Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [139]
* Well, I’m not the only one who feels a little bit of vertigo when maps change, as London transport officials learned in 2009. The “tube map” of the London Underground was created in 1931 by the engineer Harry Beck, who was inspired by diagrams of electric circuits to create a map that was schematically but not geographically accurate and was paid all of five pounds for his troubles. The map has become part of the fabric of London life, appearing on countless T-shirts, coffee mugs, umbrellas, and so on, and in 2006 was voted the second best design in British history (the Concorde came out on top). The last time the city revised the map, it decided it could do without the pale blue line representing the Thames River—do you really need to know where the river is when you’re riding a train?—and erased it. It was thoroughly unprepared for the resulting outcry, as Londoners reacted as if the actual river itself had been dammed. A BBC News editor compared the move to “removing the smile from the Mona Lisa.” London Mayor Boris Johnson, in New York on business when the change was made, was furious. “Can’t believe that the Thames disappeared off the tube map whilst I was out of the country! It will be reinstated,” he tweeted to his constituents. Maps change, of course—the globe in my office doesn’t have Yugoslavia on it, let alone Pangaea—but we rely on them to pretend at all times that they don’t.
† The Swedish crown jewels, however, are the only ones that include an orb with actual continents enameled on it, perhaps a signal of Sweden’s secret desire for world domination.
* Named for Gilbert Grosvenor, the son-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell, who was the first editor of National Geographic magazine.
* The author Deborah Tannen says that this is the topic she’s most often asked about from her 1990 best seller on intergender communication, You Just Don’t Understand.
* Ashley Sims went on to invent “Jellyatrics,” a popular British variety of “gummi”-type candy in which the sweets look like—you guessed it—old people.
* Some members, though, have managed to see all the continents before hitting the age of, well, incontinence. The TCC’s youngest member is Lani Shea, who visited her hundredth country at the tender age of two years, eight months. Her parents, of course, are also club members.
† The number hovered around 20 percent before the laws were recently changed to require passports for visits to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean and has risen only slightly since.
* Because the most remote of the Aleutians lie across the International Date Line, they are also, paradoxically, America’s easternmost islands as well—by a certain pedantic definition.
* The odd spelling of “convention” and of the club’s “Keep Klimbin’!” motto aren’t signs of latent Klan sympathies. Rather, the famously thrifty Longacre liked to tell people he owned a used typewriter with a broken C key.
* For many years, the least accessible U.S. high point wasn’t the icy, 20,000-foot McKinley but rather 812-foot Jerimoth Hill in Rhode Island. That’s because the only approach to the high point was the driveway of Henry Richardson, a local curmudgeon who would threaten highpointers with physical violence whenever they knocked at his door. Richardson died in 2001, and the Highpointers Club was successful in opening the once-impenetrable summit to visitors.
† State high points must be natural elevations, not manmade ones. Otherwise high-pointers would be hiking the stairs of Chicago’s Willis Tower (the former Sears Tower) and One Shell Square in New Orleans, each of which is taller than any hill in its respective state.
‡ Winter was born Rafael Lozano, but gets annoyed when the media refers to him by anything else but his self-selected one-name moniker. For many