You didn’t worry about Charlie Chaplin, did you? Now get me the friggin’ globle or Wienerschnitzelsauerkrauthonck!
Here is the biggest amazon offers in Germany:
They call it “Spielzeug”, that is: a toy. Wrong. And it is brown. Wrong again. Specially considering the beginning of this very post.
And I included “Replogle” in my search.
ETA: And the 50 cm are the brown wooden support, the itself globus is smaller. Pretty expensive for that! Plus 17.41 Euro shipping! That is a hold-up!
I have a severed head…no strike that
I have a cool globe, made almost when I was born, from National Geographic called the “Thinking cap globe”. It isn’t mounted along a polar axis, but instead rests in a semi spherical housing. The rim is scaled in miles, so you can easily compute the great-circle distance between any two points. It also came with a clear beanie cap that you could trace a country’s border on, and easily compare it to another.
Naturally, the political boundaries are 60+ year out of date, but enough hasn’t changed that it is still useful. North America hasn’t changed. 
And on a normal globe I can’t zoom in to see my house.
Interesting idea for a high-tech globe! Put a Bluetooth-enabled data card into the base that will cause the surface to display, well, any number of things, from geographical features to (updatable) international borders, with or without latitude/longitude lines, Great Circle routes, even. Historical empires and trade routes, climate models, you name it! You could even put in a map of the moon, or Mars, or the mapped portions of fictionalized fantasy/sci-fi planets (it’s way too long since you could find a globe with regions labeled “Here be Dragons,” IMHO).
Realistically, there may not be a robust market for such a product. But the concept is at least as worthy of Kickstarter funding as a ChatGPT-driven singing clock that’s programmed to occasionally lie about what time it is.
If he thinks that roughly five times the size of a basketball is small for a globe, then maybe so.
Basically, a miniaturized planetarium projector, with the viewer outside the enclosing screen instead of inside.
There’s a neat idea-a globe with a tiny dot at the (rough) location of your house, or whatever.
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind Spielberg mocked Hitler’s globe in this scene too. I am sure he was refering to Chaplin and to the myth I mentioned before about the soldier kicking the globe along the corridors of the Reichskanzlei.
ETA: I am quite blown away, to be frank: Last time I saw that movie was when it came out, in the '70s. Now I search in You Tube for “close encounters of the third kind globe”, mistype kid instead of kind and it is still the first hit the algorithm suggests! Magic.
The idea and product exists, though I’m having trouble finding too much about it. This is from 15 years ago:
This appears to be the company’s website:
I’ve seen something similar – perhaps even the same thing – at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago. It doesn’t seem to be a consumer product.
I wonder if anyone makes truly custom globes. For example, you’re running a tabletop RPG and create a campaign world, commission someone to make a globe showing your world and use it as a prop at the table. The company Replogle was mentioned earlier, and I see they do custom globes, but it looks like that means a globe with a message on it, or a globe that highlights certain features (such as what @Love_Rhombus suggested, they do exactly that sort of thing). But with fictional continents, seas, geographical landmarks, political boundaries, and so on… I don’t get the impression that they do that.
ETA: Well fuck me, I should have spent 2 more minutes searching.
https://createfantasyglobes.com/
This is exactly what they do. I will need to remember this in the future.
That is exactly what I was dreaming of. Let’s see whether the company answers, though I am afraid it might be quite expensive (plus a subscription for newer data - outch!). 3" would be the perfect size for me, by far not the biggest they offer.
ETA: Loving this:
5 A 39” globe doesn’t fit through standard classroom doors.
WWII esoterica video about Hitler’s globes. (Though euphemistically he only had one)
I’d like to thank the mods for admirable restraint as this thread -
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Now that’s how you sell a timeshare!
I have been watching some videos by Marc Felton recently, I even linked to one this very week, and now that link! Thanks for that, perfect! And the video said the magic words: Columbus Globus. The company still exists, and they do have big globes up to 100 cm. OK, very expensive, but that is the top of the shelf. The SDMB at its best (with a few detours that were worth the read too).
Me too! (And your gif made me laugh!)
IME parents pretty much earn the treatment they get from their children. There are rare exceptions, for kids just born with defective brains, and maybe this is one of those? But abusive parents exist, and kids who finally break are not more to blame because it was a parent.
There are many documented cases of born psychopaths being raised in loving homes and going on to be productive citizens and dutiful (if not loving) husbands and fathers. Maybe this Dad is blameless, but maybe not, is all I’m saying.
I think it’s safe to assume that there’s something wrong with the guy who did this, no matter how bad his parents were.
You don’t seem to have much info on schizophrenia.
Try this gift link:
It never occurred to me that the globe scene in Close Encounters was referencing anything else. (BTW, I recently saw this clip from Inside the Actors Studio, in which the host James Lipton points out what inspired Spielberg to use the musical communications shown in the film.)