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Playing Geography, Fictional Places Edition

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My all-time favorite travel game is called Geography: I have fond memories of playing it in the car on the way to visit my grandparents, or with my cousins when we would travel together to Thanksgiving. It’s not an actual geographical game, but a word game made up of place names.

Detail of a map in fresco of Ancient Italy, from the Vatican Gallery of Maps

Photo taken in Vatican City, in the Vatican Gallery of Maps, featuring a detail of a map in fresco entitled “Italia Antiqva”. This photo happens to include the towns of Gaeta (the southern-most point of our trip) and Sperlonga (a coastal town I particularly liked), along with some education: it hadn’t occurred to me that the Adriatic Sea (“Mare Hadriatic”) might be named for Emperor Hadrian.

The basic play is simple:
Player one names a place. Player two names a place whose name begins with the last letter of the previous place. And so on.

I say Rome, you say Edinburgh, the next player says Holland. (Or if it turns out you were actually saying Edinboro, then the next player could say Ohio.) No repeats.

If someone says a name that’s come up already, they get corrected and try something else; there’s no penalty (which honestly had never occurred to me until someone asked during the below-mentioned game; I replied politely that that’s done in the Draconian Rules version).

Then there are various potential rule negotiations that vary, some established at the start of play, but mostly decided whenever things come up. A not-quite exhaustive list of past negotiations:

  • Do place names that no longer exist count? (Yugoslavia, Soviet Union)
  • What if they’re archeological sites? (Xanadu)
  • Do mythological places count? (Atlantis)
  • Do other fictional places count? (Narnia)
  • Can you leave earth? (Mars, Sea of Tranquility, Crab Nebula)
  • When a place name starts with “The,” do we leave it off? (Netherlands)
  • For places in non-English-speaking countries, do we use the English or local spelling? (Rome vs. Roma). What if you’re in that country at the time?
  • Is “America” a place? (I say no, and I hold the line pretty hard.) *
  • For rivers and mountains, do “river” and “mountain” count as part of the name? (Note: this query doesn’t seem to apply to “ocean,” which is generally included by default.)
  • Do street names count? Do street names count if you’re desperate?
  • If a place has changed its name, can you use the older name? (Leningrad vs. St. Petersburg). Can both be used in the same game?

One important discovery one makes while playing this game is that humans love the letter A.** There is often a point where we have what I call the “A cascade,” in which all the place names begin and end with A, for an impressively long time.***

Conversely, there are other letters that are very promising but rarely appear at the ends of names. A few years ago, I started compiling a list of places that end with uncommon letters. Naypyidaw, Edgecomb, Alcatraz, Czech Republic, Appomattax, and so on…

There is no winning. Play ends when players run out of options (though it’s fine to offer help), or enough people are done, or we arrive at a rest stop or destination. Occasionally we’ll try to pick up again afterward, but it’s tricky to keep the momentum going: in general we’ll either start over or move on to something else.

As you might imagine, playing two games of Geography in close succession can be tricky, since it becomes difficult to remember in which round a name was used. So we have alternate themes. As a kid, I often played a “first names” version, for which I was very pleased to know people named Yolanda (friend of my parents) and Yetta (my great-grandmother) and then extra pleased as a preteen to read an article about conjoined twins named Yvonne and Yvette. More recently, with my own kid and other family or friends, we’ve done it with plants (Negotiations: Use Latin names or only common? Does using both in the same game count as a repeat?) and animals (What about categories? If someone says sparrow, can you also say song sparrow?).

I recently returned from a chorus trip to Rome and Florence (or Roma e Firenze, but we decided on English spellings), and in one of the coach rides, there was a rousing game of Geography, with six people playing, plus a few others who offered suggestions or critiques. During play, the question of whether to allow fictional places came up, and my wife said firmly, “It would have to be only fictional places.” And while I started to talk through it out loud, one of the other players said, “But you could just make stuff up,” because anything you make up would be automatically fictional.

So I thought on it for a few days, and I now propose Geography, Fictional Places Edition:

An overlay map in which the 1st age map of Middle Earth from J.R.R.Tolkien's Silmarillion is combined with the 3rd age map from The Lord of the Rings

An overlay map in which the 1st Age map of Middle Earth from J.R.R.Tolkien’s Silmarillion is combined with the 3rd Age map from The Lord of the Rings. Image from The One Ring.

The play is the same as regular Geography, but with one important difference: the goal here includes the stories and the connections.

Player one names a fictional place. If everyone knows it, then you go on. If not everyone knows it, then you introduce it: “Alola is an island region from the Pokémon TV series; the main character travels there and makes new friends, and they go adventuring, making many discoveries,” or “Nangiyala is the afterlife in The Brothers Lionheart, which I read in an abbreviated form in Cricket magazine and still haven’t read as a full book.” If giving details about the place would provide plot spoilers, you can say so: give the citation but explain that saying more about the place itself would give too much away.

Authoring codicil: If everyone agrees, then yes, you can include places you’ve made up yourself, even on the spot, as long as you provide a good story to go along with it. And certainly if you’ve established them in prior writing.

Our first experiment, at home, has led to the recognition that I don’t keep a coherent list of fictional places in my head. On only the second turn, the kid said something that ended with D, and abruptly every place I had ever read about fell out of my head – musings throughout the trip notwithstanding. “Dreamland” sounded like something, but I wasn’t sure where to place it.**** Then I had to remind myself that Denmark wasn’t fictional. And then we had the first new question: about whether structures are places. “I want to say Dawn Treader,” I mused. Kid was skeptical when I reminded him it’s a boat. “But it’s the setting for most of the book!” I settled instead on Durmstrang, which while also a structure, at least was a stationary structure.***** And there was no objection, except now the kid was stuck on G.

We’ll see how it goes. (-:

With thanks to Jennifer Woodfin, Dan Rosen, and M. Sheffield for contributions and commentary, and Stephen Mayhew for an NER refresher.

———-
* While I do casually use “America” to mean the United States and “American” to refer to its residents, I have several reasons I don’t find it appropriate in a geographical naming setting.

The first is accuracy: the US of A implies that the US is a subpart of the lands of America. But the land mass is divided, and in English we don’t talk about “America” as the entire land mass. We have North America, South America, Central America, possibly the Americas (though then we have “the”). So if we do mean the US, then it’s an alternate name for the same country. If we don’t, then we have a name that’s not actually used that way.

Which brings us to the political argument: While I understand that “America” is short for “the United States of America,” it has bugged me that “America” refers specifically to the US since the time, many years ago in summer camp, when I wished a friend a happy 4th of July, and she said, “I’m not American,” reminding me that she was from Mexico. Holidays aside, it seemed profoundly unjust to me that someone from a country in North America couldn’t say they were American.******

** Well, sounds that are written in English as the letter A.

*** It’s great fun, but it’s also important to be able to end the cascade; I try to keep in mind a set of A names that end with something else: Arctic Circle, Arctic Ocean, Ambler…

**** Hm. With more time for reflection: Dreamland is both a place people go when they sleep and a favorite bedtime CD by Putamayo. I guess the former would work, then. Collective fiction!

***** But I kind of want the boat to count, too.

In the field of Natural Language Processing, there is a machine learning task called Named Entity Recognition. In NER, a computer model is trained to find proper names and categorize them, according to certain categories. In the project I helped on, there were four categories: Person, Organization, Location, and Geopolitical Entity. The distinction between GPE and LOC (which are both geographical) went as follows:

“GPE has a border, a government, and a population. LOC is a geographical region that doesn’t meet these criteria. So, the European Union has all 3 so it is a GPE. The Sahara desert may have a population and possibly a border, but no government, so it is LOC.”
Significantly, “Airports and other structures are LOC.”
But I don’t know about structures that actually change their location.

****** Speaking of the naming of the Americas: when we were in Florence last month, in the Accademia Gallery to see Michelangelo’s David, our local tour guide spoke to us about the Vespucci family. She first confirmed that we knew of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the Americas were named.******* (She was not as surprised that we knew this as an earlier guide had been that we knew the name of Alessandro Botticelli – which for me would have been hard to avoid once my hair was long enough.) Then she explained that the Vespuccis were a well-known family in Florence, and that Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, who had married into the family, became the subject of many of Botticelli’s paintings. (I was surprisingly gratified to learn that one of my artistic hair twins was based on a known person!) And it transpired that Botticelli specifically requested that he be buried near her, and so all three of them are buried with others of the family in a church in Florence. And then it turned out that the church in question, the Chiesa di Ognissanti, was the church in which we would be singing that evening!

******* And, wow, was I wrong about why the land was named for him.
The story I learned was that Amerigo Vespucci made a map of the lands he’d surveyed, and he wrote his name across it as a signature, but people thought it was meant to be the new name of the continent.

As it turns out, this part of the world was named for Amerigo Vespucci by other European mapmakers specifically to honor him, as the first European to recognize that they had not come around to the other side of Asia but instead had found an entire separate land in between.

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2016/07/how-did-america-get-its-name/
(See also the comment therein about using America as a name)

National Coming Out Day and Time Travel: A Belated Post

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(Note: Posted October 2019, updated in 2020.)

A folded scarf in long, crocheted, rainbow stripes.

My first crochet project, ca. 2003.

For the two weeks before I began writing it, I was expecting this post to be (1) a lot shorter and (2) centered on the fact that when I came out 30 years ago on October 10, the Jewish calendar — 19-year cycle notwithstanding — matched up with the same secular days as this year, with Erev Rosh Hashanah on September 29 and Yom Kippur on October 9. It seemed significant that the context for my sudden, startling revelation, coming the day after a fast as it did, should be echoed here 30 years later: Yom Kippur (10/9), Personal Coming Out Day (10/10), National Coming Out Day (10/11).

This is no longer my focus. It is still about dates, though. And about time.*

Things change dramatically over time. Sometimes it takes 30 years, and sometimes it takes two years, or a single day. When I had my sudden, startling revelation on October 10, 1989, I was on a safe, supportive college campus, and I knew at the time that October 11 would be National Coming Out Day and that October 12 would be my frosh hall’s Gay and Lesbian Awareness Workshop.** This was only the beginning of my questioning process, so I wasn’t coming out to anyone else yet. But at that point, I knew that the very next day I could stay quiet in a sea of supportive celebration. I knew that the day after that I could sit in a circle and declare myself a lesbian, and no one would know whether I was role-playing or not, and I could get questions answered without fear. I knew I was incredibly lucky.***

A year or so later, I was in the campus GLBA office and noticed a photo on the wall. It was a cluster of students with signs on the National Mall, and it was labeled, “March on Washington, October 11, 1987”. And I stared. I am good at dates, and I am good at patterns. I knew, unequivocally, in that moment, that National Coming Out Day was created to commemorate that march. And that that meant that National Coming Out Day was created in 1988, and that 1989 was only the second one ever. And I was stunned by how close I had come to missing that day of celebration and power and comfort that I had thought was already an institution.

This is not to say I had taken my safe space for granted. It was just astonishment at how quickly and abruptly — and arbitrarily — things can change. After all, there wasn’t any particular day set up to commemorate the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Rights that I did go to, on April 25, 1993. And yet the power of that march resonated later in powerful ways. I always thought, until five or ten years ago, that the national conversation about marriage equality started in 1994, when Hawai’i made its ruling that a marriage had to be able, based only on gender (not on actual fertility or intention), to produce children. But in fact, the 1993 march had a platform of demands, and one of the demands was an expansion of the definitions of family, including the recognition of domestic partnerships and legalization of same sex marriages.

Another thing that began in 1994 was the introduction of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to Congress. Before this (from 1974), the focus had been promoting the Equality Act to expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ENDA has still not passed, despite being introduced (with gender identity added in 2009) to every Congress save one until 2014, when support wavered and efforts returned to the Equality Act, which this year passed the House but has not moved in the Senate. Instead, we now have the ACLU arguing employment discrimination cases in front of the Supreme Court, and an unfavorable Court at that.

I found myself surprised this week, however, to keep reading online comments framing these court cases as an unthinkable new disaster in this time, from people who were somehow stunned that it should become legal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people in employment. And maybe those commenters live in the states where such rights are protected. The truth is, though, that there is no federal law against this discrimination, just years of painstaking work to establish scattered local and state protections. If the justices rule against us, those laws could be superseded, which indeed would be a devastating push backward. But if, by some chance, they vote in our favor, then we would gain federal protection that we have never had.

[Edited in 2020 to add: And they did rule in our favor! See Bostock vs. Clayton County.****]

It’s been very curious being around long enough to see how much the conversation and the climate have changed over 30 years. Watching and welcoming the emerging gender identity movement, particularly over the last decade, has felt new and fascinating and also strangely familiar. From young kids coming out and public activism to bathroom bills and ongoing violence to language change and new books and new accommodation, I keep feeling, yes, this is where we were back in the ‘90s: visibility and backlash and violence and change. And in the nineties I was told by people who lived through the rise of third wave feminism in the ’70s: this is the way it goes: visibility and backlash and change. And so we all keep going, being visible, speaking our truth, and making change.

I began this essay on October 11, and it’s now grown enough that I’m finishing it a week later, and thus I’ve gotten to see, spread around my Facebook feed, the dawning of a new Day: the second instance of International Pronouns Day, begun last year on the third Wednesday in October. This is only the second one ever.

And this reminded me of something important that did happen just after Yom Kippur this year. We shared our break-fast meal that evening with longtime family friends, and since there were people at the table who didn’t know each other, one of the family, in support of her sibling, suggested we go around and do names and pronouns.

Now, I’ve been including my pronouns in my email signature at work for the past year and a half, but, I realised as it neared my turn, this was the first time I’d ever done it out loud. And then I looked at my kid, for whom this ritual was also new, and watched to see what he’d say. And even though he had only “she” and “they” modeled before his turn, he gamely followed the pattern and said, “…and I use he/him pronouns.” And thus we move forward, one word or day or year at a time, toward safe space, toward recognizing human dignity, and toward comprehensive human rights.


——
*Though, to be fair, only about the most mundane type of time travel.

**The CoLeGA (Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Awareness, later renamed BiLeGA [and eventually, in 1999, BiLeGaTA]) Awareness workshop was my favorite of the required awareness workshops, and it was cleverly designed. Everyone would sit in a circle, with two student facilitators, and everyone had to say, in turn, “I am a lesbian” or “I am a gay man”. That was the only thing we were required to say out loud. (To be fair, there were a few students who refused to do the workshop at all, based on this.) What followed was a role-play, in which the facilitators would give prompts, such as, “Tell me about a time you felt discriminated against,” or “How does it feel to tell people?” and anyone who wanted could reply. If we didn’t identify as gay or lesbian (or bi), we were asked to draw on our experiences based on other identities, or to imagine what it would be like. For the second half, we wrote questions on pieces of paper that we didn’t want to ask aloud, and the facilitators read them out and answered them as best they could.

***Actually, I wasn’t quiet on National Coming Out Day; I was fairly loud and enthusiastic, and I’m pretty sure it was even my proposal (earlier in the week) that for our hall’s turn at the dorm’s Wednesday “wine and cheese” on October 11, we serve chocolate chip cookie dough and milk, both colored with pink food coloring. But I wasn’t loud for myself, quite yet.

****Note that this decision, similar to the provisions of ENDA, covers only employment, leading to renewed focus on the Equality Act, including in the Biden campaign: “Biden will make enactment of the Equality Act during his first 100 days as President a top legislative priority.”

Some Holiday Lunacy! Equinox, Purim, Passover, and Easter

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Lunar Phase Calendar 2019Today (in the northern hemisphere) we welcome the Vernal Equinox — a time of balance — along with the full moon that heralds the arrival of Purim.*

Purim occurs at the mid-point of the Hebrew month of Adar, or in this case Adar Sheni (“second Adar”), the second instance of Adar in what is a leap year in the Jewish calendar. The leap years sprinkled along the 19-year cycle ensure that the lunar calendar keeps pace with the solar calendar, instead of traveling along the year like the Islamic calendar. Indeed, if we skipped the repeat of Adar this year, we’d be getting ready right now for Passover, which begins, also on the full moon, just a month later.

I’ve always been fascinated by the connections between the world we live in and the systems and words we use to describe and organize it. So I remember being completely stunned to learn in college that I could find the Jewish holidays by looking outside at night. I’d grown up learning and celebrating the holidays, and I’d always known that the Jewish calendar was a lunar calendar, but I thought that was an ancient thing. I hadn’t understood that those connections between the names and counting and the real world would still be intact — after all, our months aren’t like that. But calendars are designed, whatever their focus, to keep going, as best they can. So unlike Gregorian months, which only approximate the moon cycles that inspire their name, Hebrew months begin, every time, with the first new sliver of moon**.

I also knew that Jewish holidays have specific dates (as do holidays in any calendar): Chanukah on 25th of Kislev, Tu b’Shevat (as named) on the 15th of Shevat. I hadn’t paid much attention to the others, and so now I had the pleasure of learning that most of the major holidays occur on the 15th of their month … and coincide with the full moon. Tu B’Shevat. Purim. Passover. Sukkot. Because full moon is a great time to celebrate.***
(Begin 5/4 time full moonlight dance here!)

So. And then, some years later, I found myself looking through a list of Easter dates**** and wondered what was up with the one Christian holiday that traveled around as much — in fact possibly more — than Jewish ones.

And I was most charmed to learn that it combined everything: Easter comes on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

So, okay, here comes the equinox, timed for 5:58 pm Eastern Daylight Time (9:58 pm UTC, 10:58 pm Central European Time); when exactly is the moon full? As it turns out, just about four hours later!

So why isn’t it Easter week right now?

Because, as I just learned in the last week, there is an Ecclesiastical rule that declares Equinox unequivocally to be March 21.*****

…Interestingly, those same ecclesiastical rules state that the vernal equinox is fixed on March 21 (for European longitudes), even though from the years 2008 through 2103 the equinox will occur no later than March 20. In fact, in the year 2020, for the first time since 1896, spring will arrive on the 19th across the entire United States, and in 2048, that will happen across the whole of Europe.

So, while in an astronomical sense, March 20 marks the first full moon of spring, so far as the Christian church is concerned, we must put the Paschal Term on hold for a month until the next full moon, on April 19. That also occurs on Good Friday, and at sundown that same day, Passover begins. Two days later will come a rather late Easter Sunday, on April 21.

An even more extreme situation will take place in 2038. In that year, the equinox will fall on March 20 with a full moon the very next day (a Sunday). So, astronomically, Easter should fall on March 28 of that year. In reality, however, as mandated by the rules of the church, Easter in 2038 will be observed as late as it can possibly come, on April 25!

So. Many things to ponder. And a month to wait, for both Passover and Easter. In the meanwhile, I wish you a time of great balance, patience, and equilibrium, on the day that everyone gets the same amount of daylight, no matter where they are, all over the world.

______

*Also the equinox-related Eostara, Holi, Norouz/Char-Shanbe-Soori, Higan, the Autumnal Equinox in the southern hemisphere, and more … including the many cultures that celebrate the vernal equinox as the first day of Spring.******

**What I learned then, from posters in the campus center, and from the meetings they echoed, was that this first day of each month is known as Rosh Chodesh, head of the month, as Rosh Hashanah is head of the year. And it turns out that Rosh Chodesh, which I had never heard of, is celebrated as a women’s holiday. Amazing that I didn’t learn this in Hebrew School. (Hmm.)

***Chanukah is a notable exception. It’s not a major holiday, except in that it coincides with so many (other) Solstice holidays. And a number of years ago, it was pointed out to me (thank you, Otter) that Chanukah, known as the Festival of Lights though its name means “Rededication,” doesn’t just occur during the darkest time of year; it also neatly covers the darkest time of month. Starting a few days before the end of the month of Kislev, and ending a few days after, the holiday takes us into the darkness and then back out again, while the lights of the Chanukah menorah grow ever-brighter.

****Possibly this was when I was confirming that my first cat’s birthday was even earlier than I’d thought. We were told she was born on Easter. And so we (okay, I) looked it up and thenceforward celebrated her birthday on March 25 … until discovering that I’d remembered wrong, and Easter that year had actually been March 23.

*****It’s not clear to me what time or time zone is relevant here, or whether the moon must follow the entire day or just its beginning.

******I don’t, though. I consider this to be mid-spring, in the midst of the winter-to-summer transition process that is spring. But that’s another post. Oh, wait; it actually is another post.