“Oranje boven, oranje boven. leve the Koningin!”

From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates.  Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak Muslims ( Read more... )

Mijn schilt ende betrouwen
Zijt ghy, O Godt, mijn Heer.
Op U soo wil ick bouwen,
Verlaet my nimmermeer…

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit
für das deutsche Vaterland!
Danach lasst uns alle streben
Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand!

And one for Mere:

Qǐlai! Qǐlai! Qǐlai!
Wǒmen wànzhòngyīxīn,
Màozhe dírén de pàohuǒ, qiánjìn!
Màozhe dírén de pàohuǒ, qiánjìn ( Read more... )

• Miep Gies, the last of the group who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis, turns 100 today (hat tip to aisb23).
• Weekend news anchors at a local TV station have a ritual they do during a commercial break - get up and DANCE! (h/t andrewducker)
• Jabba and other beach huts on the Lincolnshire (UK) coast - just in time for our bathing suit competition.
• Batman as ( Read more... )

Another bit of Rittenhousia, about the beginnings of paper-making in America, circa 1688 - this is from the Historical Magazine, 1857.  Again, for the record.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

I’ll sit down and go over the Presidents Thang in a day or so.  Right now, I’m busy fishing the big Digital Organization, to be followed up with more organizing tricks tomorrow.  So I’m Really Busy As Heck with that stuff.

Meredith had a good deal from Sinterklaas, with lots of pepernoten / kruidnootjes and the usual Big Dark Chocolate Letters.  ( Read more... )

Longtime readers will recall that I’m a great fan of the Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem Van Loon, a taste that I got from my mom and her brother, my uncle.   There’s an online exhibit at the Ohio State University site of Van Loon’s illustrations (crude, but charming) for his best-known work, The Story of Mankind.   I always recommend his ( Read more... )

Museum exhibits:

• Historical maps from Dutch cartographers
• Mapping Arabia (from Aramco)
• Historical maps of Macau (Library of Congress)
• The David Rumsey collection (worldwide historical maps)
• The Social Explorer (US Census maps 1940-2000)

As some of you will note, Mr. Trivia and Mr. Map Enthusiast here likes to squirrel and roll around in all sorts of odd bits about odd bits of territory. Here’s a few recent adds:

The Frisian Islands, all of which seem to have hung on to their own gumbly dialects - such as Texel, Terschelling, Heligoland (go boom), Sylt and so on.

The Needles, off ( Read more... )