New Nations for the 2010s

Sept 25, 2012


The New York Times has published an interesting interactive page about potential new nations. I hadn’t heard, for instance, that “at least a half-dozen Tuareg rebellions in the past century predate the recent declaration of Azawad as an independent state in Mali’s vast northern Sahara territory.” 

But it’s been a while since I paid any attention to any TPLACs of that part of the continent, and of course the conflict seems to be fairly byzantine. The odd thing about modern African borders, which were colonial impositions anyway, is that they’ve (mostly) lasted this long.

The one about China biting off a chunk of Siberia (#10) seems far-fetched. Sure, Moscow is far away, and the Russian state isn’t quite what it used to be. But I’d guess that any formal territorial grabs – as opposed to the informal kinds – would awaken the bear pretty quickly, and the bear would be in a vodka-besotted fury.

Interesting to note that none of the posited new nations are in the Western Hemisphere, so maybe the NYT thinks that Quebec’s secession isn’t too likely. This doesn’t involve a new nation, but I learned the other day that Bolivia has finally regained its access to the ocean, sort of.

My Fine New Map

What better (besides a check) to get in the mail but a spanking-new map of the world? A little while ago National Geographic Traveler wanted me to renew my lapsed subscription for a small sum, and sweetened the pot with an offer of a spanking-new map of the world, no extra change. My esteem for Nat'l Geo maps is high; I've been perusing them since I can't remember when; and so I subscribed.

One side is the world, the other the United States. It's a fine, fine map, complete with the latest nations (e.g., Kosovo, South Sudan) and the land done all in earth colors, even the purples and oranges somehow. The oceans are white, with grays for undersea ranges and other formations, and the lettering for the oceanic features is brown. Interesting choice, especially considering that the water features on land, such as rivers, lakes and glaciation, are lettered in blue. All the typefaces are the standard Nat'l Geo ones that the organization seems to have been using forever, and which they never should change.

The map easily contains as much information as a paper book or an electronic map, without the worry that it will crash without warning. Also I can -- when I clear everything else away -- spread it majestically across my desk. Try that with an iPad.

Though I don't have time for a complete inventory, I find myself looking on the map for alternate names, which appear in parentheses on Nat'l Geo maps (as they always have). The Chagos Archipelago, for instance, is alternatively the Oil Islands. I didn't know that, but my knowledge of the BIOT is shockingly meager. Others are no surprise: the Falklands is also Islas Malvinas; Greenland and its towns have their alternate names listed; Burma has its official name listed, though we can all hope it will be Burma again someday; and Bombay and Calcutta and Madras have their officially sanctioned names, too. But really, if we must use Mumbai, Kolkata and Chenai, shouldn't we call the country Bharat Ganarajya?

None of the Wade-Giles romanizations of Chinese names are still on the map, which I suppose is to be expected, though Dongbei has the better-known Manchuria next to it in parentheses. My own favorite place name (sort of) in China remains Ürümqi.

Oddly, Ho Chi Minh City has no parentheses next to it containing "Saigon" next to it. Also oddly, the island generally called Sulawesi these days is called Celebes on the Nat'l Geo map -- no hint of any other name. The good old name I learned when I first learned about this island and its excellent shape. What's up with that? I might have to send an email to Nat'l Geo to ask.

Items From the Past: DDR Relics

We've been having a South Texas summer lately. The last time the Fourth of July was so hot in metro Chicago, I've read, was 1911. The high for Independence Day was 101° F., and for some days afterwards it was almost as hot. But not today: only about 80°, which felt positively cool.

On July 9, 1983, my friend Steve and I crossed into East Germany at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, and spent most of the day there. For one thing, about four hours at the extraordinary Pergamon Museum, which remains one of my favorite museums anywhere. We had a large map of Berlin to guide us in those pre-Internet, pre-GPS days.

This is only part of the map, but it shows the Berlin Wall snaking through the heart of the city. It's the heavy red-dash line, with the shading on the east side of the wall, which must have represented the "guards will shoot you zone" that caught up with Alec Leamas, for instance.

Next is another set of relics of my time in East Germany: passport stamps. They don't make 'em like these any more, and the world is better for it. I have two DDR stamps, there on the same page of a passport long expired, one acquired on the train between Hamburg and Berlin, the other at Checkpoint Charlie.



I didn't have a camera. Steve did, and later sent me a few prints. The pic below is the Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) as it appeared in '83, with the East Berlin main TV tower in the background. The original dome took a hit in '44 and collapsed to the floor of the church. The dome had been rebuilt by the time we got there, and visitors could enter the building, but only peer inside, because the floor was still littered with rubble.

Since then, I see that the interior has been restored, as befitting a reunified Germany.

Ferdinandea

Even Life in its heyday couldn't deliver the astonishing caches of photos now routinely available on line. These collections have the power of immediacy too, even though they document far-flung places: for example, images from bleeding Libya and suffering New Zealand. The medium also suits historic images, such as an achievement from nearly a half-century ago.

Since Libya's back in the news, it occurred to me that I couldn't remember many of the details of the 1986 U.S. raid on the country, though I remember finishing a swim that April evening at one of Nashville's YMCAs and collecting my membership card at the front desk. Behind the desk sat a small black-and-white TV, and a number of people were gathered around, watching it. President Reagan was on, making his speech about the attack. I watched it too.

So I read about the incident today. By chance I also learned about Ferdinandea, a volcanic seamount between Sicily and Tunisia that has, at certain times, emerged from the sea to become an island, only to sink again. I found out about the island/seamount because one line in the Wiki entry on the raid piqued my curiosity: "In 1986, US warplanes mistook the undersea shoal of Ferdinandea, near Sicily, for a Libyan submarine and dropped depth charges on it."

I was intrigued because the shoal had an interesting name. Ferdinandea is well described in this interesting blog, which discusses at some length about rival claimants to the island the last time it was an island, in 1831. I'm glad I live in a world of such oddities.

Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi

This is an interesting graphic. But what's the point? Africa's big all right. Number two after Asia in the all-continent square mile/square kilometer challenge. Everyone ought to know that, though I'm sure many people don't.

But if suddenly everyone in the world knew how big Africa is in the scheme of continents, it would follow that -- what? Africa would be held in higher regard because it's so big?

What would the graphic mean if, instead of the U.S., China, India and various European countries, you put in Canada and Russia? Africa's roughly 11,730,000 sq. mi.; Russia measures about 6,601,000 sq. mi.; and Canada comes in at 3,855,000 sq. mi. or so. That is, Russia and Canada would be short of filling up Africa by a Chad or Mali or the like.

This too is an interesting map, courtesy that endlessly interesting blog, Strange Maps. The numbers are a little old now, but the comparisons are probably still apt. Illinois' budget problems have been compared to Greece or Ireland, which might be appropriate in terms of relative debt load, but simply in terms of GDP, the state's failure would be more like an implosion of Mexico. Also remarkable is that, after decades of decline, Michigan still has an Argentine-sized economy.

The New Nation of Bob?

At about midday today I found myself wondering what the new nation carved out of southern Sudan is going to be called. That's the kind of thing that a longstanding fascination with political geography will make you think about. When I was young, I was so taken with our copy of Historical Atlas of the World and its maps that the book eventually fell apart. Sometime in the 1990s, I bought a reprint of it (which wasn't updated: the editorial cutoff remained about 1970) that I still peruse from time to time, for the sheer aesthetics, enough though the Internet offers the likes of this and this and much more.

I'm fairly good at dating old globes, too, a skill I wish paid something. There are plenty of giveaways. If I didn't know the globe we have around the house was almost new when I bought it in the late '90s, I'd know it was post-Eritrean independence (1993) but pre-Nanavut (1999). More exactly, Hong Kong has no colonial designation on it, but Macao still says "Port." So that pins the globe down to between the handing over of HK on July 1, 1997, and the creation of Nanavut on April 1, 1999 (Macao was Portuguese until December 20, 1999).

I keep a couple of older globes out in our garage -- who could stand throwing away a globe? -- including one made after the reunification of Germany but before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a fairly tight window from late 1990 through 1991. The other one is older: it still has a divided Vietnam, and Angola and Mozambique as "Port." (both pre-1975) but also East Pakistan, which would put it pre-1971. But that globe, a lovely 12-inch "Land and Sea" Replogle, isn't old enough to include the likes of French West Africa. Closing the window a little further, it does sport Afars & Issas, which had been French Somaliland until 1967 (and became independent Djibouti in 1977).

