A New Atlas

November has been true to November lately, with days of cold drizzle and long nights we’re not quite used to. With one or two exceptions, the trees are bare and the grass its part-brown. We did have a warmish day last week, however, so warm that a ladybug flew in and landed on my computer.

I was playing with a radio dial about a week ago – sometimes I enjoy catching a few seconds of stations I wouldn’t ordinarily listen to for long – and it seemed that the local lite rock station had already converted to all Christmas music. This is insane. It wasn’t even Veterans Day, and the pumpkins were still lingering from Halloween. I do not want to hear Christmas music in early November, or late November for that matter. Or at all on that station, which takes a heavy-rotation approach to all its music.

Retailers are ready for the holidays, of course. I was in a Target not long ago, which had tarted itself up, but I wasn’t there for Christmas goods. One of the items I did buy is a 2007 edition Rand-McNally Road Atlas (actually called, on the cover, the road atlas ’07, no caps). I get a new one every year, and lately at Target because they knock a few dollars off the publisher’s recommended price, selling it for $5.99. That’s an astonishing about of information for not much money.

It’s fairly good for navigation during drives, as it should be, and near the checkout counter I noticed an assortment of GPS devices for cars that also purport to be for navigation during driving. These items cost about 100 times more than the road atlas ’07 and I wondered if, in fact, they were 100 times more useful than a book of paper maps. Besides a map function, it also claims up-to-date information about roadside necessities (gas stations, restaurants, etc.) and attractions (Rock City, Snake Farm, etc.).

Up-to-date? A likely story. Their databases probably started out with a lot of errors, only to get worse as places in the real world change. For now, I’ll take my chances with paper maps, and some assistance from address-locating web sites like Yahoo Maps.