Not London

This image was brought to us by friend Mary who provided an article in the London Evening Standard that caught the Falcons football team showing fans how thoroughly lost they'll make themselves on their way to an exposition match in London last weekend. Thank you Mary.

Olympic odds

ASAP Science is putting out an Olympics-themed video every day of the Olympics. This one is front-end-loads a pile of anthropomorphized country maps and discusses the odds of becoming a winter Olympian

World Cup geography

Is this another example of South America getting confused with some place else?

The Rocket

This submission by Amanda is from Frank Duggan about a famous hockey player. Canadians and their beloved hockey.

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.

NFL Fan Map

Over at the Facebook Data Science Facebook page there's a map showing NFL team fanbases across the country:

Sides off

Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley does some map-ish sports humor:

Mitt's event

I'm posting this, from Tom Toles, a few weeks late for the Olympic theme it's based on, but just in time for the GOP Convention.

South Africa submission

This has been a fun submission. Amanda has submitted this comic by Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro of South Africa (background and explanation here).  Note the anthropomorphized map of South Africa there cheering his comrade on. Amanda found our "Maps in Comics" blog here when it was referenced in the Diana Maps blog a few weeks ago.  I would encourage you to check that one out.

These are the champions

We're actually going to be topical today, which is odd because the topic is sports and I'm nut much of a fan.  But hockey and basketball are in their championship phases so here's an interactive map from Slate.com that shows all the championships ever won in every city in the US from 1903 (1971 shown below). Enjoy:

Mapping March Madness

While I'm not much of a sports fan, I can certainly appreciate a convergence of geography and multi-billion dollar sports industries.  For example,  here is a map showing both the number of shots taken from various places on the court during NBA games from 2006-2011, and also the success rate of those shots:

And the same kind of map for an individual player,

Now, as the article I found these in suggests, imagine overlaying all of these plots for all the players on a team and make a team that knows how to distribute its players to most effectively shoot from any position on the court. This is the work of Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State (and currently a visiting scholar at Harvard).

Geographic ingratitude

Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean.  

Notice the little globe in the travel agency.  That's the map part of this map-related Funky Winkerbean strip by Tom Batiuk.  Talk about ungrateful! This imaginary travel agent (because are there any travel agencies anymore?) offers an amazing travel package to a fascinating location that is very much in keeping with the sports theme of the charity, and the titular character there dismisses it like the slimy cretinous slug that he is.   

The proper response here would have been: "Holy Kenya!, Really!?  That's an amazingly generous offer! I can't tell you how thrilled we are to have such a valuable donation for our raffle.  We'll save that prize for last.  By the way, how in the world have you managed to stay in business all these years?"

Brett Farve

This is sports-oriented editorial cartoon by Joe Heller ran in September of 2007 when Brett Farve was riding high with the Green Bay Packers.  Much has changed since then.  There's no way cheeseheads would be this dedicated to Farve any more.

Monroe in grass

Frazz by Jef Mallet.  Of course there's plenty of sites dedicated to finding interesting things on Google Earth and other aerial imagery sites.

Even more interestingly, there's a group that printed a photograph onto mylar sheets so that it had various levels of transparency and then they laid that out on grass for a few days.  When they removed the mylar the photograph had developed perfectly in the shadings of green in the grass.

... which is somewhat similar to this troublesome forest that was planted in 1937 for Hitler's birthday: