New Shirt Design at Straitjacket T-Shirts

Just one this time:

Are You Sure The Door's Locked And The Stove Is Off?

Each shirt in the Obsessed and/or Compulsive section is now in its own subsection.

Dumbest Criminal of the Month (to date) - Montana Edition

No comment necessary.

Trail of snacks, MySpace surfing lead to Hamilton burglary suspect

HAMILTON - Stephan Crane will probably never be a professional burglar.

The 19-year-old Hamilton man was arrested Tuesday morning following an early morning break-in to the Ravalli Republic.

Crane allegedly broke into the newsroom through a window and then watched some pornography on the computers he found inside. He also logged onto his MySpace and Facebook pages using his own name.

Somewhere along the way, the man doused the room with a fire extinguisher.

Following a short investigation, Hamilton police officers found Crane at his sister's apartment just across the hallway from the paper's newsroom.

The officers followed a trail of stolen trail mix and M&Ms to her door.

The article continues at the Missoulian's website, where you can read about Mr. Crane's incredible and nefarious motives, and further details of the Hamilton Police Department's efforts to catch Mr. Crane.

Unfortunately I am unable to find Mr. Crane's Facebook page.

Matlock. I want Matlock! MAAAAAATTTTTLLOOOOOCCKK!

How old and out of the loop am I?  I didn't know Rowland S. Howard died about six weeks ago, 30 December 2009.  Then again it's probably remarkable he reached 50 in the first place.  I consider myself fortunate to have seen The Birthday Party and Crime and the City Solution play live.

Screw the Olympics.  I'm spending most of today listening to 20-30+ year-old vinyl recordings of The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, Crime and the City Solution, These Immortal Souls, the collaborations with Lydia Lunch and The Bad Seeds, Barry Adamson, and whatever I don't have but can find on the InterTubes.

Obituary from Melbourne's The Age.

Remembrance from the UK's Guardian.

Brisbane Times interview from 1 November 2008.

MySpace page.

Discogs' Discography.  

Discography by Maurice Maes and Leo Meijer at claranet.nl  Although complete only through January 2001, and included as a subset of Nick Cave's, this one is easier to read and covers important omissions from Discogs' list.  E.g. The Young Charlatans.

It didn't help that I was already weirded out yesterday when I heard Negative Trend had reformed.  Showing once again how old and out of it I am. 

While the various replacement bass players for the reconstituted version of Flipper haven't been involved, drummer Steve DePace was a couple times.  The only reason I'm bothered by this is I'm one of the last people to have seen Will Shatter alive.  The night he OD'd we were at the Mab watching somebody, drinking beer (at least I was), and, among other things, discussing my playing didgeridoo with Flipper or one of his other projects.  A few hours later he was dead.  His girlfriend even brought up the subject of how long he had been clean.  Will and I were neighbors for a couple years (we both lived on the same block on Moss, then I moved about a block away), and when Will or Bruce saw me at a gig they'd ask if I paid with my "punk bucks" (currency I'd type screeds on).  They got paid with some one night and asked to be paid with it whenever possible.

I guess whoever is supposed to walk over my grave needed to ask for directions.

Updates on Crazy Meds

If I haven't written a real article about a med after six years (e.g. Dilantin, the individual benzodiazepines), who knows when an article for said medication will be written.  As such I'm deleting the stub articles, associated PI sheets, and I'm in the process of removing links to them from most pages.

As I'm removing all those pages, I'm expanding / cleaning up pages about families of medications.  E.g. the page on benzos.  This is an on-going process.  Real articles for additional medications may or may not be written in the future.

I'm removing broken links as I find them.

References to "the usual side effects" for anticonvulsants now link to the anticonvulsants side effects page, instead of the basic info about anticonvulsants page.  Like they should have.

I'm also doing some miscellaneous cleaning up.

