I had a vicious sinus headache on this grey, rainy day in Washington. The cure: ibuprofen, lots of milky tea and continuous lashings of slightly gloomy — and ironically mood-elevating — Europop. The Eurotrashier the better.
There’s a snippet of such a song on one of those GEICO “caveman” ads. The one where’s he’s on a people-mover in the airport. The song is “Remind Me”; the group, Röyksopp. Norwegians! Does it get any better? (Maybe I can get a-ha’s most recent disc while I’m at it.)
But it is the video — dutifully YouTubed — that leads me to write. The visual plot is of a work-a-day London lass living through the kind of schematic diagrams city planners, transit engineers, economists and international development folk “popularized” after the 1960s. The kind of thing you pick up on intuitively at IKEA. The kind of charts that, as a child, captivated me the way earlier generations lost themselves in the red parts of maps of the British Empire.
The video is a parity of the truism that maps and charts can teach more efficiently and more effectively than text.
There are some maps — cartograms, really — that can help a church study group conceptualize the realities of world population growth, poverty, wealth, HIV rates and so forth. No Europop, but groovy in a geek kinda way.
