The now widely used Mercator map was created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator.
Its main purpose was to help European sailors navigate the oceans, as cartography Professor James Cheshire at University London College explained.
“He wanted a straight line to be drawn on a map to look like a straight line in reality if you followed a compass bearing,” he told the BBC. “That was what it was intended to do, and that’s what it does brilliantly well.”
To keep those angles correct on a flat map, Mercator had to stretch the grid lines wider as they moved away from the equator toward the poles.
His map accommodates for the curvature of the Earth by making countries near the equator seem much smaller than they are, with countries nearer the poles appearing stretched.
The distortion is a result of it being impossible to accurately represent the surface of a globe on a two-dimensional chart.
More than 450 years on, Mercator’s creation is still the basis for many of the maps we see in classrooms, on TV and online, including Google Maps.
But critics of the Mercator map say there is a psychological effect to viewing some places as smaller than they actually are and others as larger, as we instinctively view bigger things as more important.
For Kenyan geographer Kioko Muendo, this has implicitly downplayed Africa’s vast resources, population and investment opportunities.
“Maps are more than just guides for travellers – they shape how regions are perceived politically and economically,” he told the BBC.
It took decades for John Chiang to hustle into the top ranks of California politics, and he relished all the schmoozing along the way.
On Lunar New Year, Chiang turned up at a firecracker party in Westminster. Weeks later, he woke early for a cattlemen’s breakfast in Sacramento. When the Fresno Rotary Club sought a luncheon speaker, Chiang made time.
His nonstop networking has paid dividends. He won five elections in a rout, most recently in 2014 for state treasurer.
Yet to many Californians, Chiang is just a vaguely familiar name, often mispronounced. (It’s Chung, not Chang.) It shows up on ballots, somewhere near the middle.
But now that he’s running for governor, Chiang is competing on a much bigger stage. Voters pay close attention to the top of the ticket, appraising character and personality.
For the first time in his career, the way that Chiang’s reserved, low-key demeanor comes off on television will matter — all the more so in a race against fellow Democrats Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom, two of the state’s most charismatic politicians.
A strait-laced finance man, Chiang, 55, dismissed the former mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco as “stylish” — more showhorse than workhorse.
Chiang, who lives in a condo around the corner from a South Bay mall, wears baggy suits from Nordstrom Rack. He called himself “Torrance stylish,” then burst out laughing.
“I’m quite OK with being a season behind,” he said.
At a time of constant drama in the Trump White House, Chiang hopes that Californians will turn to a more ordinary style of leadership, as they did when they elected Gray Davis governor a generation ago.
His manner can come off as unpolished. Chiang, unlike his nimble opponents, can get mired in explaining the likes of “surplus money investment pools” — not surprising for a onetime high school mathlete who majored in finance and won election to California’s Board of Equalization on his way up to state controller and treasurer.
“He’s sort of an accidental politician,” said Michael Genest, who was state finance director under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Chiang has already banked nearly $9 million for the governor’s race, ensuring he’ll have plenty to spend on ads before the June 2018 primary.
For now, he is playing up his defiant streak. In 2008, when he was controller, he refused to obey Schwarzenegger’s order to cut the pay of state workers to minimum wage until lawmakers passed a budget.
State Treasurer John Chiang, holding the microphone, flaunts his off-key singing at a karaoke stop in Santa Ana with a group of young Democrats on June 23. (Video by Michael Finnegan / Los Angeles Times)
“I was the last person standing, and I said, ‘Gov. Schwarzenegger, you don’t do that to 200,000 good people,’ ” Chiang told union leaders at a labor gathering last month in Orange County.
In 2011, Chiang enraged legislators by docking their pay during another budget impasse, saying they’d breached a law that punishes them for late spending plans. He boasts that friends in the Legislature stopped talking to him.
“It made me the most unpopular person in Sacramento,” Chiang told a crowd in Anaheim.
Critics see a pattern of crass opportunism. “It’s all about what’s best for himself and what will generate headlines — not what’s best for the state,” said Matt David, a Republican strategist who was deputy chief of staff to Schwarzenegger.
The son of immigrants from Taiwan, Chiang grew up with three younger siblings in Palos Heights, Ill. His father was a plastics engineer, his mother a full-time parent.
They were the first Asian family to move into the mainly white upscale Chicago suburb in the 1960s, when Chiang was just starting grade school. He recalls rampant bigotry — taunts, fights, vandalism and “ugly racial epithets.” It left him feeling isolated but taught him empathy.
“The hurt goes deep,” he said. “It makes me who I am.”
At home, Chiang’s parents spoke mostly English, but also Taiwanese Hokkien, Mandarin and Japanese. Every few years, the family would visit relatives in Taiwan, which was under Japanese occupation when Chiang’s parents were children.
