Here and There

I want an app that speaks Google Maps directions, much the same way most in-car GPS devices speak to you. Well, maybe not in so annoying a manner.

It could just read each list item on a set of directions, and move to the next item once you reach that point.

I would be willing to pay for this app, perhaps as much as $20. I haven’t bought a single app yet, mostly cuz I don’t care that much, but also because I don’t have a lot of room in my budget for them.

This dream app, however, I would spring for.

Let’s see, over at Fox Whatever-the-Hell-Kinda-Channel and in the general right-wingnut-osphere, over the course of the campaign season, Barack Obama has been portrayed as a Muslim, a Marxist, an America-hating, arugula-loving, fresh-out-of-water radical who can’t bowl and who is married to a Black Panther who wants to eat your babies.

But John McCain thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border.

He kinda reminds me of Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, who gave this eloquent retort to a question about geography:

Three out of four post headline words are plural. Rad.

Okay, while I’m dorking out, how the hell did I miss this? I feel like my sweetheart did something really awesome, won a Pulitzer or something, and I wasn’t informed.

Anyway, yes, the Goog has election results. You can view results by state and many other criteria.

Oh, and it’s a Google Gadget, so you can add it to your page. Which I may just do …

Okay, everyone and their mother is posting this story from my employer on why pizza in San Francisco sucks so hard.

I came to SF from NYC eight years ago, steeped in pizza lore. I’m all Napoli and New York. Screw Sicily and Chicago.

But I must say that you just have to suck it up and acclimate. Joe Brown, my friend, my colleague, you live here now. True, New York is home, and please, relish its cuisine as you wish. I still dream about Texas soul food, Mexican food, and outdoor barbeques, all of which are attempted here in the frigid to luke warm Bay Area.

But I’ve learned to love certain efforts at pizza out here. Namely, Pauline’s and Little Star, Delfina Pizza, and (as Joe mentions in the article), Tomasso’s. There’s also Lane Splitter in the East Bay. And props to Arinell (SF and Berkeley). It’s all different, but it’s good.

And for the record: as far as the pie goes, Little Star thin is the best we’ve got out here.

Heading out to a small town near Sacramento for a port and chocolate tasting today. I wondered if I could call up directions on my iPod Touch while connected to a network, but then keep those directions when I was offline. Sure enough, it worked. So now I’ve got a trusted little navigator to ride with me (in addition to my human and canine companions), giving me directions in step-by-step format.

It looks like the device stores the map data only in each frame, analogous to step of the directions. When you try to zoom out, you lose map data. But for something as specified as this, I don’t really need to see the back roads of Iowa, so oh well.

Also, as wireless internet becomes more widespread, the ability to home in on another network while on the road will only get easier and easier, so that, say, if there’s a change of plans, or I want to take another route, I would be able to access Google Maps again.

Google Maps for iPhone/iPod Touch is probably my favorite of the new suite of applications for those devices.

Last June, I wrote about a major shortcoming of the USPS website. Well, not sure how long this has been around, but it looks like the need has been satisfied. May you never be ignorant of where the nearest dropbox is.

By Slice, the pizza blog, courtesy of Kottke.

Ran across an item in the news yesterday, a study showing that the number one state in the US where languages go to die is Oklahoma. At first, I thought, Well, wow. If we needed proof that that part of the country was a cultural vacuum, now we have it.

But on second thought, the distinction is a rather dubious one.

Here’s what I mean: In order for a culture (or parts therein) to completely absorb those that would attempt to assimilate with it, it must be powerful. For Oklahoma and Oklahomans to be better at killing off languages other than “Oklahoman English,” they must kick a lot of language ass. Hats off, Okies.

Exactly what Google’s founders did, announced today.

Now there’s Statetris, the perfect game for geography nerds cum puzzle lovers.

Enjoy “wasting” your time …

This is one of those things I could stare at for hours:

* My mom, fresh from a trip to Denali National Park, informed me very matter-of-factly the other night that “reindeer and caribou are the same animal.” Whoa, wait right there. When you say, “animal,” do you mean species, mom? “Well, the way it was explained to us was, a caribou is a nondomesticated reindeer.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, reindeer are domesticated? Reindeer actually exist? “Look it up. I’m just the messenger.”

Sure enough, when you wiki “caribou,” you’re lead to the entry for “reindeer,” whereupon you’re informed that they are members of the same family, and that, yes, mom, reindeer are domesticated caribou. Moose are members of the Cervidae family as well.

Here’s the rub, though: deer deer (think Bambi) is composed of the entire family Cervidae, which includes brockets, pudus, reindeer/caribou, and moose. Wow.

* I recall hearing something about this before (maybe on my parents’ last visit, as they love to tout all things Texas), but Fort Worth, my hometown, is experiencing a boom these days thanks largely to the discovery of natural gas in something called the Barnett Shale formation, which the city was built atop. Apparently the discovery, coupled with a rather new ability to drill horizontally, is making a lot of Texans rich.

* The theme here is “Mom Told Me So.” Last night over drinks at the splendorous San Francisco Hyatt, she told me about some catholic-priest-marriage-loophole, wherein a married Episcopalian minister can convert to Catholicism and stay married!!!

It’s a tough one to verify, but here are some clues.

* Courtesy daring fireball, the itso. (love it)

* I grew up wondering exactly what “gig ‘em” meant, in the sense of the Texas A&M sports slogan, “Gig ‘em, Aggies.” Mom did the favor of explaining, by way of dropping a “TCU rules” reference in there, that the term was coined during a football game between A&M and TCU, in which Aggie fans told their team to “gig ‘em,” a reference to a method of killing frogs. Yes, TCU’s mascot is the frogs.

* Sorry to incur another sports reference here, but I also learned the origin of the name of my college’s mascot, Bevo. Wiki dispels what was discussed last night, that some time way back University of Texas mascot (a longhorn bull) was stolen by students of the then-named Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. He was branded “13-0,” which was the score by which A&M beat UT years before. UT students then got the longhorn bull back and changed the brand to “Bevo.” Crazy? Dumb? Yes, yet I’m interested.

I know I’m wrong. I must be wrong. I’m usually wrong, after all.

But last night on the commute home, I randomly started wondering whether Iraq sits to the north, south, or close to (on) the equator.

When I got home, the first place I sought my answer was, naturally, Google Earth, admittedly one of the coolest/dorkiest applications out there.

But damn me if I could find a way to view the equator on the gad-blasted thing. I mean, Iraq, that was easy. I just typed the country’s name into the application’s search field and hit enter.

Then I scrolled through the different layers offered by Google Earth, and lo and behold, no equator.

Someone help me solve this? Surely the best app ever has an equator feature? I did manage to find this, a great 3D model of the equator. But I have to imagine there’s a default-worthy feature that would include lines of latitude and longitude, meridians, etc. Right?

FTR: Iraq is indeed well north of the equator. In fact, it rests on a latitudinal plane shared by the United States, just one degree south of Los Angeles.

This wonderful little graphic, comparing U.S. states with foreign countries of relatively similar GDP, was forwarded to me by Beth Winegarner, whom I thank.

A9 had a site that offered street-level images of just about any address you looked up on the site. That was a few years ago. It disappeared.

But leave it to the good people at Googleville to not be outdone. Check this out, and good luck doing anything productive for the rest of the week.