Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Shoe planet

Roz Chast, regular contributor to The New Yorker, can draw some pretty impressive map-related comics.  This one from 1992 has a geology bent to it.  Different labels include: Shale, Sandstone, Underground cave, Coast, Limestone bed, Trapped fossil fuels, Magic land of Tjxsprt, Igneous rock, Molten lava core.  I'm not sure why this comic needed to involve a shoe.

And of course this reminds one of a passage from the Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex:
"Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet — people, cities shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It's a well known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds — you've seen one of them — who cursed their feet, cursed the ground, and vowed that none should walk on it again. Unhappy lot. Come, I must take you to the Vortex."

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