Uncle Sam looks on while half the world burns (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe for the next few Mondays.

This one's from Carey Orr of the Nashville Tennessean:

"The Great Wall," 1915

Spinning

I applaud the use of the spinning globe in this animated musical composition made entirely of classroom sounds from the third grade classroom of Edgar Camago, aka DJ Overeasy:
 

Zeppelin or love: New heights

This is an early xkcd comic by Randall Munroe.  It's clearly more ambitious than his usual stick figures, but, lacking an obvious means to propel the blimp, lacks some of the wonderful detail which has become more characteristic in his more recent work. The "title-text" at the actual webcomic says:

Quick, try it with 'LOVE'!

USA map in The Simpsons

The map in Bart's classroom is a backdrop for his hi-jinks. The fact that the colors of the states change from cut to cut could mean that it's a new-fangled dynamic map that the teacher can use to show various data over the course of a single lesson.  Wouldn't that be nifty!  Or it's just lazy animation.  There have been other maps in The Simpsons, including a website that shows all the countries The Simpsons have been to.

Geography for sale

Published in 1992 in The New Yorker by Mick Stevens, is this showing the going rate for answers or just to learn the topics at all?  Whichever it is, geography is obviously the highest valued product.  Take that English Lit!

Dancing with the bees

This is an apioology joke in webcomic Basketcasecomix by Kelly Ferguson.

With that sciency theme I suppose this post is timed conveniently with the recent appearance of Bill Nye the Science Guy on Dancing with the Stars but i didn't plan it that way

...unless you're Canadian

I quite like this t-shirt design from Busted Tees and I think the time is soon approaching when those restrictions will wither away. The resulting land-grab and/or development explosion will likely be rather tumultuous... although it could very well be that all that will happen before the U.S. gets around to ending those restrictions. That could mean a boatload of missed opportunities for U.S. real estate interests, but it could be better for Cuba. 

Serving up the world (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe for the next few Mondays.

This one's also from the Clifford K. Berryman Political Cartoon Collection at the National Archives of the United States:

"Chorus: But Adolf! What About that Other Nice Piece?," 15 November 1940

Captain USA

From the bilingual webcomic Sephko, a followup to the perennial "America vs. USA" controversy:

Family picture

Here's a funny solar system family portrait from The Gentleman's Armchair

According to Devin

Were's a new webcomic for our site: AccordingtoDevin, taking its queue from the opening roll of The Power Puff Girls.

Tolkein's Australia

Here's a map of "Oz" rendered in Tolkein-style cartography.  And you thought the movies were filmed in New Zealand.

The world according to...

There is a type of cartographic joke that falls into the category of "The World According to..." One style of doing this is the classic Saul Steinberg New Yorker Magazine cover which has been emulated many, many times.  Another way of doing it is to re-draw a map distort the sizes and/or change the labels to caricature-ize the worldview of the subject of a jest.  Here, for example, is a map of world religions with the emphasis being on Australia's unique dominant belief system.  Below we have a Cold War-era version of this joke lampooning the self-aggrandizing attitudes France can seem to have about it's own importance on the global stage.  To be completely unfair, except for the Iron Curtain bit, I think it's an accurate misrepresentation.  (click on it to see a more legible view).

Breaking wind news

Because at heart I'm 10:

Texting while meteoring

Free Range by Bill Whitehead resorts to asteroid humor with some frequency.

Egypt on the move

Because what's an international crisis without one of the "news" networks screwing up the geography.... although you'd think Fox News would know from Iraq, what with all the war they were so keen about having there a few years back.


Need more of this particular sort of thing?
Wrong Georia
"West" Cambodia?
That's some road trip
Here's a compilation including CNN screwing up the Middle East

Rapped up

This isn't the first GIS-themed rap I've posted. Unfortunately I suspect it won't be the last.  It premiered at the 2013 New Zealand ESRI User Group Conference by the company Interpret Geospatial Solutions:

Lookin' at maps with the Cloon

Some of you may have seen the aggressively weird music video that's going viral "What Does the Fox Say?" made by the Norwegian duo Kollektivet, But that's not even remotely their first foray into very strange pop parody songs.  Here is an epic power ballad dedicated to Jan Egeland (a world-renowned peace activist who served as deputy director of Human Rights Watch) queue'd right at the point where they tie together Egeland, maps, and George Cloon[ey]:

Okkervil River

I know nothing at all about the band Okkervil River.  I just saw this interactive map by William Schaff that was released with their new album The Silver Gymnasium which explains the influences behind the group:

Explosion Bus

Remember the show "Dr. Katz" from the 1990s?  Well the guys who did that have a new web show called "Explosion Bus" and, for reasons that are made fairly clear in the trailer, they use a US map in the intro sequence.

IE Countdown

What we have here is a pair of websites from my friend Brian, an original by Microsoft encouraging people to stop using the 12-year-old Internet Explorer 6 and then a parody site that uses the same language to encourage people to stop using Internet Explorer at all.  I agree with the latter. The fact that Microsoft itself posted the first site in all seriousness is kind of surreal.  What does it say about Microsoft that they'd actually do that?  One could turn to the over-used what-if-Microsoft-made-cars meme and make an analogy about what if GM published a website badmouthing their own products of 12 years ago... but car companies just stop making the replacement parts after a while. They don't actively campaign against their own product.

Brian's comment is that "The great part is that the spoof is graphically much better"

UN world map takes some cuts (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe for the next few Mondays.

This one's also from the Clifford K. Berryman Political Cartoon Collection at the National Archives of the United States:

"Et Tu...?," 1 November 1956

Mapping Arms Data

We've done a lot of interactive posts this week.  Here's one more: Mapping Arms Data is an interactive animated map created by Brazil’s Igarapé Institute together with Peace Research Insitute Oslo and Google Ideas that lets you see where countries are buying and selling their small arms and in what quantities. It takes a while to load but is well worth the wait.

Hydrant in orbit

Marmaduke by Brad Anderson, where a fire hydrant becomes so afraid of being gang-pee'd on by a pack of dogs that it obtains sentience and achieves escape velocity and space travel. When i was little I liked reading Marmaduke and i even read the little doggie tales at the end of the Sunday strips.  Then i lost interest in the doggie tales because they were always lame.  Then I lost interest in the strip as it, too, was rather lame. My son likes it though and I'm not going to spoil it for him.

Adrift

Adrift is a fascinating interactive site from Australia built on a Google Maps platform that allows the user to see where plastic junk will end up if its dumped anywhere on the ocean.

Here there be...

Many of you may have already seen some form of Olaus Magnus’ 1539 Carta Marina.  This version is interactive, allowing the user to click on the various creatures to learn what Mr. Magnus had to say about them. While today this map is often treated as a quaint curio, in its time it was the authoritative scientific descriptor of much of the world.

Token

A couple months in our universe is only a few minutes in the plotline at the webcomic "Powernap" by Maritza Campos.  Drew regrets lying about looking at a map as he searches for and actually finds.... Token.  It seems obvious that he shouldn't have tried.

Cliche monster

xkcd by Randall Munroe:

The "title-text" at the actual webcomic has one last cliche in it:

It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destrucive power of the Hiroshima bomb.

Cold War head cold (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe for the next few Mondays.

This one's also from the Clifford K. Berryman Political Cartoon Collection at the National Archives of the United States:

"A General View of the Global Situation," 1 October 1963

And in the drunkness bind them

One flask to rule them all: