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Baseball is the quintessential North American sport, as demonstrated by this map

The ‘bloodless’ Aroostook War is variously said to have cost the life of a cow, a pig, or a single U.S. private.

Given all the time and attention the Yemeni military has spent on the Arhab tribe recently, which we have followed here at Waq al-waq by also spending a great deal […]

Prester John as virtual as he was virtuous, the legend literally too good to be true.

Apart from being a past sponsor of international terrorism and the West’s new best friend in North Africa, Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi is also a crackpot dictator with the bizarrest […]

The Maine Solar System Model recreates the relative distances between the sun and planets along a stretch of U.S. Highway 1

Remarkably, Cuba leads the world (or at least those countries shown on this map) in the patients per doctor ratio.

Did we miss a utopia or avoid a disaster?

This isn’t a political, but a commercial world map: it specifies the six distinct global ‘DVD regions’ of the world. DVD is short for ‘digital video disc’, the successor to […]

n “(…) for the last two years, I’ve been taking pictures of Britain on world maps,” writes Ben Terrett, graphic designer and blogger at Noisy Decent Graphics. Well, not too bad, if that’s […]

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

Sprinkled throughout the city – but often poorly indicated – are dozens of Privately Owned Public Open Spaces

They could have made it more complex, but they would have had to try very hard

In its most recent issue, The New Yorker magazine revisits one of its most famous covers ever. Saul Steinberg’s cartoon on the front page of the 29 March 1976 issue […]

n . n Strange Maps is partial to a nice bit of comparative geography, as demonstrated by earlier posts like #101, #131, #377 or #390. The list is non-exhaustive, and […]

I learned a new word today, but the condition it describes has been with me for quite some time: cartocacoethes – the compulsion to see maps everywhere. More on that […]

This map renames American states as countries with similar GDPs. It gives you a sense of just how wealthy the United States is.

Is the Boss to Jersey what Joyce was to Dublin?

For me, this might be the original strange map. When I was a kid, I had the Spitting Image book that contained this map. I spent hours (well… whole quarters of hours) […]

I’m not in the habit of extensively revisiting strange maps already posted here, as there are so many more out there. But the map of the ‘US States Renamed For […]

The map on the bedroom wall of every teenage Bilderberger

1. Asphalt Maine n n Looking down upon the patched-up surface of an unnamed street, J. David Lovejoy couldn’t help noticing a remarkable example of accidental geography. The patch bears […]

There are a couple brief articles that an eruption has occurred near the border region of Cameroon and Nigeria – in the state of Benue, which is midway along of […]

Borders are to maps what icing is to cakes. Tracing their course between countries and across continents is a source of great enjoyment for the cartophile, as is contemplating their […]

This map excerpt of the environs of Jerusalem is strangely reminiscent of this one, showing Belgium partially submerged along ethnic lines. Both maps solve the seemingly intractible disputes inherent in […]

Even old New York / Was once New Amsterdam / Why they changed it I can’t say / People just liked it better that way – They Might Be Giants: […]

Not so much strange as just darn purty, this map of Newfoundland on a postage stamp, probably dating from before 1949, when it became a province of Canada (this happened […]

Pigs (or hogs, or swine, or Sus – the Latin name for the species) are  omnivorous mammals of Eurasian origin, closely related to hippopotami and generally more known for being tasty than clever […]

n n What is it with airlines and maps? Which part of ‘atlas’ don’t they understand? You’d think that, being the business of transportation, they’d get their distances and directions […]

Many New Yorkers feel their city is more than just the (self-proclaimed) capital of the world. They think it actually is most of the world, the rest of the planet […]