They're certainly appealing to *my* demographic

The 1990s are back in force here in Montana.  The Freeman reconstituted around the fear that Kenyan-born and secret Muslim 'President' Obama is going to steal everyone's firearms and county sheriffs are the first line of defense against the baby killers in the BATF.  The black helicopter crowd has found a link between socialized government-run health care and the New World Order (NWO):  The FDA's Codex Alimentarius Commission. Specifically its work with the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the International Harmonization of food. And who is overseeing all of this? None other than the World Trade Organization!  Of course it's the WTO.

Doesn't that read like the scariest shit this side of the USA PATRIOT act?  It's one of those things that has the far right and far left meeting each other in the same part of Crazy Town.  Cue the theme from The X-Files.

I bring this up because the same UNABomberish guy keeps showing up in the ads at weather.com, regardless of what they're selling.  I put the first one up on fail.blog:

It could be a demographic identification fail, or he could be the 'mom' in the new UNABomber / Manson family.  Then again they could be enticing him with the promise of lots of moms attending college, because he looks like the sort of guy who'd be hitting on the MILFs.  Or any other mammal that is breathing, or at least still warm.

Now I'm seeing this:

Oh yeah, Harold could be my neighbor.  You bet.  Assuming he hasn't had his license revoked after his 11th DUI.  Although he doesn't strike me as the type who would bother with a driver's license, let alone insurance.

Crazy Meds back online

I currently don't know why or for how long Crazy Meds was unavailable, but we're back now.  When I do know I'll post something.

EDIT: Fuck if I know what happened.  The server went down at 2:43 a.m. Mountain Time (09:43 GMT) and I brought it back up at 1:45 p.m. (20:45 GMT).  I've been through every freaking log there is and nothing explains why a shutdown was ordered.

Pruning the Panoply 2

I've pruned various defunct or defunct-seeming sites from my various blog rolls.  Most are still available in a new section further down.

I've kept some that have a history of dormancy, e.g. Hospital Food.  They may or may not be moved at a later date.

Some entries have misleading dates.  The Flickr version of Texts from last night is updated several times a day, but the feed I'm getting is updated only if someone posts to the discussion.  If the folks at Not Hired haven't received a truly awful resume in some time they'll post a classic, and that will get tagged as being a year old.  The Horse Head Huffer blogs (Spare some LOL, What the Face and others) have dates all over the map.

I'll probably be adding new sites to the various blog rolls in the relatively near future.

Scenes from my boring life

All y'all should be as bored as I am with my 'life.'   This is the shit I do or just think about when I'm too demotivated and/or too medicated to do much of anything.  Which is how I am most of the time.

With only a few days left I come up with a name for this decade: The Yikes!², which is probably more accessible than Y²Kes!, although the latter might be easier to understand.  I think "Yikes!" squared  pretty much sums up the Y2K years, which sandwiched terror attacks, war, paranoia, electoral turmoils, and a global natural disaster between the dual hangovers from overhyped panic & parties and the worst international economic downturn since the 1930s.

Wacky weather haiku:

Texas white Xmas

bare, brown Montana landscape

Climate change? Really?

I got new snow tires, so of course it's not going to snow again until 2012.  If then.

I had a music-related dream the other night, yet another one that made me sad I don't know shit about music.  I heard Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover, which for some strange reason sounded like Siouxie Sioux singing with Interpol instead of her singing with Bauhaus / Love & Rockets, which is what Siouxie & the Banshees doing a Joy Division cover would probably sound like.  Anyway it was an original song (like all the music I dream about) with the lyric "I look in her eyes and see I can never win."  The Google can't find anything close to that in the same sentence, but there are so many great bands whose lyrics have yet to be published on the Intertubes.

Tremble in the majesty of my Kvetchmas booty, bitches:  Seasons 1 & 2 of Wonder Showzen. Robot Chicken Star Wars Episodes I & II. Family Guy Blue Harvest & Something, Something, Something Dark Side.

