Not Texas

That's Hartford, Connecticut there filling out the shape of Texas.  This New Yorker cartoon, by Jack Ziegler, isn't one that'd find itself in any Texan publication... except, published in 1990, this was likely done as a commentary about President George H. W. Bush claims of being from Texas.

Some optical illusions

You may have seen some of these optical illusions... but not like this:

Amber Rousse's quilled map

Amber Rousse assembled this beautiful map of the world with curled paper strips. Ms. Rousse also arranged mountain ranges to relative heights and showed major ocean currents:

Psychadelic M is for Map

Here's a mildly psychedelic ABCs animation that uses "map" for the letter "M" (at the 1:54 mark) directed and animated by Laura Sicouri & Kadavre Exquis. (Warning: The item for letter X is potentially NSFW)
:
LSD ABC from LSD ABC on Vimeo.

Borders are weird

Here's some fun with national borders from a recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic by Zach Weiner.  If you decide to stop over at the site there is this warning: SMBC is often NSFW. 

Quite literally

What do place names in the vicinity of the USA mean?  Here is a literalist translation map (interactive version and article here) of the USA and areas close to it designed by cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust,.  I like that Mexico means "Navel of the Moon".  That's pretty. A lot more poetic than the "United States of the Home Ruler".

Tennis anyone?

Here's an item by John Collins submitted by Amanda that's about the world getting itself back together after WWII and starting up The Davis Cup tennis championship.

Michigan tattoo

Here's a lot of map-of-Michigan-themed tattoos ... which after a little internet search I think may be the most popular state to get tattooed on oneself.  New Jersey is also popular.  Wyoming and Colorado are very much not. As for the last one, I'm sorry if it's offensive to anybody, because it was labelled as "impure Michigan", but I'm not quite seeing the offense.  I see a Michigan-inspired variation on the red-blue-whitespace professional sports leagues logos.  I understand where the offense could be coming from, however the orientation of the feet and legs don't lend themselves to that imagery.

USA rivers

Nelson Minar has made this beautiful map showing all the rivers in the contiguous USA:

I recognize those empty, dry places there in Texas, Wyoming, and Utah.  I already knew that some of the famously desert places west of there weren't as riverless as that. I'm a little bit confused about the riverless southern tip of Florida.  My understanding was that, at least originally, that entire area from Lake Okeechobee south through the Everglades was effectively one giant tangle of rivers and streams. Here's it's shown as being as riverless (and by implication as dry) as West Texas.  That's either nonsensical or very, very alarming.

Stamen

Here's a tool called Stamen that lets you make maps using the Open Street Maps platform which is an open source mapping tool to rival the likes of Google Maps... although some of the big commercial webmaps actually use Open Street Maps.

Shannon Rankin's maps

Artist Shannon Rankin works with maps. She makes very pretty things out of them:

GeoGuesser

Some of you may have already heard about "GeoGuesser", created by Anton Wallén, the website that is a game where it shows you some random place on the planet in Google StreetView and you have to figure out where the place is.  It went viral a few weeks ago.  It can be pretty fun.  Try it out: