People Under Pressure to Conform to "Gulf of America"

Our evil clown president, Donald J. Trump...move over, Pennywise...early in his second administration after my fellow citizens inexplicably voted him again into power, decided to ratchet up the xenophobic jingoism by renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".  This is forcing companies and employees to be under pressure to adopt the tin-pot dictator's petty decree. The two major weather TV stations, the Weather Channel and FoxWeather, have "Gulf of America" on their maps, and the latter's announcers seem to be quite happy with the new designation, especially Haley Meier who seems quite giddy about it all.  But the Weather Channel's meteorologists aren't all exactly on board with this change, particularly Greg Postel who is sticking to his guns with Gulf of "Mexico",  And why not? The presidential proclamation only renames the part of this body of water under the United States' jurisdiction, which is absurd considering that we're talking geography, not international political boundaries.  I like "Gulf of Mexico" more anyway, since when you are standing on that gulf's coast whether it's in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana or Texas, chances are that the land facing you on the other side of the water is, indeed, Mexico.  Of course, Trump in his supreme ignorance and narcissism is only trying to stir up controversy with himself as the center of attention. What a creep... 

Just Finished Reading Mexico by James Michener

I've read a few of the late James A. Michener's historical novels before, and had always come away from the experience with a better feeling of other cultures and their history...although when it comes to specific people, location, and events, I'm often left unsure as to which ones were fictional and which really existed.  In his 1992 Mexico, it seemed that the author went a little overboard on the fictional side as he concentrated on an imagined bullfighting festival featured two fictional famous matadors facing off in a fictional city with a fictional American/Mexican reporter visiting his family's fictional roots, along with a recount of the fictional Indian nation and their fictional pyramid and customs from the past...as well as the protagonist's encounter as a child with a violent, fictional Mexican revolutionary general.  So in a way it was easier for me to avoid confusion and pretty much discard everything I read as products of Michener's fertile imagination.  I doubt that veracity wasn't exactly the prime motivating factor for him writing this book, anyway: the overwhelming focus here was the sport/art/atrocity of bullfighting, which to me ranks right down there with cockfighting and dogfighting with its abuse of animals for human entertainment.  But I could tell that Michener felt differently and was fascinated and enthusiastic with it...and maybe he was thinking he could be like Hemingway when that writer wrote extensively about bullfighting, albeit the Spanish version, in the novel As the Sun Rises.  So no, this novel was definitely not one of my favorites of Michener...and furthermore I felt that with these characters he was promoting stale, negative stereotypes of both Mexicans and Americans.  Maybe you'll like it more than I did, though, and I haven't given up on other works of his.  I thought his Space, Centennial, Alaska, Poland, and The Source were all excellent and look forward to reading another along similar lines...

Just Finished Reading Alaska by James A. Michener

A very, very long book, James A. Michener's 1988 historical/geographical novel Alaska may take a while to read through, but I think you'll like it should you have the available time for this undertaking...a friend from high school recommended it to me.  It's my fourth Michener novel so far, following Space, Centennial, and Poland.  Like Centennial, which concerned itself with a fictional Colorado county just east of the Rockies and north of Denver, Michener goes back millions of years at the start of his Alaska saga, describing the geological origins of the area in terms of continental drift, as well as revealing something I didn't know: because of its relatively dry climate, in spite of its far northern location most of Alaska wasn't subjected to the glaciation that ran rampant across the rest of the North American continent.  That's important, because during much of the early history of humanity's crossing over from Asia to Alaska the glaciers served as an effective barrier to immigration to the rest of the continent...one notable exception: the Athabascans, which populated Alaska along with other native groups like the Tlingit, Aleuts, and Eskimos, actually had a split-off group that did make it further south to form the Navaho nation.  Before the author deals with these groups...and the expansionist Russians' brutal treatment of them (especially the Aleuts) starting in the 18th century...he discusses mastodons and then mammoths as early inhabitants of the area...

One common trait, it seems, of Michener novels is the mixture of fictional characters and locations with actual historical events...Alaska was more difficult for me to distinguish the real from imaginary since I was generally pretty unfamiliar to begin with about its geography and famous historical figures.  One common thread through the years that he exposes is the prejudice of the supposedly more "civilized" European cultures against the native people and their exploitation of them.  From the Russians with their sea otter hunting and plans to stamp out native religions in favor of Orthodox Christianity on to the early mismanagement by the United States after they acquired Alaska from the Russians in 1867, Michener presents the historical trends through the eyes of his own fictional characters as those actually living in Alaska find themselves in an essentially lawless place, unable even to legally buy the land they live on. Another theme is unrepresentative rule of Alaska from the outside, be it from St. Petersburg or Seattle. The Gold Rush in the Klondike and at Nome around the turn of the century, political and judicial corruption, the salmon industry, World War II in the Aleutians against the Japanese, the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, big game hunting, bush plane flying, the push for statehood, mountain climbing, reform efforts to help the native peoples in the late 20th century...all receive their fair share of treatment in this book.  My favorite part was an exploit that a fictional character performed which mirrored the same accomplishment of the very real Max Hirshberg in 1900: a 1000+ mile bicycle ride in sub-zero conditions on the frozen Yukon River!  I also loved the great detail in which Michener describes the tumultuous life cycle of the salmon...from the fish's point of view! And I've left out so much...

Alaska is, to be sure, very lengthy...but it's a worthwhile read.  I'll probably be looking into another of Michener's forty novels in the near future.  For some reason I've had trouble finding them in bookstores, either new or used, so I've been checking them out from the library instead.  Still, even there I'm having difficulty coming across some of his books I want, such as The Source, which another friend recommended.  I might have to order some of them from Amazon...

Just Finished Reading Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

In 2015 Irish fiction writer Kevin Barry came out with the novel Beatlebone, in which ex-Beatle John Lennon, in 1978, temporarily flees his domesticated lifestyle he has been living in New York City with wife Yoko and son Sean...he feels the desperate need to find and then stay for three days on a remote little Irish island he had bought eleven years earlier.  He plans to just sit there and scream and scream...a reference back to the Janov Primal Scream Therapy he had famously undergone with Yoko at the close of the Beatles era.  The problem John has...and one that dominates the flow of the story...is that although he had visited this island before in 1969, now he can't remember exactly which one it is of the hundreds out there.  He has an Irish character named Cornelius drive him around, steering away the clamoring press, finding lodgings, and introducing him to other usually very annoying characters.  The language in the story is stream-of-consciousness and difficult to follow as John lets out his thoughts and interacts with others.  There is actually very little said here about either the Beatles, John Lennon's former bandmates, or Yoko One and very much about not only his early childhood and his parents...but even his parents' lives before he was born.  One thing that struck me in Barry's fictionalized account was that folks in that part of the world believed in haunted places that sometimes distorted reality, even to the point of taking people to other places and/or times...I've read of this phenomenon before in other books.  And the notion that Lennon would just suddenly take off to a remote spot from his home has a factual basis: during his 1976-79 "retirement" from music-making while raising his little boy, Yoko and John immersed themselves in a kind of astrology in which she would abruptly assign him the task of briefly traveling to another part of the world and coming back...Barry referenced such a trip to Japan in this story.  But the author laid forth the proposition that John was suffering from musical writer's block and wanted to produce new material, hence this trip to his island.  The book's title Beatlebone reveals its meaning toward the story's end, which as usual I will refrain from giving away.  Later I read some very glowing, positive reviews of Beatlebone, but I have to admit that it came across to me like another self-indulgent version of the Beatles' critically-panned Magical Mystery Tour movie. Although I think that the music of the Beatles was terrific and groundbreaking, I never got into the personality cult mentality surrounding them.  That John Lennon was such a special, elevated person that his experiences and opinions transcended those of "ordinary" folks was never something I believed, but as a reader I felt I had to "play along" just to get through the story.  I didn't like it as much as others did, but if you like artsy, stream-of-consciousness types of literature, then this one's for you...

Tuesday's List: Pseudo-Countries of the World

After noting over the years the number of "nations" represented as such in the Olympic Games that aren't really independent sovereign states and then seeing various separatist "states" being carved out of others, I realized that it might be a good idea to compose a list of all these "pseudo-countries".  As it is, the quiz website sporcle.com has a list of most of them, thanks to a contributor named varndler who made a capital cities quiz of it...here's a link to that list: [link].  I used it, rearranging the entries and adding a few more.  So, by geographical region, I have listed below the world's current pseudo-countries, broken down by geographical area with the "real" country they are part of list next to them in parenthesis.  Since being a "pseudo-country" isn't a cut-and-dry kind of thing, you might have a few of your own to add to the list.  Oh, by the way, by including certain names on this list I am in no way whatsoever making any sort of commentary on their "national" legitimacy or otherwise...

