Phantom Settlements: The Places on Google Maps that Don't Exist
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The first few lines sounds like a normal night out in Rotherham.
Episode suggestion: the assassination of Huey P. Long. Many speculate that Carl Weiss was framed for the murder, and it really was a plot to bring down his political career
because of are copyright laws every "major" media company is trying to start there own cause they own rights to there shows other streaming places like Netflix will have it taken off.
A Big fuck you to its US people is Disney as any "not family friendly" content is pushed to Hulu, but ONLY IS THE US.
so... only a 6 hr long limited time offer for the vpn sponsor
The transition to the atlas ad was so seamless I didn't realize we were off topic for over a minute. Well done.
Hello, I'm the "blogger Mike Nolan" you mention! I'm 95% sure the original source of the error was an old paper gazetteer printed in a weird font that had a load of errors when run through OCR. As well as Argleton (Aughton) there was also Downhollnad (Downholland) and Mawdesky (Mawdesley), all roughly within West Lancashire. Tele Atlas were almost certainly responsible for sourcing the data and added it to their database incorrectly but it's unlikely to be a copyright issue as the gazetteer would be either public record or out of copyright. Anyway, it was a fun to watch Argleton still knocking around almost 15 years after my first blog post about it!
Thanks for submitting this! Watching the video (i.e., before I looked at the comment section), I was quickly onboard with Simon's hypothesis that Argleton is a "paper town."
Thank You Mike Nolan.
To quote Simon “Legend!”
Legend
Woah how did you come across this video?!
Fun Fact: There was a book of trivia that intentionally included a fake question in attempt to thwart plagiarism. The game Trivial Pursuit included this question assuming it was real. When the writers of the book attempted to sue the makers of the game, they lost because as the game's lawyers argued, the information was presented as fact, and you can't copyright facts.
Nice 😁
I vaguely remember this. It was in all the papers at the time.
I can sort of see the point. Like Trivial Pursuit workers would have to provide sources and proof that they in fact never read or heard the information everywhere but came up with it by themselves (which is obviously how facts for trivia don't get born) to avoid the source trying to sue them. "Original facts by Trivial Pursuit" sounds as trustworthy as all those magical diet product ads.
@@Yupppi Exactly. The copyright is in the conjecture, opinion or explanation of the fact, not the fact itself. The question asking for the fact may be copyrightable, so, as long as Trivial Pursuit didn't ask the exact same question, but re-worded it, they would be in the clear.
@@magic8ball1982 if they'd added related jokes or commentary maybe they would've had a case for copyright infringement or plagiarism or whatever
I literally just finished writing a final research paper on historic map making and let me tell you, there is sm weird lore that you would never think about
Would love to learn more about that. Any recommendations? You tube or books or articles. Thanks!
Any way to read your research paper? I'm intrigued about local type lore
Gotta say. Knowing roads and routes without GPS is pretty handy. Especially if you live in an area where road works are ongoing.
I drive around a fair bit and if I know the location of my destination and I can usually map about 3 different ways to get there in my head. GPS does help in mapping routes with less traffic and occasionally it does surprise me with routes I'd never thought kf
Yeah, even just having the idea of which direction your destination is in and roughly how far can be so helpful if anything happens to your phone or GPS. At the very least, then I have a clear direction in which to drive and a few landmarks I might see if navigating.
yeah, plus technology is hardly infallible, you will be glad you learned your local area when you can't use a gps function. at least ways to get home or to a location you'd need in an emergency like the hospital
Or somewhere that Google has wrong....or in areas of thick vegetation and timber where GPS doesn't work....or when your phone dies...or your car screws up....I can think of a million different reasons
Large sporting events and concerts will often slow the cel signal to a crawl. Local weather events, crashes, floods etc occasionally close routes with little warning. It's good to have a general idea.
Definitely not worth learning the road names though, knowing routes is easy, type it in on google once and you can find 1000 different routes to the place you need to go, and I have NEVER EVER been in a situation where google isn't available, probably because its nearly impossible nowadays.
Simon and or editor: the -kill designation on rivers in the mid-Atlantic US is actually a holdover from when the area was colonized by the Dutch. The -kill suffix is an anglicization of an old Dutch word for river or channel. Since many of the rivers here had been mapped and named by the Dutch, this appears quite often. So the Beaverkill is actually from the Dutch words for “Beaver River”. The most interesting example of this is actually Delaware’s Murderkill River. Over time, many stories about a massacre have cropped up as the history of the name, but they’re all false. The truth is much more tame. It was originally named Morder’s Kill, which was old Dutch for “Mother’s River”, because the explorer who named it wanted to name something after his mom.
Presumably tho, beaver river would have been named so because of the potential for killing beavers for fur there, at the time, right?
I live right near a Murder's Kill and a Murders Kill Road in the Upstate NY close to the Hudson River.
Thanks, Internet stranger, for this tidbit of info! I appreciate it!
That’s a nicer reason then murder. I like it.
