"Greenland is not for sale and will not be for sale, so you can forget about your plans for Greenland to become part of the USA."

"Nothing about us without us, and Greenland’s future is solely up to us. A majority does not want to become Americans, we do not want to be taken over by another country...."

Said Aaja Chemnitz, "a Greenlandic politician serving in the Danish Parliament," quoted in "Trump appoints Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland/The Danish territory has long been in the president’s sights. Trump said the Republican governor “understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security" (WaPo).

From the text of the article: "Trump has said repeatedly that the United States will 'get' Greenland, casting it as a national security objective for the U.S. His administration also covets Greenland for its untapped rare earth metals, an industry dominated by China globally. In April, The Washington Post reported that the White House was preparing an estimate of what it would cost the federal government to control Greenland as a territory."

"How big is Greenland?" — that question came up in a novel I'm reading. A child asks the question of her father who was telling her a story about the Greenlandic ice sheet melting and flooding the world and had said "Imagine, a slab of ice the size of Greenland!" The father "had no idea," only that Greenland "was notorious for being smaller than it looked on a Mercator projection, but he felt sure it was large, given that its melting would cause global sea levels to rise by something like seven meters."

The WaPo article offers an answer to the question: Greenland is "around three times the size of Texas."

"How about a map-a-loopy? Get a real paper road map. Pick some place to start and another place to end, and..."

"... take the most tertiary, wayward, roundabout farm roads, or tiniest neighborhood street to get there. You will be pretty surprised to spend a memorable hour or two admiring unknown, undiscovered corners, big trees, obscure roads, streets, byways and dirt lanes."

Writes Rabble in the comments at the NYT article, "Land Snorkeling? Townsizing? A User’s Guide to the Latest Travel Lingo. Here are eight terms, some brand-new, others recently resurfaced, that match today’s travel trends."

As you will suspect from Rabble's comment and even without it, the 8 terms the NYT has found are pretty dumb. "Townsizing" is going to a town instead of a big city. "Land snorkeling" is walking about looking at various things. I approve of these practices, and if a cute word encourages anybody, fine.

Humor prompt.

I found that on Facebook, where it has thousands of comments, and they are all what you think.

"The real fun... begins when you start to use Google Maps in multiplayer mode: building shared lists of saved locations with and for others..."

"... remotely populating their digital landscape with little pins. It’s a simple action that conjures an increasingly rare sense of virtual care. Populating a shareable map is an exercise in memory. I started making shared maps as a way of staying in touch with faraway friends and as a key to my own psycho-geography, doled out to give dear ones a glimpse into my world.... When my German bestie told me she was planning a trip to New York... I nudged her to my favorite haunts; hearing her report back, I felt as if my past were intertwined with her present."

From "I Was Lonely In a New City. This Tech Trick Helped Me Belong/There is a comfort in having somewhere tried and true to go, especially when you’re a stranger in a foreign city" (NYT).

I looked up the Celtic Sea, because it came up in my readings... and I was entranced....

.... by the reviews people had given it in Google Maps. To quote 4:

1. "It was wetter than I expected. Lots of fish swimming about under the surface, if you like that sort of thing."

2. "Very good sea. Compared to other seas, lakes and natural reservoirs it is undoubtedly superior. However, looking at the oceans, we need to admit that Celtic sea is slightly inferior. Nevertheless, it is a great representative of a sea.

3. "Against all the odds it does appear to be a genuine sea! I can confirm the presence of both waves and sky, with the correct one being above the other. Very tricky to get around if you don't have a boat. Minus 1 star."

4. "Lovely spot of water."

***

I was reading "Colonel Roosevelt" (commission earned). This part:

Heard just now: the rain drops became tiny ice pellets.

It's a gentle transition, barely audible.

Here's how it looked on the radar map:

The cloud cover is 100%, so I'm skipping the sunrise — 7:05 today — and perhaps waiting for some of the 5 to 8 inches of snow to prettify the landscape. It isn't cold. It's 34°, but it's windy and the National Weather Service is saying the snow will be "wet" and "heavy." So it's a good time to get clobbered by a falling tree or tree branch. 

I'm only noticing now — and only because "Madison" is trending on Twitter — that Joe Biden flew into Madison yesterday.

A line of nearly 20 cars waited to catch a glimpse of Air Force One Wednesday morning as it landed in Madison. https://t.co/EWAAtG2gNe

— NBC15 News (@nbc15_madison) February 9, 2023

Waiting on the tarmac for @POTUS! pic.twitter.com/1n9xcnhEfs

— Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway (@SatyaForMadison) February 8, 2023

The day after the State of the Union, President Biden landed in Madison, Wisconsin and visited the Laborers' Union. Hell yeah he did. Thanks for coming to the best district out there (WI-02) @POTUS pic.twitter.com/NaOFrW7wK0

— Dane Varese (@DaneVarese) February 9, 2023

I wrote "flew into Madison" because the plane landed in Madison, but the event was at the LiUNA Laborers' Training Center in DeForest. 

Know your Madison-area landscape:

"I’m attracted to things like pointillism or a Jasper Johns ‘numbers’ work because they come out of breaking something down into its components, like bytes or numbers..."

Said the late Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft, quoted in "Opening Paul Allen’s Treasure Chest/It’s been a closely guarded secret which masterworks in the Microsoft co-founder’s collection will be auctioned at Christie’s in November. Here, highlights of a billionaire’s bounty" (NYT).

This isn't a Jasper Johns "numbers" work, but it is the Jasper Johns in the soon-to-be-auctioned collection. It's called "Map":

I'm disgusted by the burgeoning "Denier" rhetoric.

Like this, at FiveThirtyEight this morning:

It's reminiscent of the Covid maps that have beset us for the past 3 years. Now, the disease is located in human minds, and we our encouraged to view our fellow Americans as contagion. This is not a good way to do politics. It's actively evil and far more dangerous and destructive than feeling skeptical about an election that took place 2 years ago. 

The election season begins officially today, the day after Labor Day, and if this is the way it's launching, what a horrorshow! 

Click in then click on the green dots to listen to the radio stations of the world.

Incredibly cool!

The more religious of the murals of State Street.

"It was only natural for me to document my experience. I decided to map the four walls I was confined in and see where that took me creatively."

Said Gareth Fuller, quoted in "What happens when a map artist goes into quarantine" (CNN). Go to the link to see both his very elaborate artwork depicting cities and his cartoon-style mapping of his own little place. Both levels of art are good, and it resonates with me because it fits my favorite abstract category big and small.

"U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman of the District of Columbia said Trump’s rhetoric 'violates all recognized democratic norms'..."

"... during a speech at the annual Judge Thomas A. Flannery Lecture in Washington on Wednesday. 'We are in unchartered territory,' said Friedman, 75, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. 'We are witnessing a chief executive who criticizes virtually every judicial decision that doesn’t go his way and denigrates judges who rule against him, sometimes in very personal terms. He seems to view the courts and the justice system as obstacles to be attacked and undermined, not as a coequal branch to be respected even when he disagrees with its decisions.'"

WaPo reports.

How do you get to be a federal judge and think the expression is "unchartered territory"? That's a written speech too (presumably). Did he visualize some entity that issues charters authorizing people to speak about the courts in a particular way? You don't need a license to speak in the United States, and to require one would, ironically, violate our norms. The expression is "uncharted territory," which would simply mean that Trump is venturing into a new area of speech that we haven't previously explored and therefore have not mapped. An uncharted territory is risky...



... but it could be great. The United States began as an uncharted territory....



... and I'm glad we're here and we have maps now and we are free enough that we don't need authorities to charter us.

Now, I agree with the idea that Trump's speech about law is unconventional, but what determines that he has violated all recognized democratic norms? It's often said that the judiciary is the least democratic part of the government, that it's countermajoritarian. So what are the norms of democracy that say a President should not criticize the courts?! You might just as well call this purported norm a norm of anti-democracy.