****THE AMERICAS & THE CARIBBEAN****
ANGUILLA (United Kingdom)
ARUBA (Netherlands)
BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS (United Kingdom)
CAYMAN ISLANDS (United Kingdom)
CURACAO (Netherlands)
FRENCH GUINEA (France)
GUADELOUPE (France)
MARTINIQUE (France)
MONTSERRAT (United Kingdom)
NETHERLANDS ANTILLES (Netherlands)
PUERTO RICO (United States)
SAINT MARTIN (France)
SINT MAARTEN (Netherlands)
ST. BARTHELEMY (France)
ST. PIERRE AND MIQUELON (France)
TURKS AND CAICOS ISLANDS (United Kingdom)
US VIRGIN ISLANDS (United States)

******ATLANTIC OCEAN*******
ASCENSION ISLAND (United Kingdom)
BERMUDA (United Kingdom)
FAEROE ISLANDS (Denmark)
FALKLAND ISLANDS (United Kingdom)
GREENLAND (Denmark)
ST. HELENA (United Kingdom)
SOUTH GEORGIA (United Kingdom)
TRISTAN DA CUNHA (United Kingdom)

*********EUROPE***********
CATALONIA (Spain)
ENGLAND (United Kingdom)
GIBRALTAR (United Kingdom)
GUERNSEY (United Kingdom)
ISLE OF MAN (United Kingdom)
JERSEY (United Kingdom)
NORTHERN CYPRUS (Cyprus)
NORTHERN IRELAND (United Kingdom)
SCOTLAND (United Kingdom)
SVALBARD (Norway...in Arctic Ocean)
WALES (United Kingdom)

******FORMER SOVIET UNION******
ABKHAZIA (Georgia)
CHECHNYA (Russia)
DONETSK (Ukraine)
LUZHANSK (Ukraine)
NAGORNO-KARABAKH (Azerbaijan)
SOUTH OSSETIA (Georgia)
TRANSNISTRIA (Moldova)

******AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST******
CABINDA (Angola)
PALESTINE (Israel)
SOMALILAND (Somalia)
WESTERN SAHARA (Morocco)

*******EAST ASIA & THE PACIFIC******
COCOS (KEELING) ISLANDS (Australia)
COOK ISLANDS (Australia)
EASTER ISLAND (Chile)
FRENCH POLYNESIA (France)
GUAM (United States)
NEW CALEDONIA (France)
NIUE (New Zealand)
NORFOLK ISLAND (Australia)
NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS (United States)
PITCAIRN ISLANDS (United Kingdom)
TIBET (China)
TOKELAU (New Zealand)
WALLIS AND FUTUNA (France)

*******INDIAN OCEAN******
BRITISH INDIAN OCEAN TERRITORY (United Kingdom)
MAYOTTE (France)
REUNION (France)

Just Finished Reading Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, is one of those books that was renown and celebrated (and criticized) years before I ever got around to reading it.  But now the deed is done and I'm ready to give my reaction...

In The Kite Runner, the country of interest is Afganistan, the narrative tracing back to 1971 while it was still a kingdom and "progressing" along to a coup d'etat establishing a republic in 1973, the Soviet Union's invasion and occupation through the 1980s, the civil war in the nineties following their withdrawal, and then the takeover by the brutal Taliban in the late 1990s.  Yet although I learned quite a lot about this land and its people, beliefs, and culture through this book, it is more a story about betrayal, redemption, and forgiveness than history or geography...

Amir, the protagonist and narrator, is a member of Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, the Pashtuns...who as Sunni Muslims tend to look down upon others, especially the Shia Muslim Hazari people. Amir's father is a prosperous businessman who has taken under his wings as servants a Hazari man and his son, who is Amir's age and named Hassan.  As Amir points out repeatedly with copious examples, Hassan is loyal, humble, and courageous...all qualities that Amir admits to be sorely lacking in.  After Hassan has repeatedly and faithfully defended Amir from others over the course of their almost brotherly friendship, Hassan one day finds himself in desperate straits...and Amir cowardly abandons him to his fate.  This betrayal, along with the guilty fear that others will learn of it, haunts Amir for years on end...how can he ever redeem himself or be forgiven?  And it is this that is truly the core theme of The Kite Runner...

Speaking of the book's title, kite flying in Afghanistan is quite a competitive interactive sport, much different from what we in the United States are accustomed to.  Whereas kite flyers here vie to see how novel or fancy of a kite they can make and keep airborne, Afghan kite flyers engage in combat between their kites, using sharp-edged string to sever their opponents' kites from their strings.  And when you've cut off a kite, then the race is on for the first "kite runner" to reach it as it falls to the ground...it's a "finders keepers" kind of competition.  And who is the best kite runner in Hosseini's tale?  None other than Hassan...

It's obvious that The Kite Runner owes a great deal of its popularity to it being published in the years soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Both President Bush and his wife Laura read and praised it, and the book won numerous awards and was adapted to film.  Yet in Afghanistan itself there was a great deal of criticism, the bulk of it aimed at what some of their people regard as unfavorable depiction of the Pashtuns.  Needless to say, the Taliban weren't too happy with how it portrayed them, either.  I myself read it as a human drama and as a confirmation of what I had long known: no matter how exotic the culture may seem on the surface, folks are motivated by pretty much the same things, for better or for worse.  It's a good book, and I highly recommend it...