@@tomorrow4eva it has to be a human to be murder. When it is a beaver or something it is predation. All animals do it.
My dad was a surveyor and cartographer, he worked for local companies and later the US government. I can tell you that as late as the 80s, if he couldn't find the official name of a location, he could write in whatever he wanted on his surveys. Still finding streets and neighborhoods named after my family. :). This is one of the reasons I always read street signs, Simon. When he made military maps, accuracy was vital. Not only did they use satellite imagery, but they sent people out to take accurate measurements, even shrubs and trees would be featured. I can neither confirm nor deny the details in military maps, but considering the Department of Defense oversaw the geography and cartography departments, before it went under the aegis of the NSA, even tiny details are vital for military use. Dad actually got stationed in Kabul and Bagram, Afghanistan. I can't know what he did there but it's interesting to contemplate why they would need cartographers 'on the ground' during the conflicts. I will have to ask him about mouth weasels and plagiarism.
Before I started working, there was ACIC, then DMAAC when I joined, NIMA (which we joked meant “Not Into Mapping Any More”), and NGA, when I retired. A few other letters as well. We joked that all the changes were done to hide us!🤣
He probably mapped mine fields. Seriously bagram was covered in them and they had like 8 guys who only mapped them out.
Sounds like the sort of rotation that allows politicians to beef up patrols without admittingbthey need extra soldiers. Sending in a map maker....well, he's there to help plan rebuilds, expansions etc
This is how the Ordnance Survey Maps in the UK began life, as a literal survey for ordnance reasons. The maps were so incredibly accurate (and still are) for military use but they decided to open them up to public. It began in the late 1700's I believe.
He was mapping deathtraps to protect the land the terrorists were stealing from Afghanistan.
For someone from the UK living in the US, the sheer scale and remoteness of the country can really do your head in. Everywhere in the UK has road signs and mile markers. You can get lost but not for long. In the US I’ve had situations where I’ve been on a road for an hour and it just ends. No buildings at the terminus, it just stops. And there are plenty of places on the map that have a name, but there’s nothing there - one house if you’re lucky. A bogus village in the UK will quickly be called out, but in the US and Canada I could easily imagine a fake town being undiscovered for years.
You haven’t been to australia yet have you?
Dude, don't dis Woolworth. When I was a kid one day I bought candy, a live turtle, and discovered the club sandwich at their lunch counter. Magic. Allegedly.
I recently moved to Germany from Mexico and to your (and my) surprise Woolworth is alive in both countries. Independent of each other though...
Meanwhile in Australia where woolies is still super common
So it's Walmart... yet eurotrash acts like Walmart makes America bad somehow. For people with 2k years plus of atrocities, you guys sure are finger pointers.
Simon, Michiganders have a penchant for odd names for towns. Some can be ascribed to the fact that early settlers tended to clump together and adopt names from their native tongues. Ypsilanti, Dowagiac, and Hamtramck can be blamed on Welsh, French, and Polish settlers, respectively. But there are no shortage of whimsical and lazy township appellations, like Christmas, Hell, and Square Lake. My favorite is Novi, which was the 6th stop on the railroad going North out of Detroit (French). Novi was voted in by the locals primarily because it would be cheapest to change the signs at the railroad station from No. VI to Novi.
How about Pompeii? Pronounced “POM pea eye,” as one does. 😉
"-kill" is Dutch for "stream" or "creek", and New York used to be New Amsterdam, so a lot of place names and river names there are still Dutch. So it was called "Beaver Creek" by the first European settlers before the English took over. There are A LOT of rivers in New York state with "kill" in their names, as well as the Catskill mountains.
That's really interesting, thanks for sharing
Ok I know so much random stuff in general. I'm rarely surprised in any "facts you didn't know" videos. I had no idea about this though. Thank you!! I have a new rabbit hole to dive in to.
Freshkills Park, NY.
Name/word origins are cool & fun, imo. 🙂 I was today years old when I learned why those names exist and their proper meaning. Thank you for sharing! ❤️
I've lived in New York my whole life and never knew this. Thank you for sharing.
Its funny, I live in the Hudson Valley, so it's just kind of something I've known forever. When he didn't know it, I was like "Really? Oh well, it's probably only around here....."
We also had Woolworth's stores in the US and, honestly, I doubt that many under the age of 45-50 would understand the appeal, any more that someone under the age of 75 or so would understand the appeal of mail-order catalogues, especially the Christmas wish-list catalogues. That's not a put-down on anyone, it's just that the frames of reference have changed go drastically over the years that it's hard to even begin to describe why a trip to Woolworth's could be such a treat to a child. Walking into a store that had a place right in the middle of the store where you could buy a little pack of hand-dipped candies or hot nuts was an experience like no other. Thirty years from now, many of you will describe an experience that you found to be a real treat as a child only to have someone Simon's age roll their eyes and ask "Why?!".