A favorite of mine to find on an old globe -- and I have seen it, though I don't own one -- is the Central African Empire (1976-79), created by one Jean-Bédel Bokassa, or Emperor Bokassa I, who apparently decided that being a tinpot president-for-life of the Central African Republic wasn't grand enough. Wiki tells me that his full title was Empereur de Centrafrique par la volonté du peuple Centrafricain, uni au sein du parti politique national, le MESAN ("Emperor of Central Africa by the will of the Central African people, united within the national political party, the MESAN").

The reason southern Sudan came to mind is that I heard part of a radio show discussing the southern Sudanese independence vote. They didn't say anything about the name. The information on the official web site of the government of Southern Sudan (GOSS, which sounds like an organization trying to kill James Bond) makes me think it will be "Southern Sudan." I suppose it's their business, but couldn't they come up with something more interesting? "Equitoria" is still kicking around. Or maybe "Bob."

Global Obviating System

It wasn't the loudest, all-hell-out-for-a-stroll thunderstorm I've ever heard (that was in Singapore), but we had a good one this evening. Nice and loud. It was the first one of the year, and a harbinger of spring, with enough close lightning for us to switch off all electronic entertainment, computers included, for a little while. We need to do that more often, and for longer.

Speaking of switching off the electronics: "GPS... obviates our need to memorize routes and may even diminish our capacity to do so," writes Julia Turner in Slate in an article called "A World Without Signs."

"Since the early 1980s, cognitive researchers have argued that it is the process of deciding which route to take that helps us develop our mental map of a place and remember how to navigate it the next time we pass through," she continues. "People who use GPS systems tend to retain less information about the world they encounter. Greg Giordano, who designs wayfinding systems for PageSoutherlandPage in Austin, Texas, notes that the technology gets us where we need to go without teaching us anything: It's not very good at 'making us smarter about places.' "

I suspected as much. GPS is fine for the high seas, open deserts or trackless rain forests. But the well-traveled, well-marked roads of North America?

GPS does (theoretically, still) offer us the prospect of never getting lost on our North American roads again. As if that were a good thing. Getting lost occasionally and finding your way again is an essential part of travel.

Item From the Past: Bensons MapGuide

Early in our stay in London in December '94, I lucked into a Bensons MapGuide London Street Map. Or maybe it wasn't strictly luck. I wasn't going to stay a month in London without a decent map, so I spent some time at a bookstore looking at the options. The Bensons MapGuide must have impressed me enough that I bought it, but it really impressed me as we used it to navigate the famously convoluted streets of the city. It's one of the best practical maps I've ever used.

I'm glad to report that the map is still in print, even in our time when GPS threatens to foster map illiteracy. The British map seller (mapmonger?) Stanfords says it well: "This map is simply streets ahead of all its competitors, as anyone who has explored central London on foot will testify: great overall clarity of presentation, excellent placing of names, exceptional presentation of small passages and shortcuts between buildings, etc...

"Excellent use of colours and symbols enables the publishers to indicate parks and green spaces; markets, prime shopping areas, and selected shops; pedestrian zones, elevated walkways, and access to streets and passages by steps; places of interest including tourist information centres, theatres, cinemas, and selected well-known pubs: transport network including streets with bus routes, Underground stations, overground railway lines with local and main line stations, and coach stations; for drivers, car parks and streets with restricted access or no entry, although one way streets are not marked; selected hotels, places of worship, post offices, police stations, viewpoints, etc., and last but certainly not least, public toilets!"

For some reason, I scanned the map's cover some years ago. That's good, because I can't find the thing now, not at least where I keep most of my other leftover maps (someday, I should gush at length about the greatness of Nelles Maps, many of which I used in Asia). I want to consult the Bensons MapGuide to see if I can pinpoint the location of this picture, taken in London that December.

Then again, it's probably Little Venice. London isn't generally known for its canals, not at least by casual North American and Japanese travelers, but they have a long history in the British capital and of course there are modern-day, web-site making enthusiasts. Even in December, the walk along the tow paths of Little Venice was a pleasant one.