Tamil Script

தமிழ் அரிச்சுவடி is how you would translate and write out the above title in the Tamil language.  Tamil is one of the national languages of India and is the chief one used at the southeastern tip of that country's peninsula in the state of Tamil Nadu (capital Chennai, formerly Madras).  It is also the second language spoken on the nearby island nation of Sri Lanka...there has been an ongoing conflict there between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil, some of whom have staged a guerilla war for independence.  But back to the language and its script...

If you've ever explored the world of Indian languages, you've probably, as I have, become intrigued by the multiplicity of writing systems...even among similar languages.  As you go further south, the scripts can get downright strange and even beautiful.  That was the impression that the Tamil script made on me when I first beheld it while reading a book on world languages back in the 1970s.  At one point I even memorized its "alphabet", although I never undertook a serious study of the language.  And I still haven't, to this date.  After all, the only real connection I have with Tamil is our family physician for many years back in the 1990s, who is a Tamil...

Omniglot is an excellent language learning site on the World Wide Web.  It has a very user-friendly introduction to Tamil script which, when you scroll down the page I'm supplying the link to [link], you'll see can get to be pretty complicated.  Still, just look at the different letters and tell me whether or not you agree that some of them are beautiful...especially the Tamil letter for "short i":

                                    இ

Tamil belongs to the Dravidian family of Indian languages, primarily, but not exclusively, concentrated in the country's southern peninsula.  The Dravidians are the people who inhabited what is now called India/Pakistan/Bangladesh until the Indo-Europeans invaded/settled the area and either drove them out or assimilated them into their own societies.  Languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, and Sri Lanka's majority tongue Sinhalese are all in the Indic group of the Indo-European family of languages...to which English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Persian also belong.  Tamil, along with Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada, are the four major Dravidian languages, each with its own distinctive script (although Telugu and Kannada are rather similar).  I'm thinking of relearning the Tamil script and, now with the learning opportunities available via the Internet, beginning a rudimentary study of Tamil's basic vocabulary and sentence structure...

Best Current TV Series: Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown

I've gotten myself into the habit in recent months on weekend evenings of watching CNN...it has a very special series of which it usually shows three episodes back-to-back during that time period: Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.  Bourdain is a renown American chef with a compelling personality, a good screen presence, and a strong sense for adventure and interesting topics who is willing to go just about anywhere in the world to reveal its geography, history, culture...and of course, native cuisine.  Although he spends a reasonable amount in time in the good ol' U.S.A., he also has crisscrossed the planet...sometimes to famous cities...sometimes to places remote, wild, and even a bit dangerous at times.  This program has been on the air since 2013 and has won numerous awards, well-deserved in my opinion.  However, the great majority of its episodes I haven't yet seen...no problem: they're all on Netflix, to which I subscribe.  Well, seeing that this "service" almost never has the movies I want to watch, it's about time they were useful for something...

So far I've seen the episodes about Congo, Thailand, Tokyo, Tbilisi (in the Georgian Republic), Bahia (in Brazil), New Jersey, Montana, Miami, Senegal, Cologne, South Africa, Hawaii, and Iran.  But there have been some 62 episodes made so far (although 6 of these are season highlight shows) and I have a lot of "work" ahead for me on Netflix to catch up with them all.  Besides, every show demands a repeat viewing...

Season 7 of Parts Unknown will begin on Friday, July 1 at 7 pm as Bourdain visits Manila in the Philippines. I'll be working at that time, but I'm sure I'll have several opportunities to watch one of the rebroadcasts that CNN offers for each episode.  In the meantime, I think I'll watch some of the older episodes I haven't yet seen via Netflix.  If you're new to this quality series, check it out: I don't think you'll be disappointed...

Indiana in My Mind

When I think of Indiana, I have three mental pictures.  One is of a mystical, far-off place: one evening back in 1960, when I was four years old and still lived in Opa-Locka, Florida, I was told by a good  friend, also four, that he was moving away with his family to Indiana.  Way out there...it became framed as a place of great distance for me.  The second is the famous cornfield scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 movie North by Northwest.  You know, this is where Cary Grant is attacked by a crop dusting plane and hides in a thick field of high-growing corn.  And the third is the city of Hammond, Indiana as described by Jean Shepherd on his radio show...only his vision of this "suburb" just east of Chicago was based on his childhood memories: he's the dude who wrote and narrated the movie A Christmas Story that features the exploits of little Ralphie, Schwartz, and Flick.  Well, I'm about to be entertained by yet a fourth mental picture of the Hoosier State as my wife Melissa will be traveling there this Sunday for a week of classes at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion.  This town of around 30,000 people lies between the centrally-located capital city of Indianapolis and Fort Wayne in the northeastern section of the state...closer to the latter.  It will be her first trip to Indiana and she's excited about it all, as am I.  As for my previously held "visions" of this state, the only one that might apply to Marion is that, although it is a town with a manufacturing (and now educational) base, I understand that once you're a few miles outside the city limits, there are those pesky cornfields again! 

