Tagged: culture

Beefscapes

Studies Of Burger Territory

by Stephen Von Worley on March 14th, 2010

And now, we present four regional zooms of the burger territory maps, similar to the originals except that they represent the two most influential franchises at each point on the beefscape. As before, the underlying metric is our fanciful, inverse-squared, earth-penetrating burger force, as broadcast by the 36,000-plus U.S. restaurant locations of the eight largest chopped-sirloin-slingin’ chains.

We intend these maps as abstract studies of geography, marketing, and consumption, in which the patterns and shapes matter more than the particulars of the involved corporations. However, for completeness sake, know that we colored each point with a 2-to-1 blend of the hues of the first and second-most influential chains per our original scheme: black for McDonald’s, red for Burger King, yellow for Wendy’s, magenta for Jack In The Box, periwinkle for Sonic, cream for Dairy Queen, green for Carl’s Jr., and cyan for Hardee’s.

Let’s start with a view of East Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi:

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A Disturbance In The Force

McDonald's Versus The Competition

by Stephen Von Worley on February 23rd, 2010

Imagine, if you will, the burger force – a field of energy that radiates from every freshly-cooked patty, earth-penetrating and inverse-squared with distance, compelling the hungry carnivore to seek out and devour the well-done ground beef at the source.

Now, wrap that concept in a Star Wars motif – set in the present day, with the second-tier burger chains as the rebels – each, by themselves, without mutual aid, battling the 12,000-plus restaurant McEmpire. The situation is most dire, for the upstarts control but a few significant islands of territory amid the overwhelming and darkly-rendered influence of the McForce:

The territory controlled by the top 8 U.S. burger chains.

Territory controlled by the eight largest U.S. burger chains.

In this and the following graphic, each individual restaurant location has equal power. The entity that controls each point casts the most aggregate burger force upon it, as calculated by the inverse-square law – kind of like a chart outlining the gravitational wells of galactic star clusters, but in an alternate, fast food universe.

By far, the largest pocket of resistance is Sonic Drive-In’s south-central stronghold: more than 900 restaurants packed into the state of Texas alone. Sheer density is the key to victory!

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My Racist Atlas

by Stephen Von Worley on December 15th, 2009

Editor’s Note: Company names have been redacted to prevent unrequited litigation.

Now and then, for the sheer fun of it, I break out my cape, light the pipe, don a plaid cap, pick up the magnifying glass, and do a bit of sleuthing. Thusly motivated, I couldn’t resist a recent garbage sale bargain: the redacted Road Atlas of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, 1949 Edition. With it at my fingertips, I have the 411 on the entire pre-Interstate North American transportation grid – perfect for solving the occasional mystery of urban geography!

Like any true map-aholic, I treasure quality time spent with an atlas, but not everyone shares my affections. To the right-brainers amongst us, a book of maps might as well be an unintelligible stream of Yiddish, played backwards.

For them, to mellow the overwhelming dryness of the symbolic gibberish within, redacted prudently wrapped their atlas with a kitschy cover. At first glance, it’s completely innocent: a playful illustration of the lower 48 states, dotted with cartoonish drawings of the regional attractions and activities. However, a closer look at the Southeast exposes some unpleasantries:

The southeastern U.S., as pictured by my atlas. Click the image for a larger version.

Here, we see the sole representations of African Americans: a bikini-clad lady near Miami, one man dancing emphatically to the banjo of another, and in Mississippi and Louisiana, oh dear… Yes, that’s several black people picking cotton and rice. Holy crap!

Did Lou Dobbs ever intern at redacted ?

Probably not, for the cover features some nasty white stereotypes, too. In Tennessee, witness a shotgun-wielding, moonshine-nuzzling loafer, and to his west, the shirtless Missouri gentleman, raising his violin’s bow to menace a donkey, within a convenient stagger of the Great Still of Arkansas! Okay, yeah, I’ll admit it… my great uncles Jethro and Jebediah weren’t exactly role models, but did they have to put them on the cover?

According to my Ebay forensics, the illustration debuted in 1949 and persisted until the 1969 edition, wherein someone finally did something about it, replacing all of the black persons, except bikini lady, with a couple of stately buildings, a factory, and a humanoid of indeterminate origin in turtleneck and cowboy hat:

The 1969 cover revision.

However, the trashy Caucasian images remained until 1984, when a complete cover redesign relegated the entire unfortunate incident to the dollar bin of history.

Now, my atlas serves as a social mile marker of sorts. It might have been in fits and starts, but over the past seventy years, we’ve come a long way, baby, in the right direction.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

The Hungry Midwest

America's Heartland And McDonald's

by Stephen Von Worley on October 20th, 2009

Say what you may about Midwesterners, but one thing is for certain: they love to eat! With that in mind, I proudly unveil the first in a series of zooms of the McDistance Map – the Midwest United States as visualized by the distance to the nearest McDonald’s:

The Midwestern United States, visualized by distance to the nearest McDonald's. Click on the image for a larger version!

At this scale, the individual McFiefdoms become more apparent. To the northwest, they cluster in tense armistice at Minneapolis, and counter-clockwise from there, at Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, the sundry cities of Ohio, and points east. Running with the feudal metaphor, imagine the manager of each location, late at night, climbing to the red-tiled roof, donning his crown, and declaring “I am master of all I survey!” Oh, wait… That’s what they do at Burger King. Nevermind!