The animation involving things like ships and asteroids in Something, Something, Something Dark Side is better than that in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That's saying something, I just don't know what. 

I used to be told, frequently, that I'm the reincarnation of someone from Japan.  A Meiji-era comic was the final consensus.  While hikikomori is a modern condition, it certainly describes me during adolescence:

Called hikikomori, or social withdrawal, the ill-defined but debilitating syndrome afflicts as many as 1.2 million young people--seven in 10 of them male. Symptoms include agoraphobia, paranoia, aversion to sunlight and severe anxiety; sufferers become antisocial [sic] in their teens or 20s and spend months or years holed up in their bedrooms. "They see themselves as ugly. They think they smell," says Tamaki Saito, who runs the outpatient program at Sasaki Hospital in Chiba. "They fear that they're being watched by neighbors, so they cover windows with curtains or black paper."

I didn't think I smelled bad, but everything else fits.  Although I was socially avoidant, which is what most post people usually mean when they use the term "antisocial."   I'm the kind of dick who points out that sort of shit.  I came across the article while researching Apathy Syndrome for a topic on the Crazy Meds forum.

Christmas Music

A bit late, given how this song is especially relevant this year.  But one of only two Kvetchmas songs you really need:

Culturcide's Santa Claus was my Lover

The other is Happy Flowers' All I Got were Clothes for Christmas.  From the Touch and Go compilation God's Favorite Dog.  I don't know if that has been re-issued on CD or not.

Lurn 2 spel

It's "straitjacket" you moron, not "straight jacket." Someone is tightly (strait) confined when wrapped / encased (jacketed) in one. It is not a linear article of clothing. The Cafe Press store name and reference on the Mental Mall page have been updated. 

 

It's been how many fucking years until I noticed that?

More Flavor, Less Lexico-Spatial Awareness

My Topamax dosage was raised by 50mg to 375mg a day, in addition to the lamotrigine (250mg), protriptyline (50mg) and methylphenidate (a whopping 5mg).  This has allowed me to take the methylphenidate daily, work on a crossword puzzle if I don't have anything better to do, and eat food seasoned with nutmeg and cloves without worrying about having an aura.  Taking the methylphenidate is especially important because taking it daily means my sense of smell and memory are better, and the tremors aren't as bad.

One downside is my appetite isn't worth shit.  More Topamax + daily methylphenidate = can't even force myself to eat that much.  I'm not dangerously skinny, gaining weight is just another thing I've given in to giving up on.  While nutmeg and cloves are kosher again, peanuts are now part of my permanent Lent.  No peanuts means no peanut butter.  No peanut butter means no peanut butter and banana milkshakes, which were a great means of caloric intake when I couldn't deal with cooking and/or eating.  Fortunately I don't have the "look at a peanut and die" allergy, just an "eat peanut butter and spench" allergy or sensitivity of some kind.  As peanuts are legumes it doesn't surprise me that they'd eventually not like me any more.  The cost is too prohibitive for other nut butters.

I've gone back to needing nine to ten hours of sleep.  That wouldn't bother me if I were able to go to sleep at nine PM.  I'm lucky to fall asleep at 10:30.  Waking up after eight in the morning just messes with me.

The oddest effect is a kind of jamais vu or other Topamax-related size issue.  When I'm doing a crossword puzzle it won't matter how many times I count the number of squares and the number of letters in the word or phrase I know is the answer, I can't make it fit.  It's too short, it's too long, I've yet to discern a pattern.

Updates on Crazy Meds

I did a minor update to the Abilify page and posted a new PI sheet for it, to reflect its recent approvals.

I also did a slightly less minor update to the Clozaril page and posted a PI sheet to replace the dead link, along with links to PI sheet equivalents and consumer information from Australia, New Zealand and the UK.  Clozaril is being discussed more and more these days.