Let's see...last year Melissa went to India.  This year she's going to Indiana.  What will be next year...the Indies?  I'm very proud of her and pray and hope for her safety there and for positive experiences...and of course for her safe return...

As for this article's title, my apologies to James Taylor...

News: Crimea, Weather, Oscars...with the Emphasis on Crimea

I've been sitting around the house most of today, with a recovering strained lower back, surfing around the TV.  Mostly I've been watching the news and sports channels.  The major news stories are Russia's ominously escalating occupation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, the severe winter storm (that The Weather Channel names "Titan") sweeping through the northeast, and who won the Oscars last night.  The first of these stories is currently in a state of flux and is due to dramatically change (probably for the worse) in the next 24 to 48 hours.  As is the weather, although being that I live in Florida the great Titan has no direct bearing on me.  And regarding the Academy Awards, I couldn't care less who won or lost.  I suppose I can get myself worked up into a panic over Ukraine and Russia, but I see that there are plenty of others out there who seem eminently more capable of panicking than me. 

So far the land that Russia is occupying is overwhelmingly populated by other Russians, and who seem very content with the presence of these soldiers.  As a matter of fact, Crimea has historically been a part of Russia proper until in the 1950's when the USSR's dictator Nikita Khrushchev reassigned the territory to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic...all in all a technically bureaucratic move since back then it was all the same country anyway.  The ethnic Ukrainians predominate in the north and west of Ukraine while ethnic Russians form the majority in the east and south (including Crimea), comprising a very large minority within the country as a whole.  It is the political divide between these two groups and their alignments that has caused so much electoral/political turmoil since the country became independent with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.  I'm sure that Russia's president (apparently now for life) Vladimir Putin would love to annex all of that eastern and southern Ukrainian territory with primarily Russian populations...and I wouldn't be surprised if the Russians living there supported him in this.  And this is where the big threat to this situation lies: how far does Putin plan to go with his idea of "protecting" native Russians in neighboring countries when they have a large minority status in them?  Ukraine isn't the only place like this, and Putin just got his rubber-stamp parliament to approve a measure authorizing the forced annexation of neighboring lands whenever it is deemed appropriate (by Russian authorities, of course) to protect the Russians living there.  Sounds ominously to me like Hitler and his claim on Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in 1938...

The Sunda of Indonesia

Many years ago, I used to check out one particular book from my local library that piqued my interest.  It was a compilation of small articles taken from various world languages, some of them with very exotic (and sometimes beautiful) scripts.  Some of these languages were in the highly populated island nation of Indonesian.  In particular, I remember two languages: Javanese and Sundanese.  Both of these languages are spoken on Indonesia's very densely populated island of Java, with the former comprising the predominant ethno-linguistic group there.  The Sunda people are concentrated on the western end of the island while there are Madurese on the far eastern side.  Today, however, in spite of the lovely traditional scripts, both Sundanese and Javanese are written using Romanized script: check out Wikipedia to see for yourself.  Sundanese strikes me at a glance to be similar to Indonesian, that country's official language.

The Sundanese are a primarily agricultural society that, like most of the rest of Indonesia, practices Islam with a strong traditional culture which predates that religion for millennia.  They have their own creation story and many orally-passed-on stories that speak of a culture that is ancient and profound.  I am interested in learning more about their culture as well as listening to some of their more traditional music. 

More to come... 

Paynes Prairie, South of Gainesville

When I first moved to Gainesville in 1977, and for years afterward, the grassland area south of town known as Paynes Prairie was always striking when I passed across it, either on US 441 or I-75.  In this part of Florida trees dominate, but in Paynes Prairie they clear away and one can see far off into the distance.  In this sense it reminds me of South Florida, where I grew up.  About a century ago, it was the bottom of a shallow lake called Lake Alachua.  But when there is a heavy rainfall season, it once again becomes essentially a very marshy lake.  Alligators abound here, and there is a bison herd.  There is a state park here, as well as a park for University of Florida staff, faculty, and students at adjacent Lake Wauberg.

The grasslands are probably still around, but probably somewhere off from the two aforementioned through-roads.  From where we passed through, all I can see now are low-lying bushes...not as spectacular of a view as I was used to behold.  There is a pier running east into the prairie off US 441 northbound side, close to the northern end, where visitors can walk safely "into" Paynes Prairie and stand at its end, which is an observation platform.  I think this might be a good place to go star-gazing sometime.

