I discovered a new blog today: Strange Maps. I’m adding it to my list of favorites.

A few samples:

• The South Shall Snack Again, showing that Mississippi is the fattest state in the union.
• Praise the Lord and Pass the Dictionary, a linguistic map of Europe published in 1730, with samples of the Lord’s prayer in many different languages.
• North America, the Balkans Version, interesting in part because I’ve been listening to Simon Winchester’s, “The Fracture Zone” about the Balkans. BTW, I like the descriptions of the terrain in the beginning of the book. It was the sort of thing that made me want to go visit someday, by bicycle if possible.
• Hip to Be Square: the Land Ordinance of 1787. When I’m bicycling to historical sites, I’m always going with maps showing the way the land is divided into townships and sections.

Speaking of townships, when I’m riding an east-west road and come to a jog in the road, like the one in this photo where the east-west roads don’t quite line up, I check to see if it’s a township boundary. Usually it is. (Note the van in front of the house in the background. It’s stopped at a stopsign that ought to have been directly opposite the stopsign by my bicycle. In this case the mis-match is substantial.

Those things happened a lot at township boundaries when the land was divided up into square-mile sections. Sometimes the east-west lines just didn’t line up.

Jogs in the north-south roads could be places of correction for the curvature of the earth. But on east-west roads there are no such corrections.

I like to think that back in the 1820s, some surveyor’s lines were off slightly due to a pesky mosquito while taking a sighting, or a piece of twig caught in the chain, or whatever, and we’re still living with the results today.