Some friends of mine recently moved from Maryland to Texas. Before they left, I spoke to my friend K. on the phone, and told him he outta make a trip to Mississippi to visit me sometime. “Oh yeah!” he said, “that’s north of Texas, right?”
“Um,” I said, frowning. “Mississippi is east of Texas.”
“But isn’t it on top of Texas?”
“I think you’re thinking of Oklahoma, darlin’.”
After our conversation, my mother and I had a good laugh. Truth be told, after that I was a little worried they wouldn’t end up in Texas at all, but would keep driving around aimlessly until an exasperated K. finally declared, “Here we are, this is Texas!” while his wife protested, “But the sign says Welcome to Iowa!” only for him to reply, “Damnit, it’s Texas! Texas!”
Fortunately, it seems K. figured out Mapquest and they made it all right.
I know what you can get them as an unbirthday gift. An atlas with the route from where they live to where you live marked out for them. Do they use the internet at all? Why didn’t the look it up online? That is frightening!
My brain will simply not accept the data that Oregon is in the Pacific Northwest. I mean, I know I just wrote that sentence, so I know it on some level, but the second I relax, my brain puts Oregon somewhere in the Rockies, over by Colorado - or possibly, replacing Colorado entirely. I’m not sure where Colorado would go in this scenario.
I know some Coloradans (sp?) who would probably resent forced conversion to Oregonianism. They think of Oregon as the home of rain-soaked pantywaists who have lost the will to pump their own gas.
I’m going from memory, not looking at a world map or globe, but I seem to recall being surprised that:
Tennessee is north of Guatemala
All of South America is east of Atlanta
England is further north than Maine
Most of Africa is north of the equator
There’s one way to turn a globe so that all you can see is water
Going east from Tennessee to Europe you run into Spain; all except that is north of Tennessee
Japan and California are about at the same latitudes
Reno is west of Los Angeles
OMG. I’m teaching a very casual summer English class with the kids here in town. I’ve decided to work in some geography, and today I brought in an inflatable globe/beach ball thing, and was pointing at various places and asking “what’s this?” or tossing it to the kids and asking them to find certain places.
They couldn’t identify Africa.
They couldn’t identify Europe.
They couldn’t identify Australia. (Guesses included Spain, Italy, America, and France.)
They couldn’t find Bulgaria.
Keep in mind, these are the smart, good kids, the ones who WANT to go to summer school.
Oh, little kids. You are in for such a surprise come fall! Give me a couple years and you’re going to winning the Bulgarian national geography bee (and if there isn’t such a thing, maybe I’ll make it up!). I’m rubbing my hands in anticipation.
Some years ago, I played Pictionary with my family and another couple of people. At one point, I drew a vague outline of the United States–was guessed correctly. Then I drew something that looked like two little triangles stacked on top of each other. Minnesota! came the guesss, and we won. So far so good. (It was an allplay, the drawer for the other team had started off with a vague outline of the US, had maybe drawn the Mississippi or the Great Lakes, and was not having much luck getting the team to guess Minnesota).
Then one of the people who was not from my family said “Is that some kind of family symbol for Minnesota?”
“Huh?”
Yes, we had lived in Minnesota until about a year or so before this incident, but no, that was not family symbol, it was a poor, tiny, not-to-scale imitation of the outline of the state. It didn’t bother me that it didn’t look enough like Minnesota to inspire that as a guess, but it baffled me that “family symbol” was more likely than “outline of state” as explanation for how it was guessed so quickly.
I’ll admit that I always thought of it as Goshen (some place in the Bible) and wasn’t there a battle in the Civil War with that name? Otherwise, I’m barely getting the single entendre.
“Considered by many”? North Carolina IS part of the South. It’s south of Virginia. It’s the home state of Jesse Helms. It went with the Confederacy during the Civil War. There’s a North Carolina style of barbecue, for heaven’s sake. It’s a southern state. “North” means it’s on the polar side of South Carolina, nothing more.
Now, what startled ME was learning that London is north of Newfoundland.
Anyone else ever seen the poster “The World at Night”? I have it on my dining room wall. It’s fascinating trying to figure out which glowing spot is which city or town, and which blank space is what natural feature. I had no comprehension of the sheer size of the Everglades until I saw that black space in the middle of the end of Florida. Wow. It’s also pretty appalling how gigantic the gas flares from oil wells are.
Not quite. If you centre on the Pacific Ocean you’ll still see the east coast of Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, various Pacific Islands and the west coasts of North and South America: link