New Board on Crazy Meds Talk for Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Conditions

I just created a new board on the forum for Crazy Meds.   Schizophrenia & Other Psychoses: Messages from the Zernox Galaxies

Throughout their lives, membership in the nine versions of the Crazy Meds fora has skewed towards affective mood disorders.  We never have had many people in the spectrum of psychotic conditions, but we've been one of very few sites run by the mentally interesting that caters to the psychotic.  I've yet to come across a site specifically about schizophrenia that isn't run by, and is primarily for family, friends and 'caregivers.'  It's the same patronizing attitude NAMI has these days and it disgusts me.

What finally got me off of my ass to create the board was a post, that, in part, reminded me the latest round of anti-crazy bigotry from NPR, Huffington Post and other bastions of liberal groupthink. In their effort to avoid even raising the questions of what parts religion or nationality may or may not have played in the Fort Hood event (My take: Exactly like those of Timothy McVeigh when he killed 168 people in Oklahoma City 19 April 1995, a perverted form of religion mixed with an extremist and racist nationalism.) they dug and dug for the slightest hint of crazy. Long before the rumor of an insanity defense plea.  Unable or afraid to wade into a complex debate regarding the motives of a fratricidal traitor they prefer to deflect the issue by raising the specter of crazy.  Because it's perfectly acceptable for everyone to hate and fear us.

In the hierarchy of the mentally interesting the schizophrenic and other psychotics are pretty low on the social totem pole.  I've read posts from plenty of people with affective mood disorders (depression, bipolar, etc.) who were glad they aren't schizophrenic, don't want to be lumped in with people that crazy and so forth.  Crazy Meds strives to be the big tent of brain cooties, it was about time I continued with that tradition.

Tyler Durden: TV Commercial Consultant

I sent the link of my HTC & clam commercial mashups to Adnoxious and a couple other ad-related blogs on the Panoply of Stupidity etc.

Adnoxious did something better than noting their interchangeability, they found the pedigree of the $cientology ad: the "You're not your fucking khakis" scene from Fight Club.

See for yourself.

Words of Wisdom

From frumiousb's galleries via 

Best use of Live Journal (Official) via

FFFFOUND!

Photonuclear Excitation by the Large Hardon Collider

A diseased sun burns through the wounded sky...

The dealer's cold, black, insectoid eyes kept shifting to and from Nielsen and Ninomiya, the only two players at her table. Sitting in the somewhat functional remains of what was once Singapore's finest casino they had doubledowned on a pair of diamond sevens. They were dealt a pair of suicide kings. Faye, their dealer, had 18. Nielsen and Ninomiya were all in with all of their available time.

Two sixes of spades.

"23," Faye said, her voice as cold and flat as her eyes, "you lose."

"No," said Nielsen, "we all win."

"What are the odds?" asked Ninomiya, shrugging as he attempted to fade from his chair.

Strong fields and multiple excitations

Because of the strong fields associated with ultra-relativistic heavy-ions, the probabilities for several electromagnetic processes are very large at small impact parameters, and calculated, un-unitarized first-order probabilities may even exceed 1. This is for example the case for two-photon production of e+e− pairs.

The dominating process is photonuclear excitation of the target into a Giant Dipole Resonance followed by emission of one or more neutrons. The probability for mutual Coulomb dissociation reaches about 35% in a grazing Au+Au collision at the Large Hardon Collider.

 "As anyone who has read the literature can attest," Dr. Benway said, "not all particles require collision as a means to reach a state of excitation.  Many electron-hole interactions are often played out in the form of bondage and confinement scenarios, with the hole invariably the bottom.  Typically the interaction lasts only three pulse-pumps.  Photoexcitation is required for multiple excitations, but the second hardon won't be as large nor will it last any longer.  Two is usually the limit."

Subluminal Cerenkov Radiation

Three a.m. and two graduate students at CERN were playing cards.

"Blackjack is a stupid game.  Who in hell would want to play that?  If you can count cards it's easy, if you can't you're a sucker.  Plus someone has to be the house, so there's no point in playing if not in a casino."

"You're right.  I don't know what I was thinking."

Weak Force 

"When the largest quantum orgy of all time happened, what did electrons do when they had a chance to interact dangerously with positrons?  They were as conservative and repressed as Lutherans!"

The large mass of the "W" Intermediate Vector Boson (IVB) is also interpreted as a re-creation of the dense spacetime metric of the primordial electroweak force unification era during the initial moments of the "Big Bang".

Looking at a simple example, we diagram the decay of a muon (u) to an electron (e-) (antiparticles are underlined and the symbol (v) represents a neutrino):

W-[u- (e+ x e-)] ---> vu + ve + e-

(Where the square brackets indicate the interior of (or the mediation of) the "W" IVB)

We see how natural a reaction this is when diagrammed via the catalytic action of the W- and a virtual electron-positron pair. The negative muon (u-) and positron (e+) simply cancel each other's opposite electric charges, which frees both their neutrinos (vu and ve), and forces the electron (e-) to become " real", as it no longer has an antiparticle annihilation partner. All the W has done is catalyze the reaction by bringing the muon (u-) and the virtual particle-antiparticle pair (e+ x e-) into intimate contact, where the charge cancellations and energy transfers can take place safely. Hence the "kissing box" of the IVBs is really a "conservation containment", which ensures that charge and energy transfers take place in a secure environment - a perfectly natural role in the well regulated and orderly conservation domain of spacetime.

 "One can only hope," Dr. Benway drawled, "that the Large Hardon Collider is used to excite particles beyond the kissing box and get them outside of what they would normally consider a secure environment."

This quasi-Burroughsian pastiche and interictal interlude is brought to you by:

Extra Medication For All!! shirts.

Cult of HTC Hero Commercials

As I wrote a couple of posts down, there's a remarkable similarity between the commercials for HTC's Hero and the latest ads from Scientology.  To give you all a better idea as to what I mean, I present a mashup of their commercials:

Unclear on the Concept

I got a letter informing me my truck has been included in the expanding set of vehicles covered by a recall.  It's in the category of "No reported problem of spontaneous automotive combustion, but it has the same faulty part that probably caused the 200 instances of minivans blowing up for no good reason."  I was warned not to park the truck anywhere near a building as the fire could start when the vehicle isn't running.

This, of course, tempted me to park it in the garage under my bedroom instead of the carport where I usually do.

The faulty part has to do with cruise control. I never could wrap my head around the concept of why something with manual transmission has cruise control in the first place, let alone how that combination works.

So I go to Ford's website to find the nearest dealer, who is a lot closer than Missoula and has  online appointment scheduling.  The VIN is enough to tell them I need the recall service.  Everything is working like it's supposed to.

Except after I click on submit I get an error message and am told to contact the service department.  You know, the people with whom I was attempting to make an appointment.

I was reminded of this Fail Blog entry.

Fortunately the only fail regarded something I wouldn't have missed, because I received a confirmation e-mail.

TV Show Math

I like cheesy, science fictiony TV shows.  They are often dismissed as formulaic.  True enough, as actual formulae are used.  Some examples:

Stargate Universe = (Stargate SG1 * (2000s era Battlestar Galactica - 1970s era Battlestar Galactica)) - Stargate Atlantis + The Starlost

Eureka = ((Original The Prisoner - 1960s Patrick McGoohan-era Secret Agent Man {a.k.a. Danger Man}) * Dexter's Laboratory) - Bill Nye the Science Guy

Sanctuary = ((Torchwood - Dr. Who) * Angel) + The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Buffy

Fringe = (X-Files - Glenn Beck)  * (All those Mirror Universe episodes from Deep Spare Nine / the original Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror" episode) + (Eureka / Mythbusters) - Twin Peaks

Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles = Terminator 2 * Firefly

Flash Forward = (Lost - Fantasy Island) * Quantum Leap

While on the subject of TV, am I the only person to have noticed the remarkable similarity between $cientolgy's "No Life" ads and the "You are different" ads for the HTC Hero?  It sounds like the same narrator, the ads are thematically similar, if not identical, and if the former were more colorful or the latter shot in muted tones they'd be practically indistinguishable.  Other than everyone using the newest tech toy in the HTC ad.