Here are a couple of not-so-revealing shots of Paynes Prairie taken from I-75 while I was riding (not driving) on it the other day...

Steep Driveways and Roads in North Georgia

Recently I stayed with my family in a cabin in northern Georgia.  The cabin itself is in a very hilly area, and I was not at all accustomed to getting around on this type of terrain, being from flat-as-a-board Florida.  When we first approached the cabin, we looked down at the driveway...way, way down! I'd be lying if I didn't say I was a little bit apprehensive at going down to the bottom, but with extreme care we made it.  Once at the bottom, though, the next question was whether we'd be able to climb back out of it!

For those used to these types of hills, this may seem a bit silly.  I honestly don't know how some of the people who live up there are able to get around on such steep roads and driveways...especially when it's rainy and the roads are slippery.

The Firm, Mitt, Cayman, Synchronicity

I just finished reading John Grisham's excellent, gripping novel The Firm. Perhaps you have either read it or watched the film version starring Tom Cruise (or both). Or maybe you're going to get involved watching the spin-off TV series. But for me, a novel many years old is suddenly very, very timely.

Part of the story in The Firm involves how the tiny Caribbean island of Grand Cayman is used as a haven for wealthy American tax dodgers to legally avoid paying federal tax on their holdings by depositing their money in one or more of the hundreds of banks set up there just for that one purpose. Several important scenes in the novel take place there (even though it isn't the primary setting). But it is crucial to the story...

Call it coincidence or call it synchronicity (which I personally define, for all practical purposes, to be "useful coincidence"), but this decades-old novel I just happened to pick up recently and read suddenly has relevance in the news of today.

Enter now Mitt Romney and the very recent allegation that he also has large deposits on the Caymans in order to, well, you know...

In The Firm, those who used offshore tax havens like Grand Cayman to avoid paying taxes were depicted as being technically law-abiding, but still shady and slimy characters that perhaps a young, idealistic lawyer like the story's protagonist may not take too kindly to (no worry: he really was O.K. with it, in a fictional sort of way). So I wonder to myself whether our possibly next president fits the description of someone who would take every legal means possible to squirm his way out of paying his due share of taxes? I think that is a more relevant question to ask than for the intimate, personal details of a very private conversation that Newt Gingrich may (or may not) have had with a former wife, don't you? After all, isn't the president, by virtue of his position in office, heavily involved in determining how much tax you and I will be paying?

Atlas of Middle Earth and Its Appeal

Every now and then I get into a whimsical mood and check out a peculiar spin-off book from my local library: The Atlas of Middle Earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad. It is based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, known best for The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This book goes into meticulous detail about the various stages of change in Middle Earth, a thoroughly fictional place, through the different "ages" as Tolkien laid out in his often cumbersome tales.

Fonstad is herself a geographer with cartographic experience. It shows in this excellent book, although as I study its pages I get the disturbing feeling that my time would be better served looking over maps of real places. And yet, because I have enjoyed an affinity with maps since early childhood and feel quite comfortable around them, I keep coming back to this book.

As for the Third Age, the era in which The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings transpires, I am pretty familiar with the geography of this completely non-existent world. As for the earlier ages, there were a lot of cataclysmic upheavals that occurred with Middle Earth, raising and sinking islands and parts of continents, making one place move to another realm, and even changing the shape of Middle Earth itself. Definitely pure fantasy, not science fiction!

Since Atlas of Middle Earth is based on stories and illustrates where events took place involving those stories' characters, how about a personal "Atlas of Real Earth" compiled in a comparable manner? Let's say, for example, that I want such an atlas for my family and friends. The maps would feature migration routes as we moved from southern Georgia in my infancy to Alexandria, Virginia, and then to Opa-Locka and later Hollywood in southeastern Florida. Then in my adulthood to Gainesville, Leesburg for a seven-month respite, and then back to Gainesville. There would be a special page showing the various places in Gainesville I've lived as well. Not to mention the vacation excursions and other travel I've undergone. And of course, friends and other members of my family would have their own tales and "trails" featured on the maps.

I think that would be a pretty cool idea for a business: make and sell a highly stylized atlas, patterned after Tolkien's maps, depicting your own life's events and journeys just as if you were the one living out some fantasy adventure!

Drinking Starbucks on the Hudson, Going to Work in Brooklyn

Anyone who visits Manhattan comes away with the impression that it is a very, very compressed urban area. But how compressed it really was I was unaware until I actually went there in person. So after I got back home I tried a simple little project.

I set two Google Maps to the same scale, with my home neighborhood in one (my house being at its center) and Midtown Manhattan in the other (and the Marriott Marquis hotel I stayed at in its center). I then superimposed one map onto the other, the two maps' centers aligned as well as the cardinal directions. The results were revealing to me, to say the least.

--Rockefeller Center would be at the entrance to my humble little subdivision onto NW 34th Street (Gainesville grid).

--The NE corner of my neighborhood running course would be precisely at that traffic circle (containing the beautiful giant globe) at the SW corner of Central Park.

--I'm sitting in the Magnolia Parke Starbucks writing this. But were I in the corresponding point in Manhattan, I wouldn't actually be in Manhattan: I would be "sitting" in the middle of the Hudson River halfway between 14th Avenue on the east side and Hoboken, New Jersey on the west. And this Starbucks is within walking distance of my house.

--The Empire State Building and Macy's would lie in the subdivision just south of my extremely close YMCA.

--The Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn would begin right at the Solar Walk, an outdoors planetarium running along Gainesville's 8th Avenue. It would then head toward the UF campus as it approached the Brooklyn side.

--New York's Chinatown roughly corresponds to Gainesville's Westside Park, which is located near the Solar Walk.

--Gainesville's Oaks Mall (our big shopping mall) would be in Paulus Hook, New Jersey.

--My workplace, situated on the southern end of Gainesville, corresponds to an area in western Brooklyn, near 2nd Avenue and 9th Street ( a few blocks from the end of the Brooklyn Bridge).

Superimposing maps is a cool idea that can also be used to compare the relative sizes of political entities from various distant parts of the world . I'll be using it from time to time in the future.

Yellow on Road Maps

When I was a little kid, I was an atlas fanatic. I would pore for hours over maps in world atlases, road atlases, and even star atlases. At one time, I even had a hobby of collecting road maps whereby I would walk to all of the gas stations within a couple of miles of my house and take whatever (then) free road maps they had.

In our home, we had one of those great Rand McNally road atlases of the United States. I would trace various federal highway routes through different states and across their borders, imagining that I was actually driving down the real roads and through the towns along the way (especially going east-west along routes like US 2 and US 6). I was deeply disappointed when I discovered that US 441, my "favorite" route (it still is) disappeared somewhere in Tennessee, never making it to Canada or the Great Lakes.

Through the road atlas I also noticed the cites and metropolitan area that were growing the quickest in population. These urban areas were depicted by yellow on the map. I was most impressed by the cities that had the biggest "yellow" (for some time I liked Newark, New Jersey for this one reason alone). Later, I got a revised road atlas and noticed how many more cities had gone from "point" depictions to the "yellow".

But as I grew older as a kid, I would begin to question whether urban growth was such a good idea. After all, my own home area of south Florida was becoming one gigantic, mass urban sprawl. I pictured the land designated by yellow in road atlases as being urban sprawls of buildings, roads, and parking lots. With nature in those areas being essentially wiped out.

Now, living in Gainesville (in north-central Florida), I am in a "yellow" zone but also in an environment with a lot of "nature" in it. And it makes me wonder how really urban those other yellow areas are. I bet even Newark, New Jersey has plenty of "natural" places within its borders. Now that would be an interesting project for someone to do (if they haven't already done so, that is): Go to the most urbanized locations in the U.S. and discover nature and wildlife in their midsts.

Geographic Dreams

I don’t know how you dream, but in my dreams, I almost always think like a complete dunce (the character of Patrick Starfish in SpongeBob SquarePants comes to mind). When I do wake up from a dream, I will often want to kick myself for acting so stupidly within the dream! I think that this is largely due to my lack of critical ability within the dream state. But this is not always the case. There is a certain kind of dream I have from time to time that somehow seems to make such an impact on me that I unconsciously have incorporated it into my “reality” memory: the geographic dream.

In eastern Gainesville, just on the other side of Main Street around a place called the Thomas Center, is a compact theme park with several rides, especially of the roller coaster variety. North of this park lies a vast area of concentrated, old apartment buildings some of which are abandoned. And there are railroad tracks running around this area. I have gone on several of the rides in the park, and I would have to say that, as far as theme parks are concerned, it ranks right up there at the top (especially since the lines are so short). But the catch is this: none of this is real! The theme park, apartments, and railroad tracks only exist in my dreams, and by “dreams”, I mean that I have dreamed of this place a number of times!

There is a solid wall in the building where I work that, in an earlier dream, connected to a library with a large sitting area. I sat in that place once, reading a book in Finnish (and understanding it). Now, whenever I walk past that wall during work, I think about that curious dream. By the way, I don't know any Finnish.

