Puzzling

National Geographic Online has atlas puzzles - very, very cool! Addictive but in a good way. Go jigsaw your little heart out! I am not to blame for lost hours of productivity.

Look Now Look All Around

Clearly I was going to go see something that City Paper described as “an elusive little show” about mapping. And I did. “Look Now Look All Around” is at the Maryland State Arts Council offices on West Ostend Street. Cool stuff – I especially liked the conversational maps by Emily Hunter. (hey… is this the Emily Hunter from Maryland Art Place?) Art meets language at the corner of Mapping and Interpretation. Nice!

Where in the World is…?

A Friend Of A Friend sent me this photo. (My reputation as Her Majesty is spreading; I’m not sure if I’m flattered or a little bit creeped out.) My FOAF’s family has a wall-mounted map in their house where they plot every place they’ve been -- one color pin for trips where FOAF goes alone, another color for where Mrs. FOAF has been, and a third color for where they have been with their little FOAF kid-lings. Cool idea… and lucky kids! Look at all those pins in the Caribbean and Europe.

Down to the Wire

You know by now that I’m not the craft type. But I’ll make an exception – when it’s a cool map. Like these, made by “The Wire Lady” Elizabeth Berrian. Suitable for hanging.

Never Lost

The guy who helps me at my neighborhood Kinko’s has a tattoo of Poland on his arm. It got me thinking… and you know what that means…. Check these out

Ouch. But very cool.

But ouch!

Day and Night

If you’re reading this in, say, Helsinki, and it’s oh, let’s say 9 pm here in Baltimore, then you should be in bed, fast asleep. It’s 4 in the morning there, nuthead! How do I know? Here’s how.

Raise Your Hand

So here’s a neat thing… the Hand Drawn Map Association! www.handmaps.org (Who knew?!) What a way cool idea – a repository of, you guessed it, hand-drawn maps. I love it. I’m in. (see above: showing my mother how to get to Holy Frijoles in Hampden)

The Karmphleuterstam Provinces?

Or a map depicting the political divisions of Traignothingham following the Mreptipol uprising? The topography of Ghreishenstat? Geothermographical waves in Qarestinen following the 2001 hurricane?

Nope. Just the bark of a tree at Pompeii. (I found this photo I took many years ago while I while organizing my pics last night.)

Let’s Map Some Trees

Hey tree huggers: this Saturday is the opening event for the Urban Forest Project here in B’More. There are all these really cool designy banners being put up all over the city that celebrate trees and a driving tour (map above) where you can check them out. Here are the detes. I may check out the party Saturday at “the Beach” at Hopkins… free bands, why not?

Maps in Clay! (Who Knew?)

I’ve never been one for molding things out of clay. After all, I AM her majesty. (Plus, I once took a pottery class and let’s just say things came out somewhat bumpy and lumpy… which made me grumpy.) But I am definitely pro-looking-at-people’s-work-who-are- sculpturally-inclined. And combine that with something about maps, and I’m there!

This past weekend I checked out another Baltimore Festival of Maps exhibition, Terra Incognita at Baltimore Clayworks. Rebecca Harvey, the awesomely mappy curator of the exhibit, wrote in something I saw “ I am interested in looking at the work of these artists in terms of mapping, in expanding the definition to include the abstraction of form and meaning, in a stripping away to uncover meaning. Can a map be a line, a pattern, a series of objects? How do we map the unknown? ” A woman after my own heart!

The exhibit has a little bit of everything, from colorful vases to circles filled with red clay (you know, like dirt) to shiny dinosaurs with their heads in the clouds. Very, very cool. Check out the exhibit for yourself at Clayworks’ online gallery. (You really should come to Baltimore for all this, my friends. You think I’m just going to keep filling you in on all the mappiness going on here. Well… maybe.)

I See London

I’ve only been to London once and I am not planning on going any time soon. I don’t know anyone in London. And frankly, I don’t even know what most of what the maps are showing -- but this is waaaaaaaay cool. A University College researcher used the names of registered London voters to map the ethnicity of the city based on another researcher’s probability of what ethnicity the name was. (Get it?) (My people live north of central London.)

The map is also a cool way to check out lots of other way cool stuff that I don’t really know what it is but it’s still way cool. You can see the real routes of the London subway overlayed on the real city, crime, poverty, housing costs… neat-o!

See the Walters Exhibit from Your Barcalounger!

Just in case you’re not in Baltimore, or near Baltimore, or coming to Baltimore (c’mon – it’s a nice place!) … you can still have a guided tour of the maps exhibit at the Walters Art Museum. Check out the YouTube videos with the curator Will Noel. Not quite the real thing but unless you’re coming to Charm City, you can sorta kinda get a sense of the exhibit. And it’s not so bad listening to Will’s oh-so-sexy voice of Noel wax prolific about things like cholera and Inuits, and say things like “the oldest map – evah!”

Ah-Choo(se a Map)

Did you miss me? Her Majesty has been sneezing up a royal storm and coughing up ye annual royal phlegm the past few days. I’ve been a little under the weather and off the map. Not my favorite time of year. … except it gave me an excuse to do this:

The American Lung Association’s allergy map.

Check out the location of you favorite type of pollen (I’m more of a Betula Populifolia gal).

Who knew – sneeze fetishes! Had I known, I would have been the belle of the ball this week.

Happy AF Day

And I don’t mean Abercrombie & Fitch! (I’m not that kind of princess).

It’s April Fools Day, which reminded me of one of my favorite maps - the “View of the World From 9^th Avenue” from the New Yorker. (Is it a cartoon? is it a map?... does it really matter?)

That reminded me of the “New Yorkistan” map from the New Yorker.

Here’s an interesting article about this genre of map.