Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [141]
* If true, this would explain virtually every hobby ever concocted by man, from golfers to stamp collectors to those frightening old people you see running metal detectors over the dirt at parks and beaches.
* The geocaching community still sits at a unique Venn-diagram intersection between indoor and outdoor types. The early GPS units all had rugged model names that sounded like SUVs—Venture, SportTrek, Oregon—despite the fact that many of them were being bought by bookish gadgeteers.
* For evidence that Irish’s site was crucial to geocaching’s growth, look no further than some of the other GPS games that have appeared more recently, like Geodashing (essentially geocaching to randomly chosen points), Shutterspot (geocaching from photo clues), and GeoVexilla (a global game of capture the flag). All are well-designed games, but they’re still played by dozens or hundreds worldwide, not geocaching’s millions.
* Yes, some cachers annoyingly append the prefix “geo-” to every other word. The effect is a little like characters in a 1950s science-fiction movie who eat “space fruit” for “space breakfast” in their “space kitchen.”
* The first team to recover Psycho Urban Cache #13 used an elaborate system of ropes, lines, and magnets to snag and replace the cache without ever leaving terra firma; the second team managed to place an anchor on top of the tower with a bow and arrow and then scaled its sheer stone sides.
† This cache was actually left by none other than Richard “Lord British” Garriott, the video game developer whose Ultima series I spent much of my childhood playing (and mapping). Garriott, the son of a former NASA astronaut, has also been to space: he was the sixth “space tourist” to board the International Space Station.
* Ventura_kids first took the world speed record in the summer of 2009, notching 413 smileys on the roads around the Denver Airport to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of fellow cacher “EMC of Northridge, CA,” who, along with “f0t0m0m,” accompanied the Kids on their record-breaking run. EMC is actually Elin Carlson, an accomplished soprano whose nerdiest claim to fame, aside from her prolific geocaching career, is the fact that she sings the ethereal “oo-wooooo” vocals for the latest incarnation of the Star Trek theme.
* Scubasonic, whom we will meet in a moment, has been questioned by police no fewer than twenty-five times.
* Six weeks after placing the first cache, Dave Ulmer predicted this very problem, becoming so alarmed at the eco-Frankenstein he’d created that he posted on June 17, 2001, “OK, OK. I Give Up! All development on the sport of Geocaching should cease.” It was too late.
* In fact, Scott and his entire party were lost in a blizzard on the return trip. Geocachers, thankfully, generally face much lower stakes.
* That’s right: when you’re caching for numbers, says van der Bokke, “Left turns in urban environments are absolute killers. You’re sitting at the light. You’re sitting, you’re sitting, you’re sitting. Then you have to make another left turn to get back out!” “Wait, that’s the secret of your success?” I ask incredulously. “No left turns?” “That’s one of them.”
* In the same chapter in which he invented the life-sized map, incidentally, Lewis Carroll went on to invent the modern sport of paintball. No, really. “Mein Herr” tells the children of a planet on which, when war was waged, “The bullets were made of soft black stuff, which marked everything it touched. So, after a battle, all you had to do was to count how many soldiers on each side were ‘killed’—that means ‘marked on the back,’ for marks in front didn’t count.”
* Aerial photogrammetry is the technology that