Anyway... the weasel word is "recognized." It takes all the oomph out of "all." Trump's speech about judges violates "all recognized democratic norms." Who are the recognizers? The judges? Judges certainly have a role talking about democratic norms, which are often part of the determination of the scope of the judicial role: Judges refrain from doing what is left to the processes of democracy. But part of democracy is speech about government — which includes the judges — and that speech is not limited to flattering and deferring to them. It does not violate the norms of democracy to criticize and attack judges.

Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.

This morning, I'm pairing the famous RFK quote with the coat of arms of Greenland.

ADDED: Picture the map of the world with Greenland as the 51st state:



What a legacy for the real-estate mogul!

AND: If what they're saying about global warming is true, Greenland is the place to which the entire population of the United States could relocate. If we bought Alaska from Russia, why can't we buy Greenland from Denmark? We're already using Greenland for military purposes — there's an air force base — and our military protects Europe....

ALSO: The Mercator projection is like the wide-angle lens in real-estate photos on Zillow.

MORE: From "Trump Eyes U.S. Buying Greenland" in The Wall Street Journal:

The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer's imagination, according to people familiar with the discussion, who said Mr. Trump has, with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest in buying the ice-covered autonomous Danish territory....

Some of his advisers have supported the concept, saying it would be a good economic play, two of the people said, while others dismissed it as a fleeting fascination. It is also unclear how the U.S. would go about acquiring Greenland even if the effort were serious.

It's a great topic for conversation. There's even potential for racial politics, I think. Trump seems to love the Nordic places (in contrast to "shithole countries")?

With a population of about 56,000, Greenland is a self-ruling part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and while its government decides on most domestic matters, foreign and security policy is handled by Copenhagen....

U.S. officials view Greenland as important to American national-security interests. A treaty between Denmark and the U.S. gives the U.S. military virtually unlimited rights in Greenland at America's Thule Air Base. Located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it includes a radar station that is part of a U.S. ballistic missile warning system.

The U.S. has sought to derail Chinese efforts to gain an economic foothold in Greenland. The Pentagon worked successfully in 2018 to block China from financing three airports on the island.

People outside the White House have described purchasing Greenland as an Alaska-type acquisition for Mr. Trump's legacy, advisers said...

Greenland relies on $591 million of subsidies from Denmark annually, which make up about 60% of its annual budget, according to U.S. and Danish government statistics. Greenland is culturally and politically linked to Europe. Following World War II, the U.S. under President Harry Truman developed a geopolitical interest in Greenland and in 1946 offered to buy it from Denmark for $100 million. Denmark refused to sell.

Truman tried to buy it! Trump endeavors to close the deal that was Truman's! If Greenland is draining $591 million a year from Denmark, they should pay us for taking it off their hands and taking care of it well and preventing China from acquiring dominance. But if China is so ambitious in Greenland, Denmark should wait for a good bidding war between the world's 2 superpowers. And every year gets us closer to the global warming disaster that will make Greenland the most desirable place on earth. In that light, Denmark should hold on as the landlord, charging exorbitant rents and until things become so catastrophic that Greenland is snatched away from them by military force.

At a dinner with associates last spring, Mr. Trump said someone had told him Denmark was having financial trouble over its assistance to Greenland, and suggested that he should consider buying the island, according to one of the people. "What do you guys think about that?" he asked the room, the person said.

The person described the question less as a serious inquiry than as a joke meant to indicate "I'm so powerful I could buy a country," noting that since Mr. Trump hadn't floated the idea at a campaign rally yet, he probably wasn't seriously considering it.

The person believed the president was interested in the idea because of the island's natural resources and because it would give him a legacy akin to President Dwight Eisenhower's admission of Alaska into the U.S. as a state....

PLUS: Kudos to the stable genius if he floated this idea intending to get his antagonists to declare it stupid and knowing that on further examination it would actually make enough sense to intrigue us to talk about this rather that whatever the hell we were talking about before this came up. I see WaPo is getting ahead of the curve with "Trump reportedly wants to buy Greenland. So did the Truman administration" (by Antonia Noori Farzan):

"New York City is rife with scents that make it a diverse 'smellscape'..."

