Hmm, not trying the Asia/Africa tests...I already know I"d do very badly. But the states one was easy--but I've BEEN to very nearly all of them. So easier to remember. I think I realized the only two I really don't know are New Hampshire and Vermont--I'm not sure which is which.

Vermont is on the left.

Ba-dum bum.

I think the only states I got, beyond Maine and California, were by deduction. 'That's next to Virginia-- it could be West Virginia' or 'Just above South Dakota? Probably North Dakota.' I might do better at counties of England, though.

And I'm thinking about it way too much, aren't I?

Perfect on SE Asia, perfect on North Africa, NSM on West Africa and South Africa. I got the big countries, but there's so many little ones...

Vermont is to the west--if you can remember that New Hampshire is an original colony and Vermont isn't, it's pretty easy to keep them straight by thinking of order of settlement.

And, I lived in Vermont for a summer.

One of my college friends confessed to me that he couldn't keep Alabama and Mississippi straight. I sort of understand--they're shaped a lot alike--but I was miffed at the time.

which really puts this into context,

Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. ..."the administration's plan", says Marshall, is "to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism."

And I think I'm hatching a theory.

I wouldn't expect non-Americans to know more than a handful of states, but it did kind of surprise me that a lot of the people I met in England didn't know which coast fairly major cities were on. People would discover I was from Philadelphia, dating someone from Seattle, and ask if they were anywhere near each other.

Fairness forces me to admit that when I got word a few months before my trip that I'd be working in Bristol, I had to look it up on a map. However, if someone had told me it was near Bath, I would've known exactly where to look. Before I lived there, my knowledge of British geography was deeply colored by my leisure reading choices.

Vermont doesn't border the ocean. I remember this because I remember when some Vermont politicians were trying to get Lake Champlain classified as a Great Lake, because there's some sort of federal waterways fund or something that gives money to states bordering the ocean or a Great Lake.

Heh.

I know where the places I've been are.

The rest are all squiggles on a page. My home state is large and distinct. Those tiny things you call states back east confuse me.

I spent a long part of my childhood thinking that Britain was vast, because it took days to get from here to there. (You know, I knew they were riding horses, but somehow I assumed that horses and cars went the same speed.) I was very disappointed when I discovered that the English and the Scots had been fighting over a football-field's worth of territory for several hundred years. I mean, for crying out loud.

Also, there was the part about all the different languages and dialects and accents in that one tiny island. I mean, surely people had to be thousands and thousands of miles apart to talk so differently in the same country!

And I think I'm hatching a theory.

moonlit, are you bursting into song, then?