His name is Mimal

Sorry to intrude on your Monday, Amanda, but I want to update a previous post from 2 years ago today about the chef that's hidden in the Mississippi River area states: His name is Mimal, after the states that make him up: Minnesota (hat), Iowa (head), Missouri (shirt), Arkansas (pants), and Louisiana (boots). Fittingly, the chicken is Kentucky and the tin pan is Tennessee.

Mississippi River States give you KFC chef

Somebody was looking at a map of The United States and saw a chef serving up a plate of fried chicken... Kentucky Fried Chicken to be exact.  Do you still see it when it's not diagrammed   Will you still look for it every time you see the Mississippi River states from now on?

River Transit Maps two-fer

What if river systems were displayed in the form of subway transit maps?  Behold the work of Daniel Hoffman at his Somthingaboutmaps blog (He's also the creator of the Cartastrophe blog).  Here's a few more.  The rest are at the river maps installment of the blog:

Fire break

Back in the summer of 2007 there were massive wildfires raging across the west.  Pat Bagley created a map-related editorial comic on the subject.

Worst case

We'll finish the week with another XKCD by Randall Munroe.  That map of Louisiana is nice, but somewhat inaccurate.  I had a geology professor in college who could accurately draw a very quick California coastline on a chalkboard in a single swipe.  Always impressive. 

 Go to the actual xckd site, hover over the image, and there will be an additional message in the "title-text" . This one says:

To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

So here's Jeff Master's blog, and Bruce Schneier's blog.  And I'm going to step outside for a bit ...even though it's cold, cloudy, windy, threatening to snow, and in winter it's impossible to produce vitamin D from the sun if you live north of Phoenix because the sun never gets high enough in the sky for its ultraviolet B rays to penetrate the atmosphere.... it's just that going outside sometimes is a good thing to do no matter what.  You should do the same.