According to "New York Today: Smelling Your Way to Work" (NYT).

On one recent work-bound walk to the F train, I was puzzled to meet a half dozen separate smells along just one block. Garbage, which seemed peculiar on a decently clean sidewalk; skunk, which left me wondering how prevalent the animals are in the city; cookies, which nearly caused me to detour; and burned rubber, then grass, then dish soap.

The scents may come from miles away, according to Kate McLean, a Ph.D. candidate at the Royal College of Art in London, whose research has focused on mapping urban “smellscapes.”...

She noted... subway stations and pretzel stands... [and] a composite of fried garlic, wheat grass and tarmac.... “The smell from the sidewalk, and the reflective qualities of the tarmac, and garlic — it’s very, very New York. It’s healthy living alongside the traffic alongside the heat.”

McClean conducts "smellwalks" for tourists. And here's one of her "smellmaps."

Puzzlingly violent illustration on NYT op-ed criticizing Trump's judicial nominees.

What is this supposed to mean?



I haven't read the column yet. What I see in the the illustration (which is by Chris Kindred) is a large hammer — a judge's gavel — slamming into a man's face and cracking it up. The cracked up face seems to have been fragmented even before the hammer hit. Perhaps the pre-smash fragment is intended to look like the state of Kentucky. The man seems to have the Confederate stars and bars in one eye, and he has some other symbol in front of his other eye, perhaps crossed swords or some kind of cross. I simply do not understand connecting the idea of face-shattering with this issue. Who is supposed to be wielding the gavel?

The column is titled "William Barber II: Trump’s Terrible Choice for Judge," so I'm guessing the man with the shattered face is William Barber II, and the idea is that he's a Trump nominee and he's terrible, presumably because of something connected to the Confederacy. I suppose the column argues that he shouldn't be confirmed, but does that mean he should be bashed in the face with a hammer? Why would you want to associate your opinion with murderous violence?

Now, who's the author of this piece? Oh! It's William Barber II. He's not "Trump’s Terrible Choice for Judge." Somebody else is. Ha ha. Eventually, I'm going to read this piece, but I've gone from being outraged by the depiction of violence to amused by the horribly ambiguous headline.

All right. I'm reading it. The "terrible" nominee is Thomas Alvin Farr, and he's from North Carolina, so that shape really is a state, and the shattering interfered with my state-shape perceptions. The "tails" — the unshattered parts — are very similar. The front ends differ, but North Carolina is the one with the straight-edge on top. Kentucky has the straight-edge on the bottom.

Barber connects Farr to Jesse Helms and Helms to "white supremacist causes." Helms was a Senator from 1973 to 2003, and you can look at his long career and pick out some terrible things (and also some good things), but the question now is what do we think of Farr?

When Mr. Farr graduated from law school, Mr. Helms and [lawyer Thomas] Ellis brought him into their fold. Mr. Farr joined the small law firm of Maupin, Taylor & Ellis, where all of the named partners were openly hostile to civil rights....

Most recently, Mr. Farr has carried on Mr. Helms’s legacy by helping North Carolina’s Republican-led Legislature create and defend in court discriminatory voting restrictions and electoral districts, which were eventually struck down by numerous federal courts that found them to be motivated by intentional racism. In fact, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that the state’s 2013 voter suppression law was aimed at blacks with “almost surgical precision.”

Put on that abstract level, it does indeed sound terrible, but a balanced presentation would specify that the subject is mostly voter I.D. laws, which have been upheld by the Supreme Court. It will be interesting to see whether the confirmation hearings on Farr will rest heavily on the voter I.D. issue. Polls have long shown that the great majority of Americans support voter I.D. laws. But you can tell all these people they're racists — deplorables! — and see how that works.

Senators from both sides of the aisle must condemn the experience Mr. Farr brings with him... Every senator who condemned the racism on display in Charlottesville must vote to prevent it from having power in the federal judiciary.

