Grimm Positioning System

With the tech media abuzz about this month's new Apple gadget announcements I'm posting this Mother Goose & Grimm strip by Mike Peters from 2010 to remind y'all that the App Store is only 4 years old... and Android and Apple apps together constitute a $15 billion - $22 billion market already and smart devices are the fastest growing technology adoption ever. Faster, even, than the dot-com boom and social networking.

Smogging or Non-Smogging?

Here's a fun little bit by Mike Peters, creator of this Mother Goose & Grimm strip.

Christo two-fer

Here's another in our collection of map-related comics with artist themes. Y'know this post would have been perfectly topical back in 2005 when Christo [and Jeanne-Claude] did [their] installation in New York City's Central Park. However it's fun enough now to see two completely different cartoonists doing two completely different jokes using almost the same exact imagery.  I just wonder why the one has the tied-up part on the North Pole while the other has it on the South Pole.  

Christopher Weyant in The New Yorker (which ran in August of 2004, six months before Christo's Central Park installation)

Mike Peters' Mother Goose & Grimm

You are finding yourself

Psychotherapy meets the "You are here" gag at Mike Peters' Mother Goose & Grimm strip. 

Carmen Sandiego found at two-fer (three-fer) Tuesday

For today's Tuesday Two-fer we have Carmen Sandiego. What child of the '90's (and late '80's) who had any awareness and/or interest in geography could have escaped the ubiquitous Carmen in the multi-media of the day, making it all the more strange that she was so hard to find.   In case you're wondering, this was, in fact, inspired by the recent release of the Carmen Sandiego game for Facebook. But then I don't spend much time on Facebook and I actually never got into Carmen Sandiego.

So let's get to it.  We'll start , slightly anti-climatically, with simply finding Carmen Sandiego.  I gotta say, Carmen has totally let herself go if she's this easy to find:

My guess is that she's headed for her secret hide out here:

That's got to be photoshopped, right?  Nope.  That's Juan de Nova Island off the coast of Madagascar.  It's rotated about 180 degrees and there's some clouds obscuring an inconvenient bump on the "hat".  But other than that, it is an actual photo of the island.

But let's stop picking on Carmen.  After being on the run for so long she deserves a break, and maybe a chance at true love... with none other than....

Waldo (of course).

The first two images are from the Cheezburger Network's Win! page.  And the last is from Mike Peters' Mother Goose & Grimm strip. 

Guilt trip

Mike Peters provides this guilt trip in his Mother Goose & Grim strip.

Stars' clothes

Mike Peters gives us another "map to the stars" gag in this Mother Goose & Grimm. Here's one that I posted previously. I gotta say, this is the only sort of "map to the stars" I'd ever buy.

And, if you're at all interested, here's an article explaining the recent dust up about the changes in astrological signs. I missed out on being one of the new Ophiuchus by just a day, which is kind of a bummer. Not that it matters.  I was happy enough being a Sagittarius. But now it appears that I'm a Scorpio, which sucks 'cause my older brother's a Scorpio and, while I love him, I don't know that I wanna be like him... But it's all OK 'cause now he's a Libra.

It's beginning to look a lot like isthmus

Mike Peters' Mother Goose and Grimm. I'm sorry.

Merry Christmas!

(This is still my favorite map-related Christmas comic)

Christmas GPS

In his Mother Goose and Grimm comic strip Mike Peters gives us this Christmas and GPS-related comic from last year.  He does a lot of map-elated comics.  He ran another one last week that I'll post it tomorrow... and beg your forgiveness when I do (you'll understand why).

Portland

Yes, this is a bit of a stretch, in terms of this being a map-related comic. But it is about a place. And it does mention "directions". OK? Look, it mentions my beloved Portland, in an appropriately funny way. So I'm going to include it. So there!

On-star

This ran in 2007. Since then Mike Peters has quit referring to this technology as On-star, but more accurately as GPS. On-star still exists, of course, but it's still a car-only-based device, at least as far as I know. On-star seems like a rather expensive service to operate.
Regardless, there have been a number of On-star-themed spoofs that are rather funny (easy to find on any Internet search of "On-star Spoof")

Postal

Cliche. But well enough played.

Your flat girlfriend

This one ran on my birthday in 2008. And it's about one of my favorite cartographic urban legends (BTW, if a legend is hundreds of years old, can it still be described as urban?). That being, of course, that anybody in Columbus' time believed the Earth was flat (nobody did. The roundness of the Earth was well-established thousands of years at least prior to C.C.). I've addressed that falsehood and its origins here. 


Bugs Bunny's take on this argument is funnier. 

Atlas abs

This week we'll concentrate on Atlas-themed cartoons. And there are a very large number of them. I've already posted a few. This week we'll see many more. This is from Mike Peters' Mother Goose and Grimm again.

Not Astronomy

Another example from Mike Peters' Mother Goose and Grimm, this time with Grimm and Atilla the Cat trying their turn at paparazzi. And of course they need a map. And of course hilarity ensues.

Grimm GPS 12

This story arc is finally over. Parts of it were kinda funny. All of it had GPS in it. Score one for mapping humor!

Grimm GPS 11

More geek-speak: The FAA generally doesn't allow UAVs to fly inside US airspace. But that's quibbling with a story line were an abusive sentient GPS device is having a (rapidly deteriorating) romantic reltionship with a talking dog. Cartoons are great!

Grimm GPS 10

In case you didn't know, Google Earth isn't even remotely live. Most imagery is several years old and purchased at deep discount from one of a pair of commercial satellite companies (GeoEye or DigitalGlobe). Most of the imagery in urban areas in the US is acquired with cameras/sensors on airplanes, but it's still old stuff. But that's geek-speak. In the popular culture, Google Earth is a high-resoloution live-imaging satellite owned by Google. In fact much of the press surrounding GeoEye's last satellite launch didn't even mention GeoEye, but instead reported the satellite and launch was owned/funded wholly by Google. Of course it was the first time NASA allowed any logo besides their own (and the US flag) appear on a rocket.

Grimm GPS 09

Right, so we're back to not funny and kinda scary and basically pointless. We get it, the GPS unit is insane. But how is that funny? The "sentient GPS unit" part of the gag is done and over. Several installments in the story arc have already established the GPS unit is crazy. This didn't add anything.

Grimm GPS 08

Yes, definitely creepy. While I usually like dog sniffing humor for some reason, this one falls a bit flat.