Tag: Virginia
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Divine Apartments
I can’t tell if I live in an area overflowing with geo-oddities or whether my personality reflexively uncovers unusual situations wherever I happen to locate myself. Would I be equally adept at mining unusual patterns in London, Toronto, Sydney or Dakar? Perhaps. I’ve argued before that weirdness exists everywhere. Even so, my home area provides…
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Iconic Views
Skip directly to the bottom if you want to be part of a little contest. Otherwise feel free to read through my blathering extended explanation of context for a few moments. I featured a nice Google Street View image of the historic Hume School in Arlington County, Virginia recently. It seemed familiar, and not because…
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A Tale of Three Ridges
I’m not sure if I’m totally captivated by Google’s ability to suggest plausible answers while I type a query. Sometimes it’s a shortcut, other times it’s amusing, but more often than not it’s annoying. I seem to enjoy the feature more in Google Maps. It seems to geo-locate based on IP address when making suggestions…
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All Those Modes of Transportation
I brought my elementary-aged son to “bring your child to work day” back in April. I wasn’t sure he was going to enjoy the event but he had a fine time. And I learned from it too. It was wonderful to see my very familiar office space through the eyes of someone who had never…
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Dueling Portmanteau Placenames
My recent article on Mexican borders visible on Street View reminded me of a situation that’s long fascinated me. It came to the forefront as I viewed this image: Can you find the border in this image? Sure you can. That’s a silly question. Calexico vs. Mexicali The rural area north of this amazingly stark…
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What’s “Almost Heaven?”
We examined a song containing a blatant geographic inaccuracy in a recent article, “In Them Old Cotton Fields.” I left a hint for readers when I stated that I too took offense at a song with an equally irritating error, one having to do with the Mountain State. Many of you probably knew the answer…
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Not Fusion, CONfusion
I remember reading through my mother’s old High School yearbook years ago when I was a child. I recall only one detail that has stuck with me ever since. The yearbook had a disproportionate number of advertisements sponsored by furniture stores that doubled as funeral parlors. I didn’t pay attention to the well-wishes of her…
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Farm to Market
I have food on my mind. It’s Thanksgiving morning here in the United States and food is a big part of that. I image we’ll have very few U.S. readers today. Most of them will be feasting on turkey, watching the American version of “football,” and getting mentally prepared to hit the shopping malls tomorrow…
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Revisiting the Swap
It’s not every day that I get an opportunity for a do-over. I was in Williamsburg, Virginia during the early part of this week. It’s so tantalizingly close to The Swap that I featured a few weeks ago. I travel to Williamsburg about once a year on business and I have mixed feelings about the…
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Tangier Island on ESPN
ESPN has been airing promotional videos featuring Tangier Island, a small marshy inhabited locale within Virginia’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay. The premise is that Tangier Island is the biggest (per capita) sports town in America. I’ve been getting some pretty impressive website traffic from Google as a result. For First Time Visitors: Welcome to…