Google News Has No Idea Where South Dakota Is

Which, granted, puts them in plentiful if not good company, but still:

Believe me, I am used to people assuming that South Dakota is in the south, but I have yet to encounter this strange assumption that it is in Africa...and northeastern Africa at that!

As a public service, I present this handy map that shows the location of South Dakota in relation to Sudan. However, I pulled the illustration from Google Maps, so who knows how much we can trust it.

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Trying to Be a Good Citizen!

Sometimes all you can do is lead 'em to water. The rest is up to them.

Case in point: Last week I received a regular updates from the City of Sioux Falls, which included information about today's municipal elections. Since the community occasionally flirts with the idea of "super precincts" and otherwise is given to play around with polling locations, I thought it best to follow a provided link to make sure we're still in the same place.

We are, but I noted that the address of the neighborhood school was wrong. The list of polling places said it's on South Fourth Street, but in this town there ain't no such animal. Streets run east-west; avenues run north-south, so you'll never find an address on South Forth Street. The proper venue is South Fourth Avenue. Not an issue for us veterans, but newcomers might be confused.¹

So I, civic-minded as always, quickly dashed off e-mail to the entities indicated at the bottom of the list, viz., the County Auditor and the City Clerk.

In reasonably short order I received replies from each of them, thanking me for bringing the error to their attention.

And today comes another update from the city, with the link to the list of precinct polling locations...and the still-wrong street for Longfellow School.

Well, to be fair, both the County Auditor and the City Clerk merely thanked me for my efforts on behalf of clarity and accuracy; neither of them said anything about correcting the error.

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¹Indeed, anyone attempting to find number 1116, east or west, on Fourth Street in Sioux Falls will quickly find himself on the wrong side(s) of town entirely. In other places I've lived--specifically, Omaha--numbered streets and avenues conveniently run parallel, meaning you'd never be more than a block off if, say, someone told you Fourth Street instead of Fourth Avenue. Not so here. Another oddity of Sioux Falls' street numbering system is that the center of town is said to be the intersection of Phillips Avenue and Ninth Street, the location of City Hall. All well and good, but it confuses the heck out of people who are used to cities where, say, 1116 South Fourth Avenue would be found near the corner of Eleventh Street and Fourth Avenue--when in Sioux Falls it's on Fourth Avenue between Nineteenth and Twentieth streets. You gotta have your wits about you if you're going to drive in this burg.

An Unanswerable Question?

This one has me stumped, I'll admit.

I was taking an online survey the other evening, and one of the first questions, if not the first, was :

CITY. Which of the following cities do you live nearest to? (Check one only)

So far, so good. There was a drop-down menu with a fairly long list of choices--Amarillo, Baltimore, Kansas City, Nashville, New York, and on and on.

And there, at the bottom of the lengthy list (right after Wilkes-Barre), was the stumper:

None of the Above

Well, clearly, that can't be right. One of those cities must be nearest to me. Even if the list had consisted solely of cities on, say, the African continent, one of them would have had to be nearest to my domicile, no?

I mean, if the question is, Do you live nearer to the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean, the answer cannot be "neither." You do live nearer to one than the other. (I suppose it's mathematically possible to live on a spot that is precisely equidistant to both shores...but even so the odds are greater that you would be at least a couple of inches closer to one or the other.) And don't tell me that you actually live closer to the Indian Ocean: That wasn't the question! The question was which of these particular oceans do you live closer to.

Ditto for the list of cities. I don't live very close to Las Vegas, but that wasn't the question--the question was which one of these cities do I live nearest to...and clearly there is an answer. (In my case it happens to be Kansas City; your actual mileage will vary.)

Which makes me wonder where the people who wrote the survey live.