In the heart of the Midwest, we’re hard-pressed to find a viable McVoid, with the conspicuous exception of the large, pickle-shaped gap at the center of our map: Lake Michigan. Come summertime, fishermen, jetskiers, and party boaters frolic on its crystal waters by the thousands. Everyone’s living large and playing hard until, seemingly without warning, things get ugly: they’re offshore and famished. To the Eager Entrepreneur, would McDonald’s sell a franchise-on-a-barge? With a Boat Thru, preferably?

Home to eight million hungry mouths, the Chicago Metropolitan Area hugs Lake Michigan’s southwestern shores. There, in suburban Des Plaines, Ray Kroc, founder of the present-day McDonald’s corporation, opened his first location in April of 1955. This wasn’t the debut Micky Dee’s, however, for Kroc licensed the concept from brothers “Dick” and “Mac” McDonald, who had already established a small but successful collection of their namesake restaurants. For more information regarding that somewhat cantankerous saga, read this.

Number of McDonald’s in the entire state of Illinois, sixty years ago: zero. Within the fifty-mile purview of the Sears Tower’s 103rd-floor Skydeck, today: 424!

On this side of the country, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wins the dubious distinction of Most McUnderendowed, by a landslide. Understandably, mind you, for the bears keep tearing apart the restaurants, and the cultivated tastebuds of the discerning Yooper are not easily impressed. Who needs Micky Dee’s when you got da pasties, eh?

Once again, thanks to AggData for providing the geolocated McDonald’s location information that made these maps possible. To view the full, coast-to-coast McDistance Map, see my original post, entitled “Where The Buffalo Roamed.”

Set Your Sights High, Son

Self-Expression And The Transamerica Pyramid

by Stephen Von Worley on October 1st, 2009

Top And Flop

We all have our long foul balls in life – the solid hits that power over the fence, but just outside of that yellow post at the edge of right field. As a photographer, mine have mounded into a motley pile of not-quite-good-enough shots that I periodically revisit to see if I can do better.

For example, consider the pleasant vignette to the right, from August ’06, informally titled Top And Flop. It melds the clean lines of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid with the rougher textures of a vintage Chinatown hotel sign, tidily evoking the many schisms at the edges of downtown Frisco. Of skyscrapers to bay windows; bankers amongst bike messengers; conservative versus radical; breeder and gay; the materialistic sterility of today’s financial district, contrasted with the brash, sloppy pleasures of yesteryear’s Barbary Coast; et cetera.

Top and Flop is no home run. Still, it’s got potential, so I had it up on the screen, under review for content, framing, light, and focus. Scrolling across the Transamerica building at 100-percent zoom, I noticed something weird - a subtle, strangely-organic blip. Hmmm. I leaned closer. What is that? Etched upon the dirty concrete of the Pyramid’s windward edge, in Comic-Sans-meets-Script font, 600 feet above street level…

A series of crops of Top And Flop at increasing zoom, photo-enhanced for readability.

A tag?!?! Yes, that’s clearly the letters L-E-O. Definitely not the biggest or brightest doodle known to civilization. But, oh, the placement! Over the time that it lingered – hours, days, weeks, months, years? - it achieved immortality, forever captured in the zoomed-in snapshots of countless tourists. A work lacking the scale or sophistication of a Banksy, to be sure. Nevertheless, on its lofty merits alone, a defining moment in graffiti history, destined for the Hall Of Fame, where it might slot directly below the time that Fairey stenciled Andre’s mug on the Capitol Rotunda.

Forty stories up on the window cleaning platform, it probably went down something like this. A couple of young bucks. Break time. Wafting testosterone. Four minis of Cuervo apiece. The Dare. And bam! Leo was hanging off the corner of the building, power spraying his name into the grime.

The next night, cutting loose on nearby Columbus Avenue, he gestured upwards towards the Transamerica. Confused, his buddies craned their necks to see, and beaming a Cheshire grin, Leo serenaded them with this little ditty:

Yo sucka yo my name is Lee-oh,
I got mo’ smoove than Captain Eee-Oh,
Up the Pyramid, I holla with my hose,
Don’t try to stop me, I spy the po-po,
Bet you wish you could write like Mee-oh,
Can’t touch this my name is Lee-oh.

Cue the chuckles, fist bumps, and Jägermeister!

But wait a second: let’s not make an ass out of you and mee-oh. Everyone deserves a fair shake, so take our arrogant punk and flip him 180 degrees. Up on the platform: dutiful Leo, husband and father-to-be. Night shift wrapping up. Ten hours straight of misty monotony. Vast deficits of sleep, caffeine, and core body temperature. Desperate yearnings to do something – anything – creative. Oh, poor, valiant Leo! Give him five minutes of cathartic self-expression, stat!

Sensing confusion, the dark-horse scenario trots in, braying that we’ve got it all wrong: that our tagger was no Leo at all! The letters could be an homage to Low Earth Orbit! The scribblings of an unbalanced August-born astrologer! A tribute from DiCaprio’s Number One Fan! The truncated autograph of a Leon with poor planning skills!

As with any great mystery, we’ll never know for sure. However, the Deities Of Comeuppant Comedy assure me that the Leon Theory is incontrovertibly correct. Myself, I haven’t decided.

What is certain is that I’ll soon be OCR-ing my entire photography archive, in search of more of these twinkly little gems!

(Hat tip to The Lonely Island for the Lee-oh-Mee-oh rhyme.)

Weather Sealed finds inspiration at the fringes of art, science, photography, and life. Our guiding principles? Quality over quantity, original content, and the occasional chuckle. Read more...

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