The HTC ads were done by DEUTCH LA.  I can't find who did the clams' ads.  Several people have found Boston's Co$ displayed as a favorite footprint about 3:20 into the original demo video.

HTC's Hero runs Google's Android software.  The last thing Google needs is to be associated with $cientology.  It's one thing when their ads were displaying all over Crazy Meds, because they have a right to advertise their sham 'religion' and Google shouldn't discriminate against them.  And if they want to pay me out of their antipsychiatry budget, I'm more than happy to take their money.  Getting any closer to the clams just makes you go "eeewwww" and not want to buy the phone.

As if I have any standing to write on that subject.  I rarely use my cell phone, and the most complicated thing I do with it is take a picture that I'll send to one person.  The only thing that keeps me from getting anything cheaper than what I have now is living just within range of Alltel's service.  And only Alltel's.

Any day now I'll start living in the 21st century.

But wait, there's less.

Yet another food-triggered aura last night.  I'm especially out of it today.  Late-night lorazepam tends to make the next day disappear.

The latest culprit: cloves.  Compared with nutmeg there's not as much written up on cloves in the world of epilepsy support & consumer-oriented information sites.  The big difference is nutmeg is often written up by itself, probably due to having psychoactive properties.  Cloves get lumped in with any foods that trigger allergies, either in someone's experience or information that's being collected by someone who may or may not publish.  The thing that bothers me the most about the foods cloves are grouped with is they are all high in salicylates.  I've already cooked the food-free diet, a.k.a. gluten, bean and corn-free, and very low-salicylate.  One can do only so much with approximately 24 items (although if it were just for me I could expand it to about 34).

As for PubMed, the only thing about foods of any kind triggering seizures had nothing to do with what the food is, just if it had pesticide and/or herbicide residue on it or not. As much as I like to blame chemical-addicted agribusiness for my problems, it's not a factor.  The spices in question aren't organic, but I've been eating food that is across the spectrum from certified with eco-Nazi standards of purity to "it qualifies as food because people eat it.  As do the animals they eat."  As for cloves, there are a bunch of articles on how cloves are great as an antimicrobial, an antifungal, a treatment for way-too-rough sodomy, and an ingredient in a nice smelling, newage spermicide.  And for every article about how wonderful cloves & clove oil are, there's one about how some idiot ingested too much and fried their liver.  Nothing about seizures, except as a symptom when some kid ate too many pumpkin squares or something.

Crashed

A man staged over 90 car crashes at the nexus of high-rises and roundabouts.  His attempt to redefine himself within the context of the modern landscape was thwarted by the more modern technology of omnipresent cameras that captured fragments of his identity.  Fragments now easily merged together into a pre-crash whole.

Amateurs using the staged crash in an attempt to alter identity or circumstances are bound to fail.  Parents and others have used staged automobile accidents for over half a century  to prevent accidents caused by reckless driving and/or driving while intoxicated.  Parents have tried to alter the circumstances of their childrens' deaths via staged accidents.  Instead of achieving the desired results, rumors of Miley Cyrus' and Emma Watson's deaths due to automobile accidents spread like wildfire.