So the illustration means that the Senate holds the gavel and it "must" smash Thomas Alvin Farr in the face with it. I understand it now. It's very crude, violent, and ugly. And somebody at the NYT decided it belonged on that column.

Digitizing a very large book — the Klencke Atlas

See the images here — at the British Library website.

The Klencke Atlas is one of the world's biggest: it measures 176 x 231 cm [5'9"x 6'3") when open.

It takes its name from Joannes Klencke, who presented it to Charles II on his restoration to the British thrones in 1660. Its size and its 40 or so large wall maps from the Golden Age of Dutch mapmaking were supposed to suggest that it contained all the knowledge in the world.

It was the largest atlas in the world until some Australian publisher made a larger atlas in 2012.

"It's all about U."

A map of the world showing all the countries' slogans.

Some sound like a guy answering the phone: "Yes, it's Jordan."

Some sound like they were written by a cow: "Much mor."

Some lie so blatantly that it works as a cynical joke: "Always beautiful." "You are invited."

At the top of the NYT this morning: Fanciful maps depicting 2 Americas — a GOP-majority America as a landmass with lakes and seas in places that voted majority Democratic...

... and a Democratic-majority America that is a collection of big and small islands in the waters of GOP-voting places with names like Old Glacier Gulf, High Plains Sea, and Great American Ocean.

On the first map, I'm in Madison Lake, and in the second, I'm on an island they didn't bother to label with a name. Madison Island, I presume.

The text around these elaborate maps begins: "For many Americans, it feels as if the 2016 election split the country in two. To visualize this, we took the election results and created two new imaginary nations by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas."

Well, that's not how it feels in Madison. The 2016 election didn't do that to us. We've been proudly envisioning Madison as its own special island since at least 1978, when the Republican Lee S. Dreyfus,  running for governor, called Madison "30 square miles surrounded by reality.” Dreyfus, who won, didn't mean it as a compliment, but Madsonians loved the phrase, and in 2013, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin proposed it as the city's official motto — with a slight update —  "77 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality."

“It’s a statement about who we are,” he said.

The decision will probably take a series of meetings, Soglin said, seemingly half joking and half serious.

“This is Madison.”

It almost became the official motto, failing in the City Council by a vote of 10-9. Some people thought it might be perceived as an insult, but Soglin and many others thought it was quite positive in a self-deprecating, hip way.

In January 2015, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker used the familiar Wisconsin phrase in a jab at Washington DC:

"For a lot of folks here in our nation's capital in Washington it's kind of a dome.... In fact, I like to call it 68 square miles surrounded by reality.... What I see in the states and from people in this country outside of Washington is a craving for something new, something fresh, something dynamic, instead of the top-down, government-knows-best approach that we’ve seen in Washington."

I don't think Walker was imagining Trump as the way the people would satisfy that craving for "something fresh, something dynamic," but you can see in Walker's words a description of "this country" that corresponds to the NYT's first map, the one with 80% of the landmass. We here in Madison had long taken ourselves out of that mass. We were happy and willing to locate ourselves outside of reality. The NYT can portray us as a big lake, but that would never be our self-image, because we are a city of full of lakes. We saw ourselves as not even here at all, unreal.

That's what I've lived around for the last 3 decades. But, you know, there were still 23% of us in this county (Dane County) who voted for Donald Trump. And I bet there are few counties that were more skewed than that. So lefties and righties do live together. You have to choose to want to think of America as 2 countries. You can choose unreal if it suits your post-election freakout needs. It's a free country. A country called the United States.

Norway will not give Finland a mountain for its birthday.

It's Finland's 100th birthday next year, and there has been a social media campaign to get Norway to give Finland the summit of Halti mountain, which is already partly in Finland, with the summit just 66 feet inside of Norway. It would hardly change the border at all to redraw the map to put the summit on the Finnish side.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Norwegian constitution bars giving up any territory and the Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said no to the cute birthday idea.

I made a screen grab from Google maps: