2006-05-11 - 4:44 p.m.
Do you know what makes me really anxious and frustrated? World map projections. I wish I could say that it was a joke or something, but I’m really serious this time. The fact that the year is 2006 and we have no way of faithfully and accurately projecting the geography of the globe on a flat surface gets me anxious and fretful. I probably spend about two nights a week laying in bed, thinking about the different ways that it would be possible to do it right. It keeps me up for hours sometimes.
What if you took a shot of every square of the earth straight on and then just pieced it together? Well, the landmasses would be accurate but the distances between countries would be jacked up. There’s that whole “Peel the Earth like an Orange and Lay It Flat So That the Map Has Little Jagged Edges at the Top” thing, but let’s just admit that it’s a piece of crap. It’s so freaking distracting. Whenever I look at that projection of the world, I can’t concentrate on the rest of the world; I keep getting distracting by the little jagged parts at the top and wondering if it freaks any of those people out on Greenland or those little Canadian islands that this projection is chopping their homeland in half.
I know there are people who are paid lots of money to think of this stuff, but you how sometimes you think that you could solve it through pluck and sheer nerve? Like, if I actually solved the whole problem, they would make a movie about it, about some 23 year old loved maps a lot and during his Peace Corps Service figured out a way to make the round world pretty and true on a piece of paper and Rosie O’Donnell would play me (Della Reese was busy filming in Australia), with Kathy Griffin as my wise-cracking sidekick: “Round World Flat: A True Story.” On the cover of the VHS release, Rosie O’Donnell, as me, would be spoon-feeding a child with a terminal illness.
That’s how I want my impact to hit the world of cartography.
