The rough beauty of the American West seems as far as you can get from the polished corridors of power in Washington DC.

n Genetically modified crops are controversial and indeed have been banned in several locations because of concerns that they may cause unintended, as yet unforeseen and potentially hazardous consequences. These […]

“With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self portrait on our planet,” writes Swedish artist Erik Nordenankar on his website for the project, appropriately […]

n This is a print ad for a Dutch brand of ice coffee, the slogan of which is: ‘The Ice Cold Coffee Kick For On the Road’. The drink’s interest […]

n The Eurovision Song Contest proves that H.L. Mencken’s famous dictum about quality standards in the US media – "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" […]

The title of Daniel Mansfield’s email was ‘Cheese Map of Canada’, so I immediately thought it would be a variation on the bread map of France (described earlier on this blog […]

“Heaven is a place,” sang the Talking Heads, “where nothing ever happens.” Not so in this version of the Afterlife. This is what Heaven might have looked like in the […]

To the right of this postcard, a romantic Germanic warrior (if that isn’t an oxymoron) anachronistically admires a postcard-romantic German village from what looks to be around the 18th or […]

As insolvable problems go, it’s right up there with attempts to square the circle. Try as you might, it is impossible to render a three-dimensional object (the Earth, say) on […]

They even made it through the Northwest Passage

Many don't believe they exist - but this is where gnomes may be found hiding

The floorplan was “drawn from notes taken while reading all 60 Sherlock Holmes stories twice in a row“

In 1852, when New Mexico was at its newest, the territory bearing that name was more than double the size of the eponymous present-day state. Of the many changes that […]

“On a recent trip to Taiwan, I purchased this bottle opener at the Taipei 101 building (technically still the tallest building in the world until the Burj Dubai opens),” writes […]

n Well, the jury is in. The country with the most functional geography is… France. As proved by this diagram, France’s jagged, hexagonal shape makes it the ideal, multiple-use household […]

n Ay caramba! Absolut Vodka has found a surefire way to put its US sales figures in a downward spiral. This map, used in a Mexican ad campaign, shows what […]

At some point early in the previous century, island nations particularly were gripped with air raid angst. The relatively new threat of airborne destruction was especially poignant for countries that […]

As any journalist knows, news has to be about people – they either make it, or are affected by it. No people, no news. It therefore stands to reason that […]

n It’s déjà vu all over again. Post #163 of this blog (d.d. Aug 5, 2007) dealt with a secretive plan by the European Union to carve up the United […]

n n People of a very religious disposition have been known to see the face of Jesus in a slice of burnt toast, or the Virgin Mary’s silhouet in a […]