Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [135]
* Well, pretty much. Even back in 1983, nobody watched CBS’s morning show.
* Even for three-hundred-year-old jokes, I’ll grant you that these aren’t really very funny. But, hey, Friends hasn’t aged all that well either.
* My sense of celebrity geography knowledge was shaped as a child by watching the daytime game show Win, Lose, or Draw, a Pictionary clone produced by Burt Reynolds, of all people. Whenever the clue was an American place, the celebrity guest—whether it was Tony Danza or Loretta Swit or Dom DeLuise—would always start by drawing on their easel the exact same “map” of America: a vaguely rectangular blob almost tipping over on the right side due to the presence of a ginormous, phallic Florida.
* When the media is disproportionately interested in a story, you’re going to hear about it, whether it’s newsworthy or not. An example that immediately springs to my mind: my six-month residence on the quiz show Jeopardy! in 2004 was, I was convinced, just a minor bit of quirky local news that only my close relatives would ever be aware of. I had reckoned without one fact: trivia and game-show geeks, otherwise unemployable, often become pop-culture pundits and radio personalities when they grow up. So my Jeopardy! streak became a staple of blogs and drive-time radio, whether anyone else cared or not.
* This may seem a little silly, but local maps have often provided crucial intelligence. In the late 1980s, for example, maps in Iraq started labeling Kuwait as the nineteenth Iraqi province, an early warning sign of trouble years before the tanks actually rolled in.
* And why not? There’s no magical reason for our hemisphere to be at the top, beyond our insidious “north-ism.” Medieval maps were usually aligned so that east was “up,” which is why we use the same word, “orient,” to mean both “the east” and “to spatially align.” NASA’s famous “Big Blue Marble” photo of the Earth from space had south on top when it was taken, so the agency flipped it for publication.
* In 1942, the BBC asked its listeners to send in prewar postcards and holiday snaps from the beaches of Europe. Seven million poured in, showing coastlines from Norway to the Pyrenees, and they were used to select Normandy as the site of the initial landing.
* British mapmakers used every trick in the book to make the empire look its biggest and best. A carefully chosen cylindrical projection would make Canada balloon to many times its actual size, for example, and some maps even spanned the globe through 420 degrees, so that Australia and New Zealand would appear twice, once on each edge of the map.
* Most of the tourists will never know that the location of Four Corners isn’t just desolate—it’s completely arbitrary. The current monument is a result of inexact nineteenth-century surveying, and sits 1,807 feet east of the actual quadripoint mandated by Congress in 1863. The “real” spot, in case you’re curious, is identical bleak desert, but with fewer souvenir stands selling Navajo blankets.
* That book—Theatrum Orbis Terrarium, or “Theater of the World”—is now considered the first modern world atlas. If Ortelius had had his way, today’s atlases would be called “theaters,” but we’ve instead chosen to use the nomenclature of Ortelius’s friend Gerardus Mercator. He dedicated his map book to Atlas—not the Titan who supported the heavens on his shoulders but another mythical character of the same name, a Phoenician philosopher-king said to have invented the first globe.
† Speaking of Ortelius and continents: the cartographer was also the first person to propose the theory of continental drift, based on the way the African and South American coasts seemed to fit together. But others have always gotten the credit, since Ortelius’s 1596 note on the subject wasn’t noticed until 1994!
* Thorpe was