… that all French men are in their forties; beretted, fat, with thick jowls and whose day isn’t complete without quarreling with someone on the street.
I still can’t believe Edinburgh is to the west of Liverpool.
I spent an entire weekend in the French Quarter in New Orleans with it rotated 90 degrees in my head, putting Decatur Street along the southern edge.
I lived in New Orleans for 4 years and never understood the map coordinates for even the most major areas. It is like a house of mirrors with all the conflicting terminology and bends in the river. If you live there, you just have to just have to trust descriptions of directions that depend on landmarks rather than map directions. There is no other way to do it.
Boston is even worse. They are proud to make it hard for outsiders to find their way around. North-South-East-West? A given street or highway can be all of those plus much more! The local attitude is that if you get lost, you probably shouldn’t have no business driving here in the first place. Street signage is godawful and confusing when it exists at all. They also have extremely strange traffic laws like blind green arrows (you can’t see them; you just have to know they are there and how long they last) plus driving in breakdown lanes during certain hours is legal (not posted) but illegal otherwise. I have lived in the area for 18 years and can drive as well as anyone in the areas that I frequent because I have learned the real rules but god forbid I venture outside of those. The rules change suddenly for any outsider and their is no way to to know that until you are in it.
Link is NSFW.
Boston looks more normal to me.
In terms of physical geography, it makes no sense that Maine and New Brunswick are in different countries. They should both be in the US, or they should both be in Canada. I’m reminded of this whenever my three-year-old puts together his “GeoPuzzle” of North America.
The first month I was here, I found myself standing on the platform at the Charles/MGH T stop, staring down at a small roundabout. Over it, apparently aligned with no particular road, hung a sign that merely said “Cambridge” and “3”.
Three? I thought. Cambridge isn’t three miles from here; it’s half a mile behind me, across the bridge. I-3, if it exists, would be on the other coast. Third exit? No; Storrow Drive doesn’t have any Cambridge-ward outlets in that direction until the Mass Ave bridge, which goes straight there, and any exits in the other direction would take you to the Financial District or to Charlestown.
I later came to realize that this Dadaist approach to street signs was typical of MassDOT, and that I should not trust anything I see on the surface. (Even the walk signals. Walking around in the Greater Boston Area is a lot like live-action Frogger.) Mercifully, the signage down in the T is both accurate and helpful.
I think the US-Canada border “should” look something like this. A straight line from the north end of Lake Champlain (the US keeps Burlington) to a point on the Maine coast which allows Canada to have the Penobscot River valley, while the US keeps the lower (heavily populated) stretch of the Kennebec River valley.
If you’re doing it purely geographically (and ignoring history) then why not run it straight down the St Lawrence river from the Great Lakes? The Canadians still get to keep Montreal and Quebec City, while America gets some new and exciting metropolises like, uh… studies map …Rimouski.
Yeah, to British eyes, gridded street layouts just look so boring. Give us some bends, goddamit.
Probably Massachussetts Route 3 (which, confusingly enough, continues into US Route 3 in Cambridge.)
Trying to be even-handed – there are a good many locations in the world where in terms of physical geography, the dividing-up of countries is outright bonkers. In Europe: there’s the famous paradox about partitioned Ireland, where the Irish Republic (often referred to as “Southern Ireland”) has one county (Donegal) which – attached to the rest of the country by a narrow strip of territory – extends northwards parallel to, and beyond, the political entity of Northern Ireland. So, the furthest-north point on the island of Ireland, is in Southern Ireland. (This weirdness of course comes from historical / political / religious issues, and attempts nearly a hundred years ago, to deal with those.)
Or some way further east: the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, is part of Denmark; but is located way eastward of the nearest spot anywhere else in Denmark (about 80 miles) – it’s very close to the southern tip of Sweden; and closer to Poland, than to any point elsewhere in Denmark.
True, but I wasn’t trying to be entirely physically geographic. For example, rivers are more apt to be in the middle of a human-culture-zone, not at the edge.
I always mentally place China somewhere in western Siberia, much further north than it is (around the Stanovi Mountain range). Then I realize that it needs to touch India, Korea, Myanmar, etc and have to shuffle it on downward.
In my mental geography, Palin would have been talking about ordering Chinese food from across the Bering Strait.
If I was pressed to draw a map on the spot, I’d screw up the relative coastlines of North & South America as well.
I went to Boston to visit friends and in the back seat of their car was a thick street atlas. I asked what is this about? They had both lived there for years and years. They laughed and laughed…
There is a north-south street in the Los Angeles area. As it runs through several cities, it changes names, though it’s a perfectly straight street. The north end is Fir Street. The south end is Ramona Street. In between is Firmona Street.
Right up until today I assumed for some unknown reason that Venice was on the west coast of Italy, somewhere around the middle (never had a reason to actually check). My wife is touring the Venice exhibit at the museum and I was looking over her shoulder at the atlas. Well, I’ll be dipped in shit. . .:smack: :o
I’ve also been to Tin City, which is an extremely remote radar site on the western-most point of North America. From the mountain top where the radome is located, you can indeed see the mountains of Siberia on a clear day.