In the formerly undeveloped Everglades wilderness southwest of Hollywood, there is a back-winding road out in the middle of nowhere on which stands an all-night restaurant that I’ve eaten at (but only in my dreams). There is a special waterway running north-south through Fort Lauderdale that I’ve swum down, and which has a little pastry shop on the side (the best-tasting pastry ever), but once again, this is a figment of my dreams. There are specific real spots where, when I am dreaming, I can actually lift off of the ground and fly (out along the north side of my old Hollywood home and in the middle of the road directly in front of my current home). Recently, I took off with my family in a plane that was camouflaged as the second floor of an old house near the Office Depot on US 441 in Gainesville. I sat in a comfortable recliner, strapped on my seat belt, and the second floor took off! The pilot decided to go through a few loops over Gainesville, to which I whooped and hollered in delight! I could go on and on with dream experiences of this type.

I’m sure that you, too, can probably dig up your own dream experiences as they relate to real places. Those that I mentioned of my own experiences were just among the ones that I most clearly remembered upon awakening. I wonder how much of our feelings about our waking, real world are influenced by unconscious associations from unremembered-but-latent dreams. After all, we are all a mix of the rational and irrational. And sometimes we may get a feeling about a place that we can’t explain the reasons for. Perhaps this says something about my psychological makeup, but dreams about geography and travel have always been the most memorable and meaningful for me.

Maps

I have always felt a deep affinity for maps of all kinds. World atlases, road atlases, fold-up maps, fantasy-book (like Tolkien's Middle Earth) maps, and star maps all hold great interest for me. When I was around four or five years old, my sister and I used to play a game in our yard we called "Mapland", in which we would imagine different sections of the yard to be exciting, exotic lands, full of adventure, of course. I remember playing a lot of "imagination" games like this as a child, and I wonder whether today's children aren't being deprived of an important growth experience with their video games that provide ready-made images and narratives for them. Once, also when I was a kid, I began to etch, for no particular reason at all, some lined grooves on the seat of an old wooden chair of ours. Soon the idea took hold that I was drawing a map of sorts, and I began to imagine a city corresponding to the roads I was etching. There were schools, stores, the library, my "home", and friends' homes on this street or that. Soon I had covered the entire seat of this chair with a strange, web-like etching. I think it's still there at my old home. I don't think anyone in my family ever knew what that was all about. No one ever asked me and I never told them!

Also, around that time, I caught "collector's fever" and began to collect all sorts of different things. Naturally, road maps became one of my collector's items. On Saturdays, I would leave my house and make the rounds, walking to different gas stations (some pretty far away for a little kid to walk to) and asking the attendants whether they had some road maps (all of which were free then). So I soon amassed a pretty sizable collection of fold-up road maps, although they were mostly either of Miami, Florida, or the Southeastern US. For some reason, even though Broward County (lying directly north of Miami's Dade County) had a very large population, I never could get road maps of Hollywood or Fort Lauderdale back then. It was as if only Miami counted for anything in South Florida!

Nowadays, sometimes I have fun playing around with GoogleEarth on my computer. It really is quite an amazing feature, and seems to be continually undergoing updates and improvements. I remember reading somewhere that foreign governments, such as the Soviet Union, once would deliberately insert errors into their own maps, in hopes of making military conquest by others more difficult. Well, nowadays you can just forget that! What I would like to see in the future with GoogleEarth is a regularly-refreshed view of the Earth, or at least have them update their pictures more often.

Street Plans

When I came into Knoxville, Tennessee on October 11, I had no idea where anything was, other than the hotel I was staying at and the home of the friends we were visiting. The problem that I have about the Knoxville street plan is that the roads are named and not numbered. This makes finding any address difficult, to say the least (unless you’ve lived there a while).

I have usually lived in places (South Florida and Gainesville) that used a numbered street plan. If I needed to find any place, I could locate it easily from its address and had no problem getting there. Hollywood, Florida, has an interesting twist: although their “east-west” streets are named, most of them are named after former U.S. Presidents (in chronological order). So, Hollywood has an historical theme to its street layout.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been some glitches to the street-plans in my hometowns. If you go eastward in Hollywood toward the ocean, the avenues go down in number until you hit the Atlantic Ocean itself. At about where 5th Avenue would be is where you start to wade to the seaweed-saturated sea! Apparently, the Hollywood coastline has eroded quite a bit over the past several decades!

Gainesville has its own peculiarities. If you go west on NW 16 Avenue, you’ll find that it changes to NW 23 Avenue. And if you go west on NW 23 Avenue from the center of the city, you’ll find that it changes to NW 31 Boulevard! There is the heavily-traveled NW 53 Avenue that I drive down to go to my Publix grocery store. Along a stretch of this road, I can look off to my left and see another, completely different, residential road running parallel to it. Its name? NW 53 Avenue! And driving north on NW 34 Street, there is a side road turning off to the left. Its name? NW 34 Street!

But in Knoxville, they have their own way of doing things. For example, they have a street officially named after current (neither retired nor deceased nor fired yet) University of Tennessee head football coach Phillip Fulmer. I guess they really do take their football seriously up there!