And Green Bay Is Still In The Middle Of Nowhere

It's the first full day of the NFL season, and opening day for the Packers. So I'm not really paying too much attention to blog matters today. I do, though, want to have something for the non-football fans to do.

So I'm going to direct you to Robert D. Kaplan of the Wall Street Journal, who explains how, as small as the world has become due to the advent of technology (I mean, look at me; random guy from Wisconsin randomly dropping in on Guyana or the Cook Islands or someplace whenever he feels like it and going 'hey, what's shakin'?'), geography still must be taken into account. Where things are, where things are in relation to other things, what used to be somewhere but is now somewhere else, how easy it is to get from Point A to Point B, whether or not you want whatever's at Point A to be able to get to Point B. We still talk about who neighbors who in the Middle East. We still talk about nations trying to build missiles and the ranges of those missiles. We still talk about border crossings, their lengths, the terrain of the border, the ease in crossing them.

Heck, it's Week 1. We talk about how well fans travel to away games. We talk about college conferences that bear increasingly tenuous resemblances to the regions they purport to represent, and often do so in the pros as well when it comes up. (The Atlanta Braves used to be in the National League West. The Winnipeg Jets are in the NHL's Southeast Division.) We talk about what sits next to or otherwise near stadiums, and any potential weather effects that might have to be taken into account (e.g. the variable winds at Wrigley Field; the thin air at Coors Field; the climate of any cold-weather NFL city or any city with a retractable-roof stadium). And how do you think rivalries form half the time?

Go get 'em, Pack.