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

Confused non-Californians

[xenolee.livejournal.com]

Visiting an SF fan party in NY, we were asked if as Angelenos we often went went to San Francisco for dinner. I explained that it was over seven hours drive and then, when they looked confused, explained that it was much farther from LA to San Francisco than it was from NYC to DC. The listeners doubted this, so I got out my datebook which has a table of mileage: LA to San Francisco is 401 miles, NYC to DC is 225 miles. Eventually I think we figured out the problem: East Coast states are small, and people living in them tend to assume that same-state cities aren't far apart because of that.

--Lee Gold