This bit of minor psychosis  brought to you by:

I'm So Happy I Could Kill Myself shirts




Picture via The Barrage

Alternate History Cartography

I collect antique globes, atlases and maps.  At least I used to, when I had money to spend on stuff like that.  Now I just appreciate the ones I own.  There are two mutually exclusive criteria I have, overlapping with coin, stamp and those rare currency collectors, that make a globe, atlas or map a prize find.  The first is the item became obsolete quickly due to political changes; the best being an item that shows a nation-state which existed only for a brief time.  Choicest find: a sketch-map atlas published in 1939 by Oxford University with a map showing an independent Ruthenia / Carpatho-Ukraine during one of the two brief times after the Munich Pact of September 1938 that Czechoslovakia broke into three states.  The final time, ending with the Hungarian annexation of Ruthenia, the creation of the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia, and absorption of the rest of Bohemia and Moravia by Germany in March 1939 came a full day after Ruthenia's final time as an independent state.

I wish I could remember the name of the movie loosely based upon Ruthenia's numerous changes in political status and being passed around from country to country in the first half of the 20th century.  In the Austro-Hungarian Empire sometimes they were under Austrian rule, sometimes Hungarian.  Immediately after WWI Ruthenia was independent, then part of the short-lived West Ukranian Republic and other variations of the independent Ukraine that existed during the Russian Civil War.  Then part of Hungary.  Then it was part of Romania when the Romainians weren't satisfied with Transylvania alone and they invaded Hungary during the near-constant, internecine Balkan wars (of which WWI was essentially a supersized version).  Then they were part of Czechoslovakia under the theory that big countries kludged together (Yugoslavia & Czechoslovakia  in Europe) were needed to keep dickish countries like Germany and Hungary in line.  Then within the span of a few months Ruthenia was independent, annexed by Hungary, part of a truncated Czechoslovakia, independent again and part of Hungary until the end of WWII.  After that Ruthenia was annexed by the Soviet Union and became part of the Ukraine SSR with the typically Soviet name of Transcarpathian (Zakarpattia) Oblast.  It stayed with post-Soviet Ukraine and kept the name.

So finding an atlas with Ruthenia as a nation, and a National Geographic map showing it as part of Hungary but of questionable status, were pretty geektastic.

Now there's a  Ruthenian independence movement, but it's probably Russian-sponsored shit-stirring.

I also have a globe with an independent East Timor.  From the first time they were independent, between November 1975 and July 1976.

Those are my favorite examples of quickly obsolete items.  The other is the title of this entry.  Any map can be wrong, but there's a special kind of wrong that I really appreciate: mixing borders, existence of nation-states, etc. from wildly different times and the cartographer's imagination.  The sort of thing you might see in an alternate history book, except it wasn't supposed to be a fictional map.

Or: the map collector's version of an upside down plane on a stamp.

I bring this up because of a recent post on Catholic Gauze.  Apparently someone at USA Today's weather department is living in a parallel universe, as their version of the Middle East and surrounding area is nothing like it is today, or any time since forever.  Some of the same quirks also exist on their map of Africa.  They're just including or ignoring all sorts of events that happened in 1990s.  All those post-Soviet -stans came into existence in 1991-1992.  Eritrea became independent in 1993.  North and South Yemen united in 1990.  The territorial dispute between Chad and Libya ended in 1994.  The "neutral zones" between Saudi Arabia and Iraqi and Kuwait went away in 1991, and on and on.   Plus Uzebekistan reaches the Caspian Sea, but I'll give them some slack on that one since the Aral Sea, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists (shrinkage 1973 - 2000 shrinkage 2000 - 2009)and the Garabogazköl Gulf/Bay/Basin along the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea was dammed in 1980 and evaporated into a toxic plain of salt, so it didn't exist between 1984 and 1992, but has been there since.  Those sorts of changes to major physical features can really mess with the cartography of adjoining areas.  On USA Today's weather map of Asia Uzebekistan's border is correct.

I have a few mid- and late-19th century maps of Europe, published in the US, that show alternate histories, but that can be chalked up to incomplete information and/or racism.  There weren't that many people from the Balkans living here in the 1800s, and those who were for the most part lived in urban ghettos.  So as far as US schoolchildren and self-educating adults were concerned the Ottoman Turks had complete control over all of the Balkans well into the 1880s.

