A sense of place. In this case, mis-place.

[captainsblog]

Or, one good rant deserves another.

I'm back from a deposition at another lawyer's office. While waiting for that to start, I typed out a suitable rant on my mobile, following on up one from almost the identical time last Thursday where distance and punctuality were, similarly, inversely related:




Dude showed up seconds later, and was relatively patient and painless with my client, so I withdraw the threat of sacking, but in that Facebook posting lies another rantworthy subject:

Never mind where- WTF is "Kenilworth, New York?"

Were you to click that box on the actual entry, you'd see this-




- which exists, don't get me wrong. The pin's about a mile south of where I actually was on Route 324, but the name's the thing.  I know there's a street named Kenilworth somewhere around there, and maybe even a school, but I've lived here for over two-thirds of the past 32 years, and I have never, ever heard of anyone referring to that area by that name.

And Kenilworth is not alone.  This very home is tagged by various location softwares by any number of different names, depending, I think, on which Time Warner server is feeding the modem at that particular modem. I've seen entries "located" to Buffalo (the big nearby city we don't live in), Amherst (the town and school district we do live in), Williamsville (the neighboring village and school district we don't live in but which is the name designated to our zip code), Snyder (an adjacent hamlet but also the name of the fire district we're in) and, occasionally, even further-flung stuff like Harris Hill and Getzville.

I've heard talk on the radio that Ralph Wilson I'm Not Dead Yet Stadium, home of your Buffalo Bills, has a similar Google problem.  Apparently when you use location services at or near there, you're not placed in Buffalo, or even in Orchard Park (the town where it actually is), but in something called Windham.  Yet another name I've never heard in actual use around here except by the sports jockeys talking about this particular issue when they're using their mobiles while broadcasting from the stadium.

Making it even weirder is that there are, in many cases, actual places in New York that have these names. Often, places far, far away. There really is a Windham, New York- it's in the Catskills, and hosts the Windham Ski Resort.  Wonder what GPS has to say about that. Harris Hill is a far better known name closer to Elmira, where it's the home of a Soaring Museum and other aviation-related activities; there is a road here by that name, and even a church and elementary school, but they're all in towns that go by other names.

It's particularly annoying that GPS-type functions get caught in these kinds of weird snares. Some, I suspect, relate to names of defunct villages and hamlets that long passed from the lexicon, but the brainless superbrains behind the computing weren't told that.  Or they're relying on obscure identifying names on FCC cell tower applications that override sense and sensibility.

Other times, politicians get in the mess. The main drag of my growing-up neighborhood was (and, for me, always will be) named Newbridge Avenue. The "bridge" was no longer new, and probably not even there, by the time I came along, but another highway from our little burg also ran to it, and so they helpfully named it Newbridge Road. To prevent confusion, back in the 80s, town officials renamed the first one as East Meadow Avenue. I'll never use those words, but I understand them. What GPS doesn't understand, though, is that nobody except some stupid town councilman knows it as Irving Adelman Avenue.  Which is weird, because even though I actually met Irving once or twice (he was a longtime fixture at the local public library), I had no idea they'd gone done and re-renamed the street for him until it started showing up on maps and such.

I fear for out-of-town drivers winding up halfway to the Atlantic Ocean, or at least the bridge that is no longer new if it's even there, because they can't find a single street sign or a single person who has the slightest idea who or where Irving is. If, of course, he's even there:

Bang.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Ah, memories! I used to perform The Ballad of Irving way back when. Hey, it was practically a new song then.

Thanks!

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Not the Dr. Demento version, strictly. For some reason, "two sets of dishes" and "mogen david" were considered au courant enough for us goys, but the yarmulke reference wasn't, so they changed it on the single to "shlepping a salami and pumpernickel bread." I've now heard both enough times to remember them more or less in parallel.