There Goes the Lake

It's hard to imagine something as large as a lake disappearing, though of course it happens. News reports say Lake Delton, a manmade lake in Wisconsin, was itching to escape its banks in the wake of intense rains recently -- which came on top of weeks of rain in Wisconsin. So it dug itself a new channel, and emptied into the Wisconsin River on Monday.

When I heard about the draining of Lake Delton I thought about the short time we spent tooling around on it last summer on a Wisconsin Duck (see August 20, 2007, though I didn't provide a lot of details then). It seemed like a stable enough lake then. Not the largest I've ever been on, but the thought of 600 million gallons of water draining away is a little unsettling. I suppose the state of Wisconsin will refill it. After all, it's a manmade lake, and presumably can be re-made.

Other news reports are detailing the floods in the Midwest and the misery they're causing. The rains have been heavy around here, and seemingly come every other day, but fortunately there's been no nearby flooding yet.

The reports also got me to thinking about that journalistic shorthand, "the Midwest." Back when I edited a magazine called Midwest Real Estate News, we defined the region as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and Wisconsin. Seems like a reasonable definition, considering historic and common usage. Using my handy Almanac -- still better than the Internet, sometimes -- I added up the total square milage of those 10 states, and it comes out to about 608,000 square miles, or 1.57 million square kilometers.

Some comparisons? Put together, the UK, France and Germany total about 439,000 square miles (1.13 million square kilometers); and the Midwest total is only a shade smaller than Algeria, or a little larger than Greenland. Geographic size might not be that important, strictly speaking. Still, there's some comfort in knowing that while the darts of bad weather may have been hitting the Midwest lately, it's a pretty large dart board.

Friday Night Notes

Almost all of the big snow of December 1 is gone, melted over the course of this week. That suits me. Snow, of course, is our friend, but its cousin ice reminds that I probably shouldn’t stay in the North into my dotage, if I get any dotage. I’d prefer my obit not to read “died from complications of a fall.”

Browsing in my newish road atlas – a pleasure I have so little time for – I noticed that the Delaware River doesn’t quite separate Delaware and New Jersey; there’s a slice on the New Jersey side near Finn’s Point National Cemetery, and a tip of a peninsula south of there, that belong to Delaware. Information on this geographic oddity is scarce (though I only spent about five minutes looking), but from what I found, my best guess is that in places Delaware got all the river in a separation that’s quite old, perhaps dating back to Colonial times, and that the river has shifted over time, to Delaware’s benefit. Like when the Mississippi moves around to leave river-shaped borders on dry land between various states.

There’s a lot more information about Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River than the Delaware exclaves. Untold sorrow lurks in its Civil War sobriquet “Andersonville of the North.”

In September, as noted in the papers, Iva Toguri passed away. Not long after we moved back to Chicago in 1996, we visited her gift shop on Belmont Ave. not far from the Belmont El station, Ann Sather’s restaurant and other spots. I knew at the time that “Tokyo Rose” owned the shop, but otherwise it wasn’t particularly impressive. An import shop specializing in Oriental kitsch from the time when imports were rarities, long bypassed by other retail, even 10 years ago. But probably it didn’t need updating. My guess would be that there was no mortgage on the place, and that volume business wasn’t a priority.

From reading her death notices, I came away with a conclusion about Walter Winchell, who effectively hounded Toguri, an innocent woman, into prison: what a bastard. Someone who deserves his increasing obscurity.

Dilbert has been unfunny for quite a while now, but Thursday’s strip was incomprehensible, a sign of not only jumping the shark, but getting in the ocean with the sharks. In panel one, Alice (I think that’s her name) says, “And the point of my presentation is that these titanium tubes will…” She’s standing in front of a meeting table at which a male colleague is seated. In front of him is a rectangle with some musical notes emitting from it. I guess that’s supposed to be an iPod or something, but the drawing is so primitive that it’s hard to know.

In the middle panel, Alice viciously smashes the rectangle with her titanium tube. BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!!! (Five times, three exclamation points.) In the final panel, she hands the tube to the visibly frightened colleague. Something is dangling from the tube. Maybe the electronic guts of the iPod, but who knows. She says to the man, “It’s for you.”

