Friday, June 11, 2004

Names on the land I printed out a little map from Yahoo! Maps yesterday because I was driving over to the scary suburbs of northern Contra Costa County to pick up a box of tile. I noticed this morning that the map contained the name of a place I'd never heard of before and thought was a humorous misprint: "Herpoooo." I know that some mapmakers salt their products with deliberate errors to catch cartographic thieves who betray themselves by repeating the mistakes. I was wrong on two counts. First, the name is "Herpoco" but was unreadable on my poor printout. But still -- Herpoco? Never heard of it. Though when I thought about it, it occurred to me it might have a connection to nearby Hercules, which itself has a link with an explosives company that ran a plant there (here's the history). Still -- look where Herpoco is placed on the map -- smack in the middle of a freeway interchange. But having too much time on my hands, obviously, I plugged Herpoco into Google. The result shows it's an actual place name, though I don't think it would mean a thing to most of the hundreds of thousands of people who live close by or pass through every week. The U.S. Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System delivers this hit when you query the name Herpoco: Feature Name: Herpoco Feature Type: populated place Elevation: 60 State: California County: Contra Costa USGS 7.5' x 7.5' Map: Mare Island 380042N 1221612W And the gay-lesbian community search site ePodunk lists Herpoco, too, with a note that it was named after the Hercules Powder Company (successor to the California Powder Works and a long-ago spinoff from DuPont. But that's another story). 12:21:05 PM    comment []

Slice of life Nice little reading from Harper's online site -- the transcript of a call from an Oklahoma prison inmate to his parents after his funeral: KEVIN: Hey, Momma. MARTHA: Kevin, I cannot believe this. KEVIN: Wait. It’s not my fault. MARTHA: We buried you today, boy. 9:50:19 AM    comment []

Funeral, hold the blather Kate wanted to watch the Reagan service before she went off to school this morning, so she turned on CNN about 6:30. Within a minute or so, one of the "hosts" asked such an offensively insipid question about Reagan's legacy that we switched to C-SPAN's coverage. Not a new observation, of course, but it's great to get a chance to watch events like this free of the network's insistence on providing running commentary on everything. Aside from the awful quality of most of the noise the TV people provide, it's like we in the media are terrified of ever letting anything speak for itself. 9:37:15 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.