I was looking for someone who remembered them in the U.S.A. id change it to to 40 - 50 tho
I'm 35 and I remember Christmas Sears catalogs as a kid. Those things were great. And my nieces (ages 8-11) still love a trip to the dollar store.
I'm 53 and don't remember it too well since the one where I grew up closed when I was 5 or 6 years old. I do remember the tiles in the sidewalk spelling out Woolworths at the store entrance, though. My mom talks of eating at the lunch counter a few times when she was a young lady.
I was born in 1954, knew at least 3 Woolworths near me in the Bronx, they were good then but by the time they closed they'd long since been run into the ground. You could no longer count on finding the items you needed there, they kept moving things around so you couldn't find them without help, and the help wasn't there or wasn't good. They wound up as the worst compromise between discount store, department store, and luncheonette, failing to do any of them well.
I remember going to a woolworths as a kid in either late 80s or 1990, I don't think ours still had food though, it was kind of a caldors/bradleys/dollar store hybrid to my recollection
Woolworths was great! You could get a parakeet, or walk out with an ice cream cone! :)
Or both
as a New Zealander, it is very annoying how often we dont seem to exist. not just old or decorative maps. frequently in shows, and games. i am often more surprised to see NZ included than i am to see it left out
I have actually noticed that even as a non uh zeelander right? I think its because its hard to place the name because of its geography but that was always just my assumption.
I remember when Universal Studios amusement parks added New Zealand to their massive decorative globes after the Lord of the Rings movies came out. And that was the reason given for adding it.
As a svalbardian I agree with you. What is it with mainlanders and forgetting bigger islands on the "edge" of their horizon?
It's even more hilarious when you find several maps that include Tasmania a small island like state right near it but somehow they miss new Zealand.
I just always thought you were like Australias puerto rico.
Back in the 90's my dad had planned a boating vacation for our family. He proudly plotted the course and was so happy with the route he had found that would have saved us hours by cutting though a canal that would have taken us only a few miles from our destination. When we got to the "canal" we discovered that it was a smaller creek and the canal that lead to our destination never existed. Some kind people allowed us to use their dock for the night and gave us directions to a local store we could walk to that had a proper map.
Mungo Park sounds like a P. G. Wodehouse character.
"Jeeves, Mungo is going to lose his stipend from his aunt unless he can prove that he's been exploring in Africa..."
Danny is the best! You really should let him out of the basement more often.
The basement is where Communists belong ☺😊😀😁😂
I'm from Michigan, and grew up near Ypsilanti. It's, "Ip-sil-an-tee," 😂.
An old Michigan joke: two friends were on a trip, traveling through Ypsilanti and hungry. They debated back and forth on how to pronounce the name. They stopped at Burger King for a bite, and after ordering, one decided to ask a clerk how to pronounce the name of the town.
"You know, we have been debating back and forth on the right way to pronounce this place. Can you please lay it to rest for us?" The man said.
The clerk leans over the counter and says, "BUR-GER KING."
In the early 90s, I worked pizza delivery, and relied on a paper map in the car. I fell into quite a few map traps back then looking for short-cuts.
Ahhhh paper maps real explorer style 😎 the kids today will never have the same weird adventures
My husband and I own an independent pizzeria in metro Detroit. We're in our mid 50s so we definitely remember life before everyone carried a GPS unit in their pocket. I had a delivery driver last week tell me he couldn't take a delivery because his phone was dead and he wouldn't know where he was going. What?!? 🤦♀️ I couldn't believe it.
My husband delivered pizzas for Dominos during the 30 minute delivery guarantee in the 80s, and even though our POS has a map in it, he insisted we have a giant map of our delivery area on the wall. I directed my driver to that map and told him to figure it out and get on the road! 🙄
yes, the famous short-cut that makes you take longer or get lost xD
As a child, i had an old map from like the 50s or 60s of el dorado county, california (where i grew up in the 80s and 90s). It had the names of all the creeks and ponds and stuff. I thought it was pretty rad, so i hung it on my wall. There were all these towns detailed on it that i never heard of. In my teenage years as my friends and i started driving, we started going to these unknown towns to see what was there. Most of the time we found foundations from old mining towns that had long since been abandoned (after all, el dorado county was where the gold miners went for the 1849 california gold rush). There was one that always confused us though, Spreckelsville. See... we went out there and there was nothing but a several acre mudflat/seasonal pond. No foundations, nothing. Just 4-5 feet of muddy water in the rainy months, and dry cracked earth in the dry season. Later on the internet became a thing. I looked into it, and apparently back in the '20s there was a sugar processing plant out there and tons of housing for the workers. I call BS because a settlement as large as that would have left foundations. I thought maybe the foundations are under the mud, but we used to sink our trucks several feet into the mud out there and nobody ever found so much as a rock or chunk of concrete.
I love stories like this so so much. What a treasure to find such a map and to explore bits of it with friends! Thanks for sharing
Spreckels did make beet sugar in California, and they were located in Salinas, which means "salt marsh" in Spanish. Salinas is in Monterey County.