Chiang remembers his mother cooking delicious Chinese food for his school lunches. But to fit in, he begged her to switch to American sandwiches, preferably on Wonder bread.
“I was petrified bringing lunch to school,” Chiang said. “Everybody had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
At 12 years old, he was captivated by the Watergate hearings. “All I knew is the president lied, and he had secret tapes, and it was like, ‘Oooooh, the president has secret tapes.’ ”
He was stunned by the prominence of a Japanese American, Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, in the congressional investigation of President Nixon. It was a jarring counterpoint to the racism in his own neighborhood.
“You’re just trying to get dignity and respect, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, how did that guy get to be a United States senator?’ ”
State Treasurer and Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Chiang attends the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum on June 1.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Chiang graduated in 1984 from the University of South Florida in Tampa, then interned on Capitol Hill while earning a law degree at Georgetown University in Washington. He worked for one Democratic congressman from Illinois (Lane Evans) and two from California (Norman Mineta and Robert Matsui).
“I was always interested in public policy,” Chiang said. “I fell in love with it in Washington, D.C.”
In 1988, he moved to Los Angeles to work downtown at the Internal Revenue Service. He settled in Chatsworth. But the job — screening corporate pension plans — left him “emotionally barren,” Chiang said.
He quickly left the IRS to work on the campaign for Proposition 100, a measure to reward good drivers with lower car-insurance rates. Voters rejected it, but Chiang was hooked on campaign work.
For a decade, he bounced from one to the next: Gray Davis for controller, Kathleen Brown for treasurer, Mel Levine for U.S. Senate, Barbara Boxer for U.S. Senate, Don Perata for controller, Brown again — this time for governor.
Chiang was an all-purpose operative, raising money, writing speeches and rounding up political support. He also took staff jobs for Davis at the controller’s office and for Boxer at her Senate office in L.A.
“He’s incredibly competent, he’s very smart and he’s very likable — kind of rare in the business,” said Marc Litchman, who in the ’80s and ’90s raised money with Chiang for Westside and San Fernando Valley candidates.
“A lot of people fold under the pressure of all that rejection or people dodging you, and John, he took it in stride,” he said.
Chiang’s genuine fondness for political events — nights, weekends, no matter — was striking to Bob Blumenfield, a longtime friend now on the L.A. City Council.
“It’s almost frightening how much of his life he’s given to being everywhere,” Blumenfield said.
Following Chiang’s path was his more outgoing younger sister, Joyce. She, too, got a law degree at Georgetown University. After a stint at the congressional office of Democrat Howard Berman of the San Fernando Valley, she went to work as a lawyer at what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Chiang saw a future for his sister in elected office.
But one evening in January 1999, she vanished on her way home to the apartment that she shared with their brother Roger in Washington’s Dupont Circle. She was 28 years old. A few months later, her body washed up on the Potomac River. Police ultimately concluded the cause was homicide, but no killer was caught.
“She was the person I was closest to in the world, so her loss is devastating,” Chiang said, his voice cracking.
Trouble struck the family again in 2005, when Roger Chiang admitted to embezzling more than $360,000 from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, where he worked as outreach director. He served a year in prison.
State Treasurer John Chiang has described himself on the campaign trail as a “tough, strong fiscal watchdog.”
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
John Chiang, who has no children, is separated from his wife of 10 years. In his scant spare time, he likes to visit his six godchildren, play poker or watch sports or “Game of Thrones” with friends.
When he campaigns, Chiang describes himself as a “tough, strong fiscal watchdog.” He takes credit for uncovering $9.5 billion in waste, fraud and abuse in state and local government spending.
“It’s not just about the numbers, it’s about values — where you put the money,” Chiang told a dozen young Democrats eating taquitos and sipping margaritas at a karaoke stop in Santa Ana. “That’s why I’m tough with the buck — because it helps you reduce student debt.”
When the karaoke started, he stepped on stage and gamely launched into a rendition of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” exposing his off-key singing. He tried to mute it by passing the microphone to others on stage.
Chiang likes to engage crowds by asking each person to share a dream before posing a question, a request that befuddles many.
“My dream is to eliminate German cockroaches,” one woman declared to a roar of laughter at a Disneyland pest-control conference where Chiang was the featured speaker.
Eventually, Chiang will market himself in 30-second television commercials to give Californians a better sense of who he is. For now, he’s mostly dashing from one event to another — an Israeli Consulate reception, an Encino Chamber of Commerce lunch, a gala for FilipinoAmerican lawyers. That approach got him this far, and he’s sticking to it.
About this story: This is one in a series of articles about the candidates vying to succeed Jerry Brown as governor of California in the 2018 election. Learn more about them at latimes.com/CA2018.
“The Wrong Girls” is the right comedy if you want to unplