Books of maps

We here at the Porch do like a good map. And so, we are interested in any blog post that lists 7 must-read books on maps.

Like this one.

The Evening Rambler for November 15, 2009

This rambler will be short...

I meant to put this in my last post, in response to Cousin Mike's comment:

"A lot of warehouse-type places are named for Crazy Dave or Crazy Joe or some other guy who is crazy. Sure you can buy an end table...from Crazy Bill, but your fireworks? From a crazy man? No."

Actually the best fireworks warehouse around here is...

wait for it...

Mike's Fireworks in Riverside (okay, technically Kansas City north, but right on the edge of Riverside). They're kind of hard to find...unless you live right in that area or happen to be driving along Vivion Road and notice it, you'd have to find out how to get there and drive a bit out of the way.

They pride themselves on storing their stock properly. Other places may be cheaper, but if you buy from those other places you may have more duds; if you buy from Mike's you'll have more of a chance of everything working. At least, that's what I heard a salesman there say several years ago. It could be that some of the new places are now up to speed and equally good.

I do wonder about the place out east with the inflatable King Kong on the roof. Buy fireworks from a gorilla? Let me ponder that for a while.

Here's another post on Strange Maps...not a map actually, but a flowchart of The Lord Of the Rings. Click on this link right here, and you'll notice it's the movie version (Look at "Isengard Flooded" and you'll see the flowchart has both Saruman and Wormtongue die there).

Astronomy stuff, part 2: What's on Earth tonight?

This isn't what I'd planned to post for my second installment in the Astronomy stuff series, but I just came across this and I couldn't resist.

It has stars! It's a map! It ties into pop culture! It involves broadcasting! I suppose you could ask for more, but how much do you want in one place?


This is from a site I just discovered, called Strange Maps. If you go here, you'll see the image along with some comments below. As a couple of people noted, the power of TV broadcasts shrinks to next to nothing beyond our solar system. It might be possible to pick up one of our broadcasts on a planet around another star, but it would be exceedingly difficult and require Much patience.

Sure an interesting idea and a neat image, though.

Hey Mike, it might be fun to come up with a version based on the dates of famous baseball highlights.

How do I work this?

I had planned on changing the subject for my next post, but I just saw this. Well said, and it ties in with my aforementioned interest in maps.

My two cents on GPS navigation for your car can be summed up in six words, don't throw out your paper maps. These GPS units are fun gadgets, and are great at what they do - giving turn by turn instructions while you're under way. Just don't throw out your common sense, and understand they have limitations. You'll never see the "big picture" with one of these. For instance, if you want to plan a vacation, including side trips...get a map.

May Travels, part 1: The Old Roads

Five days ago, my wife and I drove to Springfield and back to bring Daughter number 2 back from Missouri State University. We each drove a car in order to have enough trunk and back seat space to bring back all her stuff. Loading the cars was uneventful. As I got my car loaded first, the three of us agreed there was no pressing reason that I had to hang around.

So I started home early, and did something I had talked about for years, but never felt I had the freedom to do. Since I wasn't on a tight schedule, I drove the old roads. I hadn't thought about this ahead of time, so I didn't have my DeLorme's Missouri atlas along; otherwise I could have found more miles of the original alignment. As it was though, I re-created the trip along what was old Missouri 13 highway through Bolivar, Fair Play, Dunnegan, Humansville, and Collins. I also got off the "new" 13 at V highway and took the old route through Vista and Osceola.

Scan from 1958 Phillips 66 Missouri map (Central Ozarks inset)

Well, you no longer have to stop in the above mentioned towns. Since 1962, a new 16 mile stretch of Missouri 13 has been open, a diagonal cut-off from three miles south of Bolivar to one mile west of Humansville. Not only did this cut-off nine miles, the inclines are much more gradual and you don't have the limited sight distance or occasional tight curves of the original route. Also, in the last ten years or so this entire stretch has been made a divided highway; the last section to open was the Collins bypass last year.

A scan of part of the 2008 Official Missouri map, for comparison. Also notice that the stretch around Osceola has been straightened over the years.

I suppose I ought to mention that I've been fascinated with maps since I was seven years old. My mom, bless her heart, had almost no sense of direction. If my dad wasn't driving, getting lost on long trips was a distinct possibility. On one of our many trips to Taney County, mom handed me a map so I could help her while she drove.

Now, the term epiphany has been overused, and I want to resist cheapening it further here by using it to describe the simple act of handing a map to a kid. But I've got to tell you the result was anything but simple; it was like a switch was suddenly flipped on in my mind. I'm sure I'd seen maps before but had taken no notice of what they were until that moment. Somehow I comprehended that These Real Places That Are - and how to go from one to another - were displayed in pictures, words and numbers. Right before my eyes. An all-out wonder, indeed. And the fact that the houses and people weren't shown didn't bother me at all. I "got" right away that it was symbolic, though I doubt I knew that word yet. I had many miles of the real world shrunken down so I could hold it in my hand and learn it. Truly an odd feeling.

So last Wednesday, I drove from Bolivar west on Missouri 32 to Fair Play, then North on Missouri 123 through Dunnegan and Humansville. I haven't seen this scenery in 47 years, and much to my delight, there were things I saw that I remembered from way back when. True, much I didn't recognize, but once in a while I'd see an old barn or old stone farm house that gave rise to an "oh yeah" moment of recognition. Sometimes it was just the lay of the landscape, or how the intersection of 32 and 123 in Fair Play is laid out. The way the town of Dunnegan is arranged - 123 highway is elevated a bit and you drive along the edge of town. You have to glance off to the left (as you drive north) and down a bit as you drive, to notice the houses.

As I mentioned, north of Collins I turned West to drive through Vista and Osceola. There's not much left of Vista, but it never was a big town. That's kind of a tight curve combined with a hill there, so I concentrated on my driving. But I think I noticed only three houses. Maybe four. And I enjoyed seeing the town of Osceola again. Kind of a pretty area that you miss entirely if you're in a hurry and stay on "new" 13.

Re: A man needs a good map

I liked Mike's comments, his surprises about the baseball loyalties map. I too am curious about how they collected the data.

Are there really no team loyalties in the so-called Unincorporated Areas?

I wonder if this has to do with how they decided to display the data. You could interview thousands of people and end up with a map that was a smear of thousands of colored dots. Or you can generalize, showing the predominant team loyalty bounded by neat lines; much more pleasant to look at. I guess it's just too sparse in the Dakotas and inter-mountain areas farther west for the loyalties to end up looking like much.

Does interest in the Team That Shall Not Be Named really cover more area in Iowa than in Illinois?

I'm suspicious of the line across the Missouri - Iowa border. For instance, I know there are Royals fans in Iowa that come to K.C. for games. At least, in years the local team does well.

The two teams in California's Bay Area share several bridges and a body of water, BUT the Giants fans break neatly for the coast, while the A's fans are only in central California?

I thought that looked odd too.

How can that many people be interested in the Nationals after so little time?

Now that makes me wonder if they used radio and television broadcast coverage maps as part of the process. The Nationals probably don't have that much of a fan base yet, but the games already have the airplay across that area.

There are no Blue Jays fans outside of Ontario? (I think that's mostly Ontario)

Yeah, that appears to be entirely within Ontario, and that is curious.

I would have loved to see a map like this 50 years ago, before any teams moved west and before there was any expansion.

Hmmm...that could be done. Survey enough people older than say, 65, and ask them which team they were first fans of. Ask where they lived at the time, then plot the results. That would be interesting.

At that point, the Cardinals would have been the most southern and most western of any team. So imagine the Cardinal area, with the powerful help of KMOX, covering everything west of the Mississippi (except Iowa, apparently) and most of the south. It would have been them or the Yankees. Tampa would have been Yankee country, for example.

I think you'd have to go back at least 60 years, at least for the Cardinals to be the westernmost team (we did have the Athletics here in KC in the 1950's). You're probably right about the south being divided between Cardinal and Yankee loyalty - and isn't the latter ironic, considering the other meaning of the word Yankee? Anyway, I will defer to your baseball knowledge on that.

P.S. The title of this post is a movie quote - any guesses?

That's kinda sorta trying to ring a bell, but I'm resisting the urge to google it. I might know it if I were given a hint.

A man needs a good map

Thanks, Bob, for the interesting and fun post about the mapping of baseball fans. I was somewhat surprised by what I saw and would be curious to know how they collected the data.

Here are some of my surprises:

Are there really no team loyalties in the so-called Unincorporated Areas?

Does interest in the Team That Shall Not Be Named really cover more area in Iowa than in Illinois?

The Dodgers' hotbed is roughly the same size as the Pirates'?

The two teams in California's Bay Area share several bridges and a body of water, BUT the Giants fans break neatly for the coast, while the A's fans are only in central California?

How can that many people be interested in the Nationals after so little time?

There are no Blue Jays fans outside of Ontario? (I think that's mostly Ontario)

I would have loved to see a map like this 50 years ago, before any teams moved west and before there was any expansion. At that point, the Cardinals would have been the most southern and most western of any team. So imagine the Cardinal area, with the powerful help of KMOX, covering everything west of the Mississippi (except Iowa, apparently) and most of the south. It would have been them or the Yankees. Tampa would have been Yankee country, for example.

I am sure you know that aside from "location, location, location", there is another axiom that would help enlarge a team's territory and it comes from Raiders football owner Al Davis: "Just win, baby!"

Hopefully the Cards will push the "zig-zaggy-ness" a little further north this year.

P.S. The title of this post is a movie quote - any guesses?

Where is your loyalty?

Team loyalty, that is.

A few years back when I customized my Yahoo start up page, one of the things I selected was The Map Room (a weblog about maps). There's usually something interesting here, though once in a while it's kind of esoteric and you'd really have to be "into" maps to appreciate it.

Yesterday there was this post, and it's one of the more fun entries I've seen lately. It's a loyalty map showing "The United Countries of Baseball" (click here to zoom in to see the map better). Not much in the way of surprises locally; I can vouch for the fact that Cardinals loyalty covers most of Missouri except for the Royals loyalty in the northwest third of the state - Kansas City and the surrounding region. And it's interesting how the largest metropolitan regions with two teams each (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco) have their loyalties divided. I can't really speak to that, but I suppose they got it right.

One thing that caught my eye was the zig-zaggy-ness (it's a word now) of the northern border between Cardinal land, and the land of "The Team That Shall Not Be Named", as Cousin Mike has it. Whoever compiled the map didn't just draw a straight line across "somewhere in there"; it looks like they took the effort to collect quite a lot of data. Hey, if you're going to make a fun map, it might as well be an accurate fun map.

Mike, make sure you click on the link, if you haven't already. I think you'll get a kick out of it.