Im aware that they had sugar operations in salinas. Salinas is not in el dorado county.
I believe there was also a factory owned by Spreckels in San Francisco sometime in the early 20th century.
TFS. I love stories like this.
26:56 congrats to writer Danny Salter for making me giggle with "As useful as an ashtray on a motorbike". Thank you Danny [Hope the basement is warmer now that winter is ending]
My brother in christ, it’s january
I used to work with one of the cartographers involved with the Michigan map. He had a framed section of it on his desk. He said it was a normal thing on state maps.
He said what was a normal thing on state maps?
In the US, stores that sell random crud are all the rage, and have been for years. Some examples include: Dollar store, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Best, Discounters/Liquidation stores/outlets, and don't even get me started on bodegas!
As useful as an ashtray on a motorbike! Hahahaha! That's hilarious. Also, this made me think of where I live now. It's not exactly what you're on about here, but it's almost the reverse. I live in Tbilisi, and my apartment isn't on GPS. This is one of many, MANY examples of the randomness of where I live. This is easily the most random place I have ever lived. My example here is my apartment's absence from GPS. I can only have deliveries or call Bolt cars to meet me at a nearby Spar shop. And when I get a car to take me home, the driver gets close-ish, but I then have to give directions. I haven't got into a cab completely shitfaced, and that's largely because I'd have no way to get home without giving coherent directions (made more difficult by my utter inability to speak Georgian or Russian).
I know for google maps, you can suggest an edit. Maybe see if that’s an option for you? When a newly built bakery first opened, they didn’t have google maps set up correctly and it was an issue for them - people kept going to the wrong place. I suggested an edit on google maps, and a few other people in the shop did too. Because multiple people told google it was real, it was successfully confirmed on the map.
@@gobsofgabs7379 No, man, you don't understand. At or in my apartment, GPS is blind to me. I don't show up as a blue dot in the middle of nothingness. I am utterly invisible to it. Google can't do anything about that.
I worked in the printing and graphic arts industry back in the 80s-90s, Printed maps usually had map traps where they would intentionally misspell a name or place a curve in a road where there was none so they could catch other map makers that sold maps you could buy in gas stations and charge them with copying their maps and have that product removed.
GPS tends to cause problems here in Brazil... Sometimes it sends you on your last trip. 😬
(It basically sends you to REALLY unsafe neighborhoods, let's say...)
Iwas thinking that you were heading towards a different story. In the United States there are stories of people driving their cars into lakes or off cliffs following Google Map directions. I've had Google tell me to turn onto non-existent streets or make U-turns where it wasn't allowed or completely unsafe. I wasn't stupid enough to follow those directions.
@@michaelb1761 eeek how dumb do you have to be to drive into water lol
@@michaelb1761 Yeah, I believe I've heard about things like that as well... But I've never heard of them happening here.
Go figure.
“You are on the fastest possible route!”
It does that in the US, as well.
I got my first smartphone in 2002. A Kyocera Smartphone 650. It had an integrated PalmPilot. No web browser, but I used it for e-mail, appointment calendar, task list etc, but it couldn't integrate to a corporate e-mail system without using 3rd-party software.
In 2005 I got a Blackberry 8700, with a web browser, GPS, Google Maps and it shared/synced to my work e-mail/calendar/tasks. It was a much smarter smartphone. I could schedule a phone meeting accurately across multiple time zones and choose a time when none of the people were already booked.
The original Apple iPhone was released in 2007, but didn't start shipping in large numbers until 2009.
A Decoding the Unknown script written by Danny is a brilliant birthday present, thank you!
Happy Birthday, Izzy!
Fantastic topic, Danny
Emergency phone call locating is actually a very cool topic. It works on many levels. It includes GPS, Tower triangulation, and tower pinging just to name the most common.
The "Mountains of the Moon" are the Rurenzori mountains at the border of Uganda and the DRC (formerly Zaire) I used to live there.
Reminds me of a site from the dawn of the internet that detailed the locations of entrances to hell. All very dull things like drainage ditches & underpasses, but it was weirdly convincing to younger version of me.
Thanks for an interesting video. I didn't know map traps were a thing. When looking on Google maps for places which sold Fish & Chips in my hometown, I looked at several supposed locations of takeaway shops on the street view of Google maps only to find it had plonked me in the middle of a housing estate with no shops in sight. I suspect the places exist, just not where Google maps say they are. I was completely baffled by it at first but after seeing this it now makes sense.
Argleton is quite clearly the secret name for Brigadoon, hence the hangover. As for GPS, I used to have a car which used maps on a DVD. They were really expensive, so I never updated it. And every time I travelled on the newly-opened M6 toll road it thought I was in a field in the middle of nowhere; "turn left at the nearest gate". 🤣(Fun fact, old school Macs had a map application in which you could search for "middle of nowhere" and it would point you at some place in the Pacific. Maybe it was Sandy Island before, Atlantis-style, it sank beneath the waves.)
And Brigadoon is the code name for Hy-Brasil.
We had an old GPS, too, and we never paid to update the maps on it. The main highway near us was rerouted and updated, so for the two years or so before Google maps replaced our pld GPS, it seemed to show us flying over a field and two rivers. I don't even remember it saying anything, like it just threw its hands up and said, you got yourself into this, you get yourself out.
@@QBCPerdition "Flying over a field and two rivers": that's some Harry Potter Ford Anglia stuff right there. Maybe next time take a Thestral?
I tried searching for "middle of nowhere" on Google Maps and there are several businesses named that
@@InquisMalleus Like the street near me named Wit's End.
Back around 2001 or so, I had a science teacher that once told us that if we looked at the right map, that there was a town called "Lamb" that was next over, even though there wasn't a town there. It was a spot on the interstate that had a couple businessmen and a trailer park, but was generally buried as being part of Fort Morgan. Ever since I tend to notice when there is a "town" on a map that isn't really there.
Simon, it's a good thing you live in Prague, because in the American West, blindly trusting Google Maps or Sat Nav is the way several people a year die of hypothermia bogged down in the snow at the dead end or the locked gate of a logging road that they were SURE would take them around the Interstate closure. Sometimes they're not found until spring.
Yes, it IS a good idea to know the roads, to check on their condition and the weather, and to possess both common sense and a sense of direction.
True story that one! I often think of that poor family! And logging roads may be improved/paved, or not and necessitate a four wheel high clearance vehicle. Greetings from Oregon!
Hello from Knoxville, TN!
Happy New Year !
Your opening instantly brought me back to S Korea , thank you Sir.
In the area I grew up there are several areas that show on maps as different names. These are hold overs of old towns that existed prior to the incorporation of the predominant town. Once this happened, businesses "moved to town" and the other areas faded into history to only be known as areas in the county with names but not belonging to or looking like a town.
Also, why have we not gotten a yeti episode? It would be smashingly entertaining to see Simon have to go down that rabbit hole. Lol
Yes -- 33:55 -- when you call 112 (emergency number) in Europe your phone can send GPS information along with the call using an SMS or data channel alongside the call. If your phone does this, it can come up on the operator's screen within seconds, and can be very accurate (within a few metres) especially with GNSS. If your phone doesn't send this data, your location can still be triangulated from cell-IDs, but that will only place you to within a few hundred metres.
Back in the pre-GPS days when people used street atlases to get around large cities, I saw a a news item about the Gregory’s road atlas for Brisbane here in Queensland, it was revealed it had at least two “fake streets” for the copyright reason. A workmate from Brisbane said that people would go out and drive around on weekends to try and find the location of these fake streets.
In the mid 1970, I was working for a small company that used a computer sold by a company called Computer Automation Inc. Our applications required a plug-in board that would hold many more memory chips that the one they sold. We were developing our own PC board that would meet our requirements and were copying the circuitry used to control the chips. Embedded in their artwork was a circuit that did absolutely nothing. It was not even attached to anything.
Now the Simon is in flight school he's probably learning that every type of navigation going back to the 1930's is still being used because they never seem to get completely rid of it. So, even though everybody uses GPS now , you're still responsible to know Amelia Erhardt era tech to get yourself a private single engine license
Also thankfully for him the International language for aviation is English. Most times..if fact boy didn't have his wife there in the car accident... Hopefully he knows enough Czech to BS his way through
You actually nailed it, Simon! The pronunciation of Ypsilanti. I lived east of there, in White Lake, Michigan, for 35 years.
Another great episode! 🎺👏💜 It would be fun if you did the Mandela effect. Such a weird topic, but it feels like you opened the window with this one. These must go hand in hand with it.
Yes! I agree! Either Nelson Mandela died twice, or someone found a way to exploit human memory and make it seem true for millions of people around the world, myself being one of them.
@@brandonzilka1274 🤣🤣🤣 No doubt!
I love that you have 2 of your channels on both TH-cam, and Spotify
They're either going to be some bug or copyright traps aren't they. That or a military base.
Nice to hear the Uni I went to mentioned where I studied Geography in the early 00’s. There wasn’t an Argleton around then either.
I honestly have a terrible time remembering street names and actually still remember how to get places by visual landmarks... which is probably insane since it seems like places are always changing with construction.... between phone/car GPS and my impeccable memory, ( LMAO THE BRAIN WORMS FORCED ME TO WRITE THAT, SEND HELP!! LOL ) I dont need no street names!!
On the reverse side the little town in Texas I grew up in was left off all maps for many many years
thanks for dropping all them videos back to back so I got something to watch while my hotel neighbours are throwing a party and are keeping me awake 🙃
(nope, nobody cares to make em shut up)
Our 7th-grade Geography teacher, Mr. Pearson, gave us only one actual assignment for the semester: fill in a world map with national capitals referenced from an _actual paper atlas_ . We were to use the official map symbols, mark mountains and rivers, and color the map so no two neighboring countries were the same color. We learned a lot about the world map that semester.
