NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2026 Jul 28, 10:42 -0700
Josh Carty:
Ha ha. I would guess that many NavList followers will not get that reference! The old PBS "geography mystery" series "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" (based on an even earlier PC video game) had a big impact in the 1990s. I also remember a Saturday Night Live sketch starring Bob Saget with a spoof game "Where in the World is San Diego California" --a one-note joke but a cute setup.
According to the wikipedia article for the original series, "The show was created partially in response to the results of a National Geographic survey [...] one in four being unable to locate the Soviet Union or the Pacific Ocean." I suspect that one in four unable to read a global map is probably true today, too. I wonder how many of them are sailing the oceans right now?? And I would point our that the number who can find the Soviet Union on a map has probably declined since that survey was conducted! Ha.
Frank Reed
