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Carto-Kitchen®

The Official Carto-Home® is currently in disarray as we are "re-doing" the kitchen: Crumbling walls being repaired, new electric circuits, re-painting old cabinets, and new tile on the floor.





Have no fear, our Carto-Cat® is not dead... he's just big boned.

I tried to convince Mrs. Cartophiliac® to consider a map-tile map mosaic on the kitchen floor, but it was a no go.



The best I could do is talk her in to Carto-Dishtowels®



The "Mercator Projection Dishtowel" does not actually appear to be a Mercator map of anything, but looks good anyway.

New York City in Legos

Christoph Niemann’s illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. His newest book, I LEGO N.Y., shows us another view of New York, with Legos, including maps:



His project started during the cold and dark Berlin winter days...

Power Grid - Brazil/Spain & Portugal

One of my favorite board games of all-time, Power Grid, has come out with a new expansion map: Brazil/Spain & Portugal.

Ms. Cartophiliac, with her interest in Spain, and the Spanish language will also be pleased.

Buy Power Grid at your favorite local game store, or online at Funagain Games.

Other Power Grid expansion maps:

Italy/France

China/Korea

Benelux/Central Europe

More California Secession/Division talk

Over at GeoCurrent Events, Martin W. Lewis has posted an update on the latest schemes to solve California's problems with long division:

The New State of Coastal California?



Related posts on Cartophilia:

Lost States

Disunited States of America

Lost Maps

Fans of the ABC television program, Lost, are excited that the final season has begun. Maybe... just maybe they'll finally get some answers... I tried to watch a bit of the show in the first season but generally couldn't bring myself to care.

However, just any other fantasy world (see Lord of the Rings, etc.), Lost fans enjoy creating maps:



The folks at io9.com have pulled together a collection of Lost maps and diagrams, including "Inside the Hatch" and a transit map!:



No spoilers here... My prediction: The series will end as equally satisfying as the finale of The Sopranos.

Via The Map Room

#550

I Want Iraq And Roll All Night

I'm no lawyer, but I'm told that defacement of currency is a violation of Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code. That doesn't seem to stop inveterate doodlers from making funny drawings on dollar bills:


From 30 Bizarre Examples of Defacing Money at the Money Mumbo Jumbo.

Artist Hanna van Goeler likes to use currency as her canvas, and her paintings on money include maps!



Van Goeler says her work "focuses on what's 'between.' The interstitial, ambiguous, complex, transitory, changing, mystic, hybrid, un-named." Considering that the average lifespan of a dollar bill is 6 months... currency is certainly transitory...

Currently her work can be seen in Zurich, Switzerland and New York City.

European Union: Fair Weather Friends?

Apparently Greece's struggling economy has some members reconsidering that nation's membership in the European Union. The Economist has run several stories on this problem, including one with this illustration:

Might other nations back out of the EU? How disappointing? I thought the whole point of the EU was that these nations would pull together to make each other stronger. This kind of unity has been an inspiration to other regions to increase cooperation (if not integration) of their economies. Step up, Europe.

Via Geographic Travels

Cindaynati?

Are Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, on the road to becoming a single metropolitan area, or "metroplex", not unlike Minneapolis/St. Paul or Dallas/Ft. Worth? The Cincinnati Enquirer has raised that question, with additional commentary from The Urbanophile.

The expectation is that after the 2010 Census, the Cincinnati-Middletown and Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Areas would become a single entity. The rapid growth of the I-75 corridor between the two cities makes such a merger seem inevitable. Perhaps eventually leading to some sort of political merger as a mega-city of three million people!

Currently, the biggest thing connecting the two communities are the two very sorry Cincinnati sports franchises, the Bengals and the Reds. The cities have their own airports, television and radio markets. Their cultural and arts communities rarely interact, with separate professional theaters, symphonies and ballet companies. Hearty workers do commute in both directions. However, as a Daytonian I can say that I do not think of my self as a "Southwest Ohio Cincinnati-Daytonian"... Sometimes Cincinnati does not even feel like Ohio. I often think of Dayton as the last outpost of "the north", while Cincinnati feels to me like a southern city on the wrong side of the river... or as Ms. Cartophiliac often suggests, Cincinnati is its own feudal city-state.



It is going to take more than a Census Statistical merger to pull these two communities together. Dayton and Montgomery County can barely agree to cooperate on combined services. I think it will be some time before we see Cindaynati on the map.

The Amazing Miss South Carolina

The new season of The Amazing Race started tonight. One of the contestants is the geographically challenged Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, Caitlin Upton:

Her goal in this show is to prove she's not quite as air-headed as she appeared during the pageant. She survived the first episode, in spite of a boneheaded mistake (unrelated to geography).

Good luck, Caite. You've suffered embarrassment enough...