BS forecast

Bill Greenhead, also known as Stik (the artist behind World of Cow), gives us a weather forecast.

Yuppie mountain

In February of 1990 James Stevenson got this cartoon published in The New Yorker.The labels on the ski trails map are presumably very yuppie-esque... but even blown up they're too hard for me to reas.

I think that by 1990 the Yuppie era was growing to a close, no?

Told you so

Artist Graham Waters gives us this "spouses arguing about directions" + GPS gag.  It's pretty bland, though.  Not a lot of humor in the depiction of a simple "I told you so".

Sat' nav', by the way, is the British term for GPS, because GPS is the term specific to the U.S.'  NAVSTAR GPS satellite navigation system.  GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) is the term that covers all of the technologies. GPS is the only fully-functional global satellite navigation system. Galileo is the Euro version and is in the middle of its deployment phase.  The Russian version is called GLONASS, but it's currently only regional, though it's global deployment is planned. The Chinese are working on expanding their regional Beidou navigation system into the fully global Compass navigation system.  There was a years-long negotiation/fight between the U.S. and the Europeans about whether and how to make GPS compatible with Galileo.  In the end they were made to be compatible and most new GPS and sat. nav. products will use both.  I think I read that the GLONASS will also be compatible. India and Japan both have smaller regional systems.  So does France.

Of course the original cartoon up there still isn't very funny. Sorry.

Lost shoe

Shoe, by Chris Cassatt and Gary Brookins, makes a GPS joke.  And what a spectacularly witty comeback he has made!

Cartographers of York

The artist "Kes" is having fun with nursery rhymes.  I like this kind of fun.

Not so much

Here, in a print ad from 1925, was Rand McNally, poised to take very lucrative advantage of America's new obsession with automobile travel.  Almost 100 years later Rand McNally is all but absent from the new GPS-driven consumer-directions driving scene.  What happened? 

This is from the AdClassix site which had hundreds of old print ads available for sale.

Not Paris

This cartoon by Karsten Schley is less political than the last one of hers (his?) I posted, but it still has a controversy.  This time it's the age-old "spouses arguing about directions" gag.

Not anymore

From 2005 this Frazz strip by Jef Mallet assumes schools still bother to keep atlases up to date. I'm not so sure that's true anymore.

You are not yet

This is another "You are here" gag, this time by a Nick Baker.  This one randomly came up on my list to be the one to post next after yesterday's post, inadvertently continuing the "Not yet" theme. 

Not yet

Farley Katz had this in The New Yorker in December of 2008.  It shows a slightly less disappointed God than the one he got published a few years later.

You are on the other end

The artist known as "Kes" here combines a You are here gag with a spouses arguing about directions gag.

Melancholy migration

John McPherson's Close to Home with a migration/Mapquest joke... We also have the first time Ohio is specifically mentioned in one of these posts.  That brings the total number of states mentioned to 18.

Google Earth on a diet

Marty Bucella gives us this comic here combining dieting and maps. There's been one other post that does that so far.  I gotta say I find this type of joke to be a symptom of dangerously psychotic body image issues, not funny.  

Glow-in-the-dark indoor mapping

Here, from an installment of the Book of Biff webcomic by Chris Hallbeck, we have a novel approach for internal GIS

Stroller GPS

Remember when Adam in Brian Basset's Adam@Home was questioning his neighbor's stroller-mounted GPS device? It obviously didn't take Adam long to get one of his own. The un-interesting mystery here is whether Adam justified the device for the same reasons.

German Shepherds

Remember back in 2005 when Germany had their "hanging chad" moment and had to sort out a deeply divided general election?  Those were the days, eh? Merkel confusing gross and net income twice in a televised debate, Schröder ... being Schröder.  Good times. Good times.  Anyway, there was no clear winner in the 2005 general elections in Germany, both leading candidates claimed victory, and they eventually had to make a joint Grand Coalition government, which didn't always see eye-to-eye.

More importantly (for the purposes of this blog) by the time that situation happened, GPS had become such a massively pervasive technology that this editorial cartoon could comfortably reference it as a standard part of the popular culture lexicon.  That's fairly impressive for a technology that had only been commercially available for about 15 years and had only hit consumer-grade electronics about 5 years earlier.

MA and PA

Dan Reynolds gives us this farm-themed comic.  And also our 20th state directly referenced in a comic on this blog. Massachusetts has already been mentioned, but Pennsylvania has not... until now! Actually this is the 21st state referenced if we count the Bugs Bunny reference to Albuquerque earlier this year.

But this is about at typical barnyard humor as it gets.  

Suburban vacation

In July of 2007  Michael Fry & T. Lewis did this Summer-Vacation-themed Over the Hedge episode.

Miss the pram

Dave Parker gives us this somewhat cynical turn-by-turn directions gag.  By the way, pram = baby carriage. 

Early road trip

A cover by William Steig from The New Yorker August of 1937 here's a fascinatingly early depiction of that now-storied American pastime: The road trip.

Homeward Bound

Here's a cute map-related comic by S Harris.  What breed of dog would that be ya think? And where's the other dog and the cat?

By the way, today's date is one of those truly rare binary dates: 10-01-10.  There'll be another in a few days, sure, and a few next year.  And then a 90+ year dry spell.