As a teacher now myself, I recognize the brilliance of assigning a project that kept a bunch of precocious young people busy but required very little actual work on the teacher’s part.
I can't described how thankful I am to have Simon's many channels to keep me entertained over Xmas, when there's nothing but bloody Xmas movies on telly. Sitting there, watching "The Santa Clause" for the 10th year running, I can feel myself get dumber. I know the kids enjoy it, but they can enjoy it without me!
I got curious about the Soviet Union top level domain thing, because it never occurred to me that they might have had one until now. Turns out, the Soviet Union was issued the ".su" top level domain on September 19th, 1990. Although the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991, Russia wasn't issued ".ru" until April 7th, 1994.
I love that Michigan got a call out lol Michigan has a lot of culturally named cities. Escanaba, Mackinac, Cheybogan, Paw Paw... Ypsilanti is pronounced: ip-suh-LAN-tee Shout to my fellow Michiganders! Hello from the Mitten State!
Mackinac. It’s the Michigander’s shibboleth.
And Pompeii.
I worked as a contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We would overlay satellite imagery over the map and make corrections. If a city or town had an expansion the extended or new streets were added by us. If something didn't exist or no longer existed it was removed. Best part was that these are non-classified projects. Most of the people that do the work do not have a security clearance. Of course many of us worked on other projects that require a security clearance.
The opening bit reminds me of an incident that happened to me back in 2002. I went out drinking in Mexico one night and woke up the next morning in the United States with my right foot completely broken in half (the pain of which was masked by a pounding headache until I jumped out of my rack about 1.9 meters off the ground). To this day I can't drink tequila (20 years later). I simply woke up with no clue how I got back across the border or what happened to my foot. To add another twist to the tale, I was on a military base and I had no clue how I got through base security. Luckily, I was in the military at the time and I was stationed at the base I found my way back to so I was where I needed to be (along with all my possessions), but I was over 500km (300+ miles) from where I started the night. And yes, I'm being intentionally vague about where I started the night, the military base, my branch of service, and a few other details.
...allegedly.
El Paso?
Such bullshit
I've definitely gotten pretty far without remembering any of the journey, but 300 miles is a hell of a trip!
This is why MFs aren't allowed to go to Mexico, now 😂
Woolworths is one of the 2 biggest supermarkets in Australia, it is a company owned by a company in the USA. They own a lot of slot machines and at least one of the major alcohol distribution companies here... Oh and Australia also still has pay phones, they have free local calls, you still have to pay for long distance calls from them....
There's a mystery local to my hometown I think would be great for this podcast. In Daly City, a U.S. Navy blimp crashed due to deflation but when the craft was recovered the crew were nowhere to be found. Also, the doors to the cabin were latched shut which is something that should have only been possible from the outside. Did the crew jump ship? Were they teleported off by aliens? A lot of theories have sprung up about this over the years and I'd love to hear your take on it.
I think the general consensus on that one is that one crewman fell out of the door and the other also lost his footing trying to save him. It was spotted very close to the water so its probable one man was in the water and the pilot was attempting a rescue. They probably both drowned as the blimp drifted away from them. It then drifted into some cliffs which punctured it.
@@meetoo594 So rather than vanishing into
thin air, they found themselves in hot water?
That does sound a lot more down to earth,
so I would say you're on fire with that idea!
Daly City is a weird place too. Just a strange vibe no matter where you're at.
it being locked from the outside isn't weird, if it was locked from the inside and nobody from the crew was on that would be weird
you could get out of something and then lock from outside, and just walk away, not as much of a mystery
i kinda thought daly city was a fever dream i had on a long road trip. my fiancé insists it’s real and i bought a slurpee there. sounds fake but okay
my area has many "un-towns" where corporations bought land, incorporate it as a town, and determine their own taxation- you can go there, but there are no residents, just a corporate face.
"Random shit stores just don't work, do they?"
Answer:
Dollar General
Dollar Tree
Bi Mart
Walmart
Target
Go Blue!
Danny has done a great job with these scrips
Another Decoding by Danny? Christmas comes twice a year!
There technically are still some Woolworths, although they aren't in the uk or usa, they are Southern Africa and in some parts of Australia and apparently they are 2 different market chains that just have the same name. And there are a few scattered over Europe.
23:07 From someone living in Michigan, congrats on pronouncing "Ypsilanti" right on the first try!
Try looking up Agra, California, on Google maps. It always comes up, but there is NOTHING there. Someone claims that they found it on a map from 1948, but even a 1981 satellite image shows no buildings. It is on Camp Pendleton, but when you pass it on I-5, the only hint of it is a small sign on a bridge with the name.
