Geography – Spinor Info

One thing follows another…

I’m listening to old MP3 files on my computer, one of which contains this once popular song by Paper Lace, The Night Chicago Died.

I once read that the band knew nothing about Chicago’s geography; I checked again on the Wikipedia page dedicated to this song.

The page mentions, among other things, how then Chicago mayor Daley hated the song. Daley? The same Daley who demolished Meigs Field airport, the island airport serving downtown Chicago that was the starting location of Microsoft Flight Simulator for many years?

Indeed. (Well, almost. There were two Daleys, father and son, Richard J and Richard M.) And Wikipedia tells me that the island has indeed since been turned into a park and nature preserve. But there are few pictures, so I figured I’d check it out using Google Maps.

So I typed Chicago into Google Maps and was greeted with this message in response:

I don’t know but this seems… a tad embarrassing isn’t it. Unless of course Chicago actually did die last night, and was promptly removed from Google Maps in response.

But no, Chicago is still there. The Google Maps thing was just a glitch. As is Northerly Island, which once hosted that ill-fated airport, its future as uncertain as it has always been in the past century or so.

I was startled by this photo that appeared in today’s Globe and Mail:

I’ve heard about this bridge! Many decades ago, in Hungary. It was described to me as an international bridge between two islands, both owned by a Hungarian family who then declared the “no man’s land” in the middle of the bridge Hungarian territory.

Well… almost. The flag in the middle is indeed the flag of Hungary, but as for the rest…

The islands together are called Zavikon island (I guess the smaller island is just considered an appendage of the larger one) and they are indeed in the Thousands Islands region. They are indeed owned by a Hungarian family. However, both islands are north of the international border, i.e., they are both in Canada. So the flags on this footbridge are really symbolic, they do not reflect political reality. And no, you cannot claim the “no man’s land”, even if it exists along the international border between two states, in the name of a third.

I was nonetheless astonished to see that this bridge actually exists and that at least the part about the flags is, indeed, true.

Spinor Info

The Night Chicago Died?

Shortest “international” bridge