atlas(t)

the vacationeers' "google maps"

Silly, but seriously, haven't you ever thought about it?

new age geography

woooooo oo!

It's a video showing how the shapes of countries relates to their role in history! Frex, England is shaped like a pickaxe! If you really, really fucked up your pickaxe! This shows how England took over the world for the world's own benefit! Japan is shaped like a serpent! An angry, fire-breathing serpent during World War Two! But now, a peaceful serpent! And Russia is sort of shaped like a beast! But with no head! And if Belarus rejoins Russia, it will have its head back! "Belarus" is pronounced "bell-AHR-is"!

You can find out more at revelation13.net, a site that shows you how best to combine biblical prophecy with astrology and muddled thinking!

3-year-old's geography lesson

what's scarier: that the 3-year-old knows all this, or that her dad put a videotape of it up on the internet?

relief (geography)

a school project using, as far as I can tell, Second Life avatars and landscapes to make a video demonstrating the temperature difference at different altitudes. Kids these days!

fucking, austria

people are so silly.

From the naughty toponyms archive comes the tale of a little town in Austria with a big problem keeping American tourists from stealing their street signs. Coming soon to a theater near you, it's Fucking, Austria!

The village is known to have existed as “Fucking” since at least 1070 and is named after a man from the 6th century called Focko. “Ing” is an old Germanic suffix meaning “people”; thus Fucking, in this case, means “place of Focko’s people”.

By the way:

Coincidentally there are two small municipalities just over the border in Bavaria, Germany called Petting and Kissing.

Here's the Wikipedia article, which I got to through a link to my Dildo, Newfoundland post on a Mercedesshop.com forum.

emotional mapquest

via Gwenda Bond, a new mapping application: Emotional Mapquest.

ORIGIN: CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM

DESTINATION: EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR

From CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM go approximately 10.5 miles thinking about the day's obligations until you arrive at CREEPING APPREHENSION.

From CREEPING APPREHENSION advance 40 miles until you see the first signs of FREE-FLOATING ANXIETY.

From FREE-FLOATING ANXIETY, allow 6 centimeter detour into SHAMELESS FANTASY.

Return from SHAMELESS FANTASY after a brief 30-foot stab at HYSTERICAL SELF-DELUSION.

Descend slowly 45 FEET from SELF-DELUSION into GLUM SELF-PITY.

beneath l.a.

no idea who's responsible for this groovy and atlas(t)ilicious site, but Beneath L.A. has a lot to offer (besides gratuitous typos---doesn't anyone proofread their homepage anymore?)

Anyway, the site offers "An anthology of little known Facts and Stories about Los Angeles, California," including the story of an Axis powers POW camp in Travel Town, Griffith Park that once housed around 450,000 prisoners of war (see map above), or the "Hump" in Taylor train yard, where they used to use gravity to let trains roll slowly down to their next berth (at right).

The site also tells about the "Integratron", a structure designed to rejuvenate cell tissues built by one of Howard Hughes' test pilots, who was visited by UFOs.

George Van Tassel began weekly meditation sessions in 1953 at Giant Rock with interested persons which, he claimed, led to UFO contacts and finally to an actual encounter with extra-terrestrials when, in August of that year, a saucer landed from the planet Venus, woke Van Tassel up and invited him onto the ship. There the aliens gave him the technique for rejuvenating living cell tissues. In 1954 he and his family began building a structure they called the Integratron to perform the rejuvenation. He spent the next 18 years constructing the Integratron but died in 1978 before completing it. During this time he hosted annual Spacecraft Conventions that were attended by thousands, featuring high profile UFO contactees and pioneers in the fields of antigravity, primary energy research and electromagnetics.

Yeah, that's pretty L.A. Don't expect a lot of deep discussion about the cultural impact of these sites, though. Beneath L.A. is like a tourist site built by critical geographers. That's pretty L.A., too.

freak streets

ragged Ass Road is my favorite. But I also like Dick Drive, Blue Ball Road, and Noisy Hole Road.

I should've posted this ages ago when I was working on odonymy, but for some reason I didn't. Since I seem to be playing catch up this week, here's a site called Freak Streets, a google maps mashup allowing people to submit the freakish and weird names of streets in their area. You (yes, you!) can add your own.

Via urban cartography.

cultmap, sf

sam Chanse, who is mini-me (and if you don't believe me, go look at the last two posts on her blog, which are mappy. Coincidence? I think not), but otherwise is not unusually random, is proposing a new mapping project.

some friends & i were discussing certain religious cults in san francisco (like the followers of the Ultimate Ching Hai, who apparently sells dresses & is tied somehow to Golden Era restaurant in the Tenderloin), and we were surprised by how many and where the cult HQs are located. so now we are going to embark on a project to create an sf cultmap (perhaps a national one already exists?), some kind of aerial view of the city color-coded by cult activity. so if you gotta religious cult/any kinda cult & you know the name & where it’s based, send it in. we will build our cultmap.

(More evidence on mini-me-ism: the lower case thing. That is so my thing!)

Anyhoo, this looks like a cool project so if you have anything to add, be sure to send it in to her (info on her website.) Sam, in case you don't know, is the program director of Kearny Street Workshop, co-director of LocusArts, and a playwright and performer around SF and (less frequently) LA. So, you know, she does actually have some cultural cred..

I'm wondering what software they're gonna use to do the actual mapping? Will they do it online? Will they use Platial or Google Earth? Do they have mappy, hacky folks involved? Does any mappy, hacky person feel like contacting them? So many questions.

new york subway travel record ii

hm. I misread the date on this story (damn the internet!) It happened almost two weeks ago! Needless to say, the guys broke the record. Congrats to them!