What on Earth does that mean? What’s the gag? Or even the point? Alice smashes a coworker’s iPod, haw haw. Who listens to an iPod during a business meeting? Not even in his ear, but on the table like a transistor radio. This isn’t the first time that he strip has made me think, Huh? Ah well, most days I know better than to even read it.

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.

Borders

I’ll pick this up again on Monday, since I have professional obligations to take care of between now and then.

Late in the morning last Saturday we stopped to go swimming in the Firehole River, a tributary of the Yellowstone, by parallel parking along the narrow Firehole Canyon Drive nearby. From the drive, you go down some wooden stairs, and swim in a section of the river slowed — it’s very swift elsewhere — by a upstream narrows that empties into a deep pool, picturesquely surrounded by rocky cliffs on both sides. The current is also slowed by underwater rocks slightly downstream from the narrows. The water’s cold, the sun’s hot in August, and parts of the swimming area have a rocky bottom. But it was pleasant swimming all the same, especially after you discover spots with sandy bottoms. Lilly didn’t want to leave.

While parking the car, I noticed two guys behind us unloading scuba equipment out of a pickup truck. “Are you going diving?” I asked them as we headed for the wooden stairs.

“Yeah, the pool’s pretty deep,” one of them said. “We’re going to look around.”

Yellowstone offers a lot recreational opportunities, as the guide literature notes: hiking, cycling, camping, fishing, birding, swimming, cross-country skiing, and more. But scuba diving isn’t something I would have thought of. As we were swimming, I noticed several other divers going in and out of the deep pool, so there must be something to look at down there.

It wasn’t the only river we experienced firsthand at Yellowstone. Just south of the park’s north entrance, there’s a parking lot next to the Gardiner River. Just beyond the edge of the lot is a path that follows the edge of the river, under some shade trees. The river is very shallow at that point, with a cold current pushing over piles of very smooth stones. Like at Firehole, piles of rock moderated the current a little, so that you could sit in the river and let it wash over you. It wasn’t exactly swimming, but it was refreshing.

Along the road, just at the entrance to the parking lot, there were two signs: ENTERING WYOMING and 45TH PARALLEL of LATITUDE HALFWAY BETWEEN EQUATOR and NORTH POLE. I’d always thought it odd that Yellowstone National Park isn’t quite all in Wyoming, though most of it is — it’s as if the park couldn’t quite fit in Wyoming, so Montana and Idaho got slices. (In fact, Yellowstone became a national park in 1872, before any of those states entered the Union.)

I also hadn’t realized that most of the border between Montana and Wyoming is 45° N., but that’s only because I’d never studied the matter. There’s a large roadside sign in Michigan, along I-75, that tells travelers the same thing: you’re halfway between two spots on the globe that everyone learns about in school, but not that many people actually go to them, especially the North Pole.

Roadside signs of that kind probably aren’t all that precise, so most of the time it’s hard to know exactly where the line is. But I liked the idea, all the same, that we were luxuriating in a cold stream a few dozen yards — at most — within Montana. At some point on the path to the parking lot was Wyoming.

Then, when walking along the river by myself, at a small fork in the path only about 20 feet from the parking lot, I saw a US National Geodetic Survey marker, a little obscured by a nearby bush. But I knew that was it. The actual border, and the 45th parallel as well, precisely midway between the pole and the red line, as close as modern measuring devises can say. Other people were coming and going from the parking lot, and down the path, but no one but me stopped for the little round marker cemented into the ground. Considering that a border of this kind is completely artificial, I don’t know why I got satisfaction standing with one foot in each state, but I did. One of these days, I want to get a kick out of standing at Four Corners.

I stopped for a couple of other borders on this trip as well. On US 212, you enter Montana -- appropriately — in the middle of nowhere. I had Yuriko take my picture under the ENTERING MONTANA sign because I’d never done that before. Montana is my 46th state, and it would be hard to take one trip to visit the remainder: Alaska, Oregon, North Dakota and South Carolina.

In Yellowstone, east of Old Faithful and on the way to Lake Yellowstone, the park road crosses the Continental Divide twice, because that line loops a bit at that point in its bisection of North America. A sign marks the Divide each time, and we stopped at one — next to the small Isa Lake, which a nearby sign said ultimately drained into both the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. It was a lovely little lake, covered in this season by lotus pads.