Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [140]
* Hogenauer completed his national park quest in Alaska in 1980 and says that twenty-five years went by before anyone else took credit for the same feat. “Which is obscene!” he exclaims. “They’re fabulous places to visit, and you and I are paying millions a year to maintain them, and twenty-five years go by before someone else sees them all?” Today the National Park Service runs a “passport” program in which visitors can stamp a little booklet at every park site, an attempt to turn every American into a “systematic traveler.”
* I wonder if Veley will ever get the chance to visit the island of Ferdinandea, a submerged volcano that occasionally rises out of the Mediterranean south of Sicily only to subside or erode again. The last time it emerged, in 1831, it led to a wave of tourism, as well as diplomatic arguments over who owned the territory. Ferdinandea last made news when the United States bombed it in 1986, mistaking it for a Libyan submarine, but scientists predict that recent volcanic activity could lead to a reappearance sometime soon.
* The Lemon Charlie was the result of the Ritz bartender’s five-year attempt to duplicate a limoncello cocktail that Charles and his wife had once tasted on the Amalfi Coast. Moss is actually the one who named the drink, when she inadvertently mangled the word “limoncello.”
* There are kinder variants, like “road buff” and “roadfan,” but more elaborate coinings, like “odologist” and “viaphile,” have yet to catch on.
† The western I-76 used to be numbered I-80S until 1975, when officials began removing the letter suffixes from highway designations.
‡ Visitors to the Mountain State take note: the top number is the main route from which the county route branches, and the bottom number tells you which branch.
* A control city is the likely destination listed on freeway signage. On a junction where one lane is marked as continuing I-380 north toward Cedar Rapids, while the right-hand lane is marked as exiting to I-80 west and Des Moines, the control cities are Cedar Rapids and Des Moines.
† Not every single mile in every lane, though. That would just be silly.
* To injuries—no deaths were reported, thankfully.
* The old sign, to Ankrom’s chagrin, was crushed in a bale of scrap metal and sent off to China. Just like Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and William Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgment, another priceless work of art lost to the ages.
* Companies like Google are still facing these issues as they develop driving directions for parts of the world without widely used addressing systems. Their solution has been similar to Rand McNally’s: base directions on landmarks, not street names. Instead of being told, “Head south on Bannerghatta Rd, then turn left on Hosur Main Rd,” a driver in Bangalore, India, might see, “Head south toward the hospital, then turn left at the end of the road.” Even landmark-based driving isn’t foolproof, though. Google GIS specialist Jessica Pfund told me about a Pakistani user of Google Map Maker who had always used the bright blue wall next to his house as a handy navigational landmark. Last week, he complained to her, the wall had been painted gray, and now nobody could find him.
* Billy Wilder used the same gimmick in his underrated 1943 war movie Five Graves to Cairo. The titular “graves” are actually materiel caches scattered across the Sahara. Their locations turn out to be hidden on the map in exceedingly simple fashion: they were left at the spots where the letters E, G, Y, P, and T stretch out across the desert, spelling “Egypt” on the map.
* This historic first geocache is long gone by now, but a new cache, complete with