It's cruel to mock the stupid

[pecunium]

Which is why I am not linking to this, but it's an amazing moment of WTF!?!, and I can't keep it to myself (I'm not always the nicest of people).

Today I’m on a flight to San Jose, CA. Well, two flights. Couldn’t find a direct flight.

It was yesterday that I discovered LA and SF were not in the same location… See, I don’t know CA very well and I’m actually headed to Palo Alto. So I mistakenly assumed that LA was pretty much right there, too.

I think the confusion came from last time I was in CA, I flew into SF and out of Oakland, so I had this impression of all the cities being close to each other.

I'm croggled. Not so much that a grown man, and an american citizen, might not know LA and SF are 400 miles apart from each other, but that he would look at a state the size of California, and assume all the metropli are adjacent because two of them were so colocated the last time he was here.

That's the first bit.

The second is that he admits it, with a sense of blasé delivery which implies he thinks this a reasonable mistake to make.

Comments

[lexica510.livejournal.com]

My mother was a theatre teacher, and once had a friend come speak to one of her classes about what it was like to be a working actor in NYC. "Of course, apartments are so expensive in the city," the friend said, "most people live in New Jersey and commute."

As a silence fell across the room, my mother saw the students looking at each other with expressions of "huh?" and realized she'd have to translate. "They're used to California distances," she told her friend. "Out here, you can easily drive six hours and not reach a state line. It's not like that in New York," she told the students. "In local terms, it would be more like 'live in Davis, work in Sacramento'."

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

My step-fathers mother asked why we didn't see his brother more often. When we commented that he lived in Eugene, Ore., and we in Los Angeles, she replied (living in SC), "It's only one state up."

What croggled me on that, is she'd been an army wife for 30 years, before he retired and she took a tenure track and UNC Chapel Hill. It was the same sort of shock.

TK

[redrose3125.livejournal.com]

When visiting a friend in California, I found myself explaining to a native Californian that I could drive 8 hours, and still not leave New York State (Buffalo to NYC). She thought that since her state was so big, New York must be tiny. It irritated me.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

To be fair to your friend, New York State has the problem of NYC, which has a disproportionate effect on one's sense of the state.

Having spent a lot of time in, physically, large cities, the idea that one can walk across a city, twice, in one day (which I did in Boston) is also strange.

When one adds the impression given by many New Yorkers that anything outside Manhattan is provincial, and that stuff outside The City, is completely uncivilised, and it's less hard to understand why some people come to the idea that NYC = New York State.

Then again, I had an ex-girlfriend's sister ask if Tahoe was one of the Great Lakes.

TK