nm …
I laughed!
Better yet, deal with that long skinny tab of western Oklahoma, by following the Red River farther west. Amarillo Oklahoma.
I’m so intrigued by that, but I cannot get anyone that I’m with to stop there… not even on a drive from Seattle to Vancouver.
Oh, and “that shit hole called Indiana”? The shithole part is the northernmost ten miles. Southern Indiana is green with rolling hills, basically Kentucky. So take the crappy part (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Elkhart!) …wait, wouldn’t continuing the MI/OH border west to Lake Michigan fix that? Move it a titch south and Michigan gets both Elkhart and South Bend! Make “Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana…” another suburb of Chicago and Indiana’s improved 1000%.
The original northern border for Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois was to be a line just tangent to the southernmost part of Lake Michigan. So Michigan would have had Toledo and Wisconsin would have had both Chicago and the UP of Michigan though its borders weren’t then set so they’d probably have cut it some in the west.
Look up the Toledo War.
Hey, Idaho? We’re going to remove most of that northern extension of yours. We’ll just continue the northern border of Oregon and draw a line straight east to the Montana border. Everything north of that line now belongs to Montana.
My wife, a HS English teacher, taught a lesson & had students do a project on literature in early New England. I walked by her room one day and saw the projects hanging up, and apparently she thought New England was the 13 colonies, not the 6 north east states. And yet, not one student or faculty mentioned this to her!
No, that will not do. Every now and then, Idaho does something (e.g., banning Polygamy Ale but not Five Wives Vodka) to remind us why the state is shaped like a toilet.
Lovin’ all the (well, actually isn’t) gerrymandering, here.
Yeah, Point Roberts has always bothered me. Alaska’s panhandle always looked stupid with that panhandle so BC might as well tack it on to make that area look less cartigraphically goofy.
Annoying that Labrador can’t just be referred to as Labrador, and Newfoudland referred to just as Newfoundland, but no, you have to fucking call it Newfoundland and Labrador, which is more a descriptor beef, I spose, but I was just looking at a map, and how they’re ‘connected’.
I’m ok with the Can-US 49th parallel, especially that it didn’t continue westward, which would have cut off the southern tip of Vancouver Island, which could have been the most frightening thing imaginable.
San Marino bothers me too but that’s a whole, other…
When I found out, too recently for my ego, that the Philippines was located relatively close to China (when I had earlier thought it was way, waaaaay closer to beside New Zealand) my world view was shattered, and didn’t help my Pacificphobia at all.
Occasonally I might get a bit dozy on where Tjan Island is located again.
Let’s not neaten borders up, let’s keep our borders interesting for us geography geeks. I loved visiting Point Roberts, and want to visit Kentucky Bend, Northwest Angle, Kaskaskia IL, Campobello island, Carter Lake. But those are really only interesting because of their geographical oddness. Straighten all that out, and it’s boring.
And Colorado can’t be made a rectangle anyway, not on the surface of a sphere. So why bother trying?
You can call the region of Labrador by that name, and the island of Newfoundland by that name. But if you’re referring ot the Province, then it’s “Newfoundland and Labrador.”
So it’s a spherical rectangle.
Correction, everything north of that line (and west of the current MT/ID border) should belong to Washington. Coeur d’Alene is practically a suburb for Spokane.
The Yankee-Pennamite War
which will still look incorrect when portrayed on a flat map.
You want interesting? Then let’s give Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas to Canada (Hell, give them to Mexico!) in exchange for Vancouver Island and a strip of coastline so Alaska is actually connected to the rest of the US. Or Baja in the case of a swap with Mexico. Can’t do much about Hawai’i, sadly.
Campobello Island is not US territory. It is part of New Brunswick.
Yeah, I know but it’s interesting geographically because you can only drive to it from the US, not from Canada. If we got it from Canada, it loses that interesting feature.
Well, yeah, if we institute the cleaning up borders initiative, we lose a lot of interesting features.
Nevermind