Tag: funny

xkcd’s Time Zone Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: Time Zones,” 15 February 2017. xkcd.

Randall Munroe is a bad man who is back with another bad map projection to make our eyes bleed. (If he does this often enough he’ll have enough for a book. Heaven forfend.) This one is, like his other maps, fiendishly subtle: it stretches and compresses countries to fit where their time zones ought to be, longitudinally speaking.

What If Only … Voted?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

While we wait for the results, think back, raise a glass, and remember fondly the meme that came and went so quickly a month or so ago: What if only … voted? Based on FiveThirtyEight maps showing the gender gap in voting intentions (What if only women voted? What if only men voted?) that quickly went viral, similar maps showing gap by race and education were followed by other maps that were considerably  … sillier—here’s a selection. As Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza said on 14 October: “The whole thing went from funny to saturation point to old in record time, and is already over.” Thing is, now that it’s Election Day I’m seeing them again. It ain’t over till it’s over. And sometimes not even then.

Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else: A Book on Australian Toponyms

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

mount-buggeryA decade ago Mark Monmonier published From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, the definitive treatment on toponyms and the controversies behind naming places (here’s my review). Now we have an Australian entry: Eamon Evans’s Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else: The Stories Behind Australia’s Weird and Wonderful Place Names, which came out last week. The book, Joshua Nash reports for Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, “charts place names from the serious – the many names for Australia, for example—to the jocular, like Australia’s many rude and dirty topographic monikers.”

Many of Evans’s humorous stories go a way to responding to some of the scientific inadequacies and toponymic foibles so common in place naming studies. And after I’ve spent almost a decade inundated with often sterile and uninspirational place name theory and how it may fit within more general research in onomastics, the study of proper names, Evans’s tongue-in-cheek take is more than welcome.

I get the distinct impression that this is a less-serious work of scholarship than Monmonier’s. [WMS]

All the Countries Boris Johnson Has Offended

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

bojo-offend

Boris Johnson is Britain’s new foreign secretary. The Independent’s indy100 news site has put together a map of all the countries BoJo has offended. It’s interactive: at the link, hover over the country to get the oh-god-what-did-he-say-and-did-he-really-use-that-word story.

Related: a map of countries with a buffoon for a foreign secretary.

Nick Ross Helps Out

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On Canada Day, Nick Ross drew a map of Canada to help Americans out:

On the Fourth of July, Nick Ross drew a map of the U.S. to help Canadians out:

San Serriffe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

San SerriffeOn 1 April 1977, the Guardian published something that has become known as one of the finest April Fool’s gags in history: a seven-page supplement about the fictional, “semi-colonial” island of San Serriffe, complete with a map (at right) full of typographic puns and gags. The Guardian has a page on the gag and has reprinted a couple of the articles here and here; the Museum of Hoaxes has scans of the entire supplement.

The Onion on Fantasy Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Onion, two years ago: “Unable to picture where in the Grand Realm the destroyed fortress was in relation to the dreaded desert of Quiltar, a fully grown adult man referred to the map on the opening pages of the fantasy novel The Tower Of Astalon Friday to determine the location of the ruined castle of Arnoth, accounts confirmed.” [via]