Hate to bust your bubble but it really helps to plot out where you want to go the old fashioned way. My brother puts way too much trust in the GPS he uses and it's forever taking him on strange little side trips. And if that's not bad enough I can recall talking to a couple that came really close to driving off a cliff because their computer aided driving directions told them to go that way. Not withstanding changes in the roads that simply haven't been updated. And there is the annoying bits too. Google has a major road going through my neighbor's shared driveway. That's a gravel drive with no outlet. So many people keep driving down their drive that they had to put up keep out signs in an area where only the survivalist put up keep out signs.
Yeah it really does espicially at night if there are deer google will send you into the backroads full of deer to save a couple miles to your journey.
Simon I freaking Love the work that you contributed to all of us over the years…
You are simply the best best ☺️
As someone who has lived in Ypsilanti, hearing Simon attempt to pronounce it made me happy. He should look up the Ypsi water tower. Maybe do a Side Projects about the World's Most Phallic Building competition.
Woolworth's was the 5 and 10 cent (nickle and dime) store. They were American but we had them in Canada too - sort of the cheap version of a department store.
Beaverkil actually draws upon the dutch word “kil” which roughly means riverbed/water channel! So basically it was a creek with a lotta beaver lol
A lotta places in NY have blank-kil names bc of the Dutch!
The Schuylkill in Pennsylvania makes more sense now...
"Simon Attempts to Pronounce American Midwest Towns" is my favorite meme.
His handling of "Mequon" and "Oconomowoc" made me giggle.
Only Simon can mispronounce “beatosu” 3 times by adding an extra “u” and not catch his mistake after Danny explains what it means then just guess and pretty much nail the pronunciation of Ypsilanti! 🤣🤣🤣
Imagine you’re at the local pub with a friend. It’s time to go home, and the friend pulls out his phone and makes a call:
“Nanny, I don’t remember how to walk home! Help!”
And a little gray-haired lady shows up, takes your friend by the hand, and leads him out, saying “Oh dear, it’s only just down the street here. I’ll show you again, come along.”
Interesting, Simon. I'd heard of these 'traps' years ago, but this is the first time I've seen a number of them detailed.
I think I ran across one quite a while ago, here in western NYS; I ran across a small town on a map in an area I knew *very* well because I used to just go on drives, exploring various places, even dead-end roads. The map showed a small village (which are sometimes referred to as 'hamlets') that was (supposedly) on a little side-road. But I had been down that side-road and there was no such hamlet! I told my step-father about it, showing him the map, and he said that he'd heard that map-makers did this sometimes in order to catch folks who plagiarized their maps.
So when I heard about these traps a several years later I was like, "OK, I guess he was right!"
BTW ... your 'Ordnance Survey' maps sound like our U.S. Geological Survey maps. U.S.G.S. maps are *amazing!* The maps are available down to a scale of *1500:1* - so they show _every_ *little* detail, every little building (even if it's just a little cabin that's thousands of feet [1 km.] away from any road)! This does make me wonder if the U.S.G.S. puts in 'traps' - like a little cabin that's far enough away from a road, that you can't expect to even *see it* from the road! - to catch folks trying to 'swipe' all the work the government put into making these detailed maps? Wouldn't surprise me!
To me their most useful maps are either their State-level maps (which show all the significant roads, and any town you might normally look for), and their "Half-degree Maps", which are, as you might expect, a half-degree on a side. They show even minor side-roads, and even the _smallest_ villages/hamlets! They don't show the little dirt roads, but do show almost *everything* bigger!
Lol google maps is a great piece of fiction. Been trying to fix the map to my house. Contrary to clear road signs, we live in a one way, people keep charging up the wrong way as if they might reach hogwards by sheer effort. All because the lady voice on the map insist they do it. They promptly get lost due to all the house numbers being unseable. My deliveries also end up at the school on the regular. Scary how people trust Google instead of road rules.
I lived in Ypsilanti for years! Most folks locally just call it Ypsi (ip-see).
Danny?! Get back to Business Blaze!
He's escaped the Blazement!
Business Blaze?
Never heard of it.
@@DannySalter haha, you bastard! It was an unappreciated gem of business facts that slowly devolved into tangents and madness. I miss it every day.
@@DannySalter Oh no, Simon has tortured you so thoroughly that you've forgotten where you came from... 😱 Danny, noooooooo!!!
Did it have something to do with business?
That's not ringing any bells.
Bravo Simon, you nailed the pronunciation of Ypsilanti.
You said "caught it a trap" and I started singing Elvis in my head. Thanks Simon
It's also possible Cook saw not the remains of a submerged volcano, but the floating pumice island leftover from a volcanic eruption
Great to see Danny pop up on this channel. is the Blazement on any map or is it just a dark square marked do not enter?
My friend had a Tom Tom back in the day. That damn thing got us lost in the sticks on so many occasions. We finally got rid of it and just went back to using an atlas.
I watch a few of your other channels but this one takes the biscuit! 😆 I love your humour in these videos!
23:05 did you just dump on my hometown? The name is Greek! It's named after a military general of Greek descent, and it has been here for a long time, in fact we are going to celebrate our bicentennial in a few days. The original settlement in what now is Ypsilanti was called woodruff's Grove it's just around the corner from me. My house has been registered with the city of Ypsilanti for over 100 years! We are adjacent to Ann arbor, hence wolverines
I woke up in the middle of nowhere many times after getting wasted 🤣 when I couldn't find my way home I just slept wherever I was at the time. In a dirt hole covered by a wheelbarrow, in a wheelbarrow, in the bed of a construction truck...
OSU supporter here and I find the beatosu story hilarious. I had no idea that happened and I applaud the perpetrator’s brilliant and silly sense of humor. It hurt no one and played along with an entertaining sports rivalry.
In the San Fernando Valley, the northern part of Los Angeles, at the corner of Devonshire Street and Sepulveda Boulevard, Bing Maps shows Hickson, but only at certain levels of magnification. If you zoom in too close, the name disappears. Other maps don't show it, if they show anything there, it's Mission Hills, but Hickson apparently isn't entirely imaginary, as, long, long ago, there used to be a farm belonging to someone named Hickson in the area, and, back when there were streetcar tracks running down Sepulveda, there was a stop there called Hickson. This was VERY long ago, as, when I was a kid, back in the 1950s, the name had long been lost, the tracks were recently gone, and the neighborhood northwest of the intersection was called Dennis Park, for the real estate developer who built the houses there, and there was a bakery in the shopping center on the northwest side of the intersection called the Dennis Park Bakery. This name, too, has long ago disappeared into oblivion, but somehow, Hickson survives on Bing Maps.
This is why I learned my area's county roads and state routes. Even if I am lost in a rural area I can find civilization as soon as one of these signs comes up. Or I can head in a vague direction and know I will eventually hit a route.
F.W. Woolworth was a department store during the days when a department store catered to the home. Departments such as Haberdashery, notions, foundations, shoes, women's wear, linens, drapers, toys, clothing for various family members, housewares and kitchenware.
Woolworth is closed.
Oh my, I almost forgot about TomToms. We had one, and my mom hated it because it was almost always innacurate, and she knew how to navigate traditional paper maps really well. So she just yelled at the device calling it stupid in the car. To her credit it did try to get us to turn into a literal river once or twice 😂
It's funny. Just an hour ago I was remembering when I got super drunk in Shanghai and almost died. And ended up lost for more than 16 hours. Good times!
That first part is hilarious, happened to me once. I was on a night out in the south of Sweden and woke up In Copenhagen 🤷🏻♀️
Regarding Beaver Kill: New York used to be a Dutch colony and 'kill' is an Old Dutch word for 'riverbed'. There are lots of things in NY with the 'kill' ending, such as Catskilland Fishkill. So, Beaverkill is the Beaver River.
I was once on the last BART train out of San Francisco. and when we got to Antioch (the last stop on that line) there was only one guy left on the train with me who was sound asleep.
I woke him and said, Last stop we have to get off."
Turned out the poor guy had just moved to the Bay Area from England, and he had meant to get off at Pleasant Hill, and as this was the last train, he had no way to get back. He hadn't even made any friends he could call to give him a ride.
I ended up giving him a ride back to the Pleasant Hill station, even though I was headed to Rio Vista, that was in the opposite direction.
He was a nice guy though. Not drunk, just tired from work and moving. Thankfully he didn't need a ride back to London. I don't think I could have got him back that far in my pick-up truck.
Several years ago the Queensferry Crossing over the River Forth opened - I was in my sister's car and on her sat-nav (which had to be updated regularly) it showed that I was flying over open water. Nope, definitely a bridge there....
Simon: "how the hell do I pronounce Ypsilanti!?"
Then proceeds to nail it.
You legend.
Really funny! In the 70’s my uncle went into a store in Hiland Wyoming to buy a pack of cigarettes. When he got back in his truck, he informed my aunt that they had bought the entire town! They ran it for decades. It had a cowboy bar (the biggest money maker), short order restaurant, 7 unit motel and it’s own Post Office which he eventually closed. It still has it’s own zip code however. The true population was the number of his family members at any particular time. He sold it a few years ago and both have since passed away. But I have been amazed at all of the businesses that claim to be located there, but certainly are not!🤣
27:00 I've got a better one of those for you. "About as useful as an ashtray in a Mormon Church.
Fun fact, I grew up Mormon and in first grade, for some reason, though my mother didn't smoke, I made her an ashtray. I suspect it was my teacher, though I don't remember it (it was 46 years ago) my mother and my 1st grade teacher were friends for years even before I started first grade, and they were always playing jokes on each other. I think my teacher convinced me to make an ashtray for her as a joke.
In any case, my mother still had it many years later when, as an adult, I was helping my parents move. I found it and that's what sparked the memory.
As someone from Michigan I want to say kudos on the Ypsilanti pronunciation.
Fun fact: there's a supermarket chain in Australia, and one in the US too, but they are not affiliated with each other or the now-defunct chain in the UK - the only link is that they were all founded by men named Woolworth.