My favorite alternate history is from the universe of Ohio Art.  When I had the cash to collect globes I bought any Ohio Art globe I came across because they are always so freaking wrong.  And they're the only globes I've found that could be the basis for an alternate history work of fiction.  I had one as a kid and I'm so glad I had a real atlas.  I can't remember who gave the globe to me, but I do remember being told in a passive-aggressive way that pointing out all of the errors to the person who gave it to me wasn't nice.

Here are some pictures from the largest of the Ohio Art globes I have, and the only one I bought off of eBay.  WWII and the years immediately afterward weren't too kind to the Communists. Of the wackier aspects of the geo-political world of the early 1960s in the Ohio Art universe:

Wow, Germany got to keep a lot of territory, and West Germany is a lot bigger than East Germany.  Look how skinny Czechoslovakia is.  Ruthenia is part of Hungary (again) and Istria (the peninsula south of Trieste) is part of Italy.  There's plenty of bad drawing all over the place (e.g. Switzerland, France), but Luxembourg and Ireland came out rather well.  The small Ulster is a bonus for Ireland.  Unlike Viet Nam, but like Korea, Germany has a single capital.  These are details of something, but other than an anti-Communist mindset I can't figure out if it's anti-Slavic bigotry, crypto-Aryan propaganda, or if the cartographer really had some kind of alternate history scenario going on. 

More bad news for the Commies.  Either the Russo-Finnish war didn't happen, or Finland kicked their asses harder than in our timeline, because that's what Finland looked like after WWI, not WWII.  The Baltic States and an enlarged Ukraine have some kind of special autonomy.  While the US didn't recognize the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, prior to 1991 we didn't think the Ukraine was anything special.  Even if it did have a seat in the UN General Assembly prior to 1991.  The Baltic state capitals are indicated with stars while the capitals of most African nation-states aren't.

And oddest of all, an independent Tannu-Tuva.  Tuva was nominally independent between 1929 and 1944, and even then was a Soviet client state.  In our world it became part of the Soviet Union in 1944.  Tuva is a kind of Temporary Autonomous Zone, a Mecca for wildly diverse groups of people, including Caucasian Buddhists, World Music hipsters, and rabid philatelists.

If you think the Soviet Union had it bad, take a look at the People's Republic of China.  It's 1919 all over again!

I can't tell if Kashmir is represented as disputed territory or independent.  The cartographer certainly liked Pakistan more than India, as West Pakistan is almost as large as India.

Labrador: disputed territory between Quebec and Newfoundland, or autonomous region within Canada?  I know some Quebecois still haven't gotten over either Labrador being taken away or that boundary dispute.  You know, all that stuff that happened in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  The Canadians really needed to bring Newfoundland into the Dominion after WWII because baby seals don't grow on maple trees, eh?

The countries of Africa and South America are just badly drawn.  Really badly drawn, but there is no instance of alternate history scenarios on either continent.

At least the planets on the globe's base are in order, unlike another globe from the same period.  That J. Chien & Co. globe has a really nice, albeit quickly obsolete, representation of the world c. 1964.  It sits on a base with the planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter and Pluto.  OK, I can understand Earth being extraneous and a nonagon would be expensive and look weird to most people while an octagon can be pulled off the shelf.  But that order is unfathomable, especially since they put the distance from the sun with each planet. Talk about an alternate universe.

The funny thing is, I don't particularly like most alternate history fiction.  Go figure.

Pruning the Panoply

Blogrolls are limited to 125 entries.  I've spun off some of the entries from the Panoply of Humiliation etc. into a list of blogs dealing with the surreal, and deleted a couple that are unlikely to return.

Meanwhile an additional 25mg a day of Topamax is allowing me to drink caffeinated tea and work on crossword puzzles without an aura.  I might be able to be as partially functional as I had been a couple of weeks ago.