Discussion Main / ArtisticLicenseGeography

I'm not sure where to suggest new names for tropes, so I'd just like to say that I think this trope should be renamed "Somewhere, A Cartographer Is Crying".

Bit of a nitpick. Star Trek: Enterprise season 1; episode 1 Broken Bow definitely falls into the artistic license: geography listing. They depict Broken Bow, Oklahoma as nothing but flat corn fields. As an Okie myself, I can attest that that part of the state is mountainous and heavily forested. The primary industry is logging there. Broken Bow sits nestled in the southern part of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiamichi_Mountains

Deleted "Sausalito Summer Nights" from Music. Nowhere does the song say or imply that Sausalito is south of SF. It says that they're going from Sausalito across the Golden Gate to SF. And that's exactly what you'd do to get from LA to SF and cross the Golden Gate Bridge. The more direct bridge from Oakland is called "the Bay Bridge".

The relevant verse: Hot summer night in Sausalito Can't stand the heat another mile Let's drop a quarter in the meter And hit the sidewalk for a while

I'll have a burger and a root beer You feed the heap some multi-grade A shot of premium to boot, dear We'll get across the Golden Gate

Removed this as a nattery not-quite-example:

• In Frankie Valli's 'My Eyes Adored You', he speaks of himself and the girl "walking home every day; over Barnegat Bridge and Bay". For New Jersey, this is good geography. For a seemingly autobiographical song about Frankie Valli, who grew up over fifty miles away from Barnegat Bay in Northern New Jersey (Newark and the Oranges), it fails very badly. The song could have been talking about summer vacations at the Jersey Shore, but it gives no indication of that.
  • Frankie Valli didn't actually write the song, so it's unlikely to be autobiographical. The writers were Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan, who sold the song to Valli for $4,000. (Incidentally, although Nolan is from Los Angeles, Crewe was born and raised in Newark.)
  • Of the four bridges that span Barnegat Bay, none are actually called "Barnegat Bridge" (they are: the Mantoloking Bridge; the Mathis and Tunney Bridges to Seaside Heights; and the Causeway Bridge to Long Beach Island). There is no bridge located at the town of Barnegat. It is just possible, however, that the older bridge that the Mathis Bridge replaced in 1950 was called that, and that Crewe, who was born in 1931, might have known it by that name.
    • Colloquial names - what people call things, as opposed to their "official" names - can change over time and are not necessarily that well documented. If the writer's a native, as in this case, it's probably either a local nickname one of them had at some point in the last seventy years, or Artistic License.

Can we have a new image? Yes, the Risk map is massively oversimplified and inaccurate. However, it's far from blatantly *wrong* and in fact it looks like most of it was cribbed from the very real life Spanish and Portuguese colonial divisions of Latin America.

A trope like this could do with a far better image.

Does the EU map created by a Cymruphobe count?

Hmm, I think the section on US sports teams needs to be reworked - it's looking kinda wonky. Anyone have ideas?

US Navy TV ad: There's five oceans if the waters around the Arctic and the Antarctic are considered as separate from the others.

I have no idea what that picture is.

The Harry Potter example just restored was accidentally entered before the explanatory text was fully entered; the text should have been

Note that the restored example doesn't say anything about Bulgaria (the deleting editor got it confused with the example on which it was commenting), much less which direction Bulgaria is from Britain (it could be directly overhead for all the restored example says), thus on both these grounds the stated "reason" for deleting it is bogus.