Clearing out the backlog Part 3

Earlier this year, I for some reason caught a section of 60 Minutes on John Stilgoe. He's a professor at Harvard, and I really don't know how he manages to keep a position. Not that I think he's doing anything wrong, in fact he's probably doing something nobody else in academia is really doing, emphasizing observation. He got my attention with one of his easy demonstrations: Look at the logo for FedEx. Go on, I'll wait. Do you see an arrow? Do you see it now? Look between the E and the x. Now I had seen it once, a long time back, and then forgotten about it, and then I noticed it when Kinko's got bought and became a FedEx fiefdom that their new logo was a star made of three arrow points. Nice continuity on their part.
S'anyway... I decided to pick up a copy of his treatise Outside Lies Magic, which tries to emphasize observation in the context of exploring your local geography and history. If nothing else, he managed to explain one of the great mysteries of my life. When I lived with my parents there was one road to go to Washington, and that was via Meadowlands. At the end of that road, you'd come to a stop sign and state 519 was there, and if you went across that, you'd end up on Racetrack Road. But Racetrack Road and Allison Park Road didn't meet evenly, they were skew by about 15 feet. So you'd always have to make this hard chicane to go across, and usually about once a year somebody'd get their car clipped going through there. It never made any sense. But with a simple explanation of township planning, premises of equal area for lots, and the curvature of the earth, I understood why the gap was there.
If you're interested in keeping your eyes open, and being able to make connections of things beyond that that you'd find in a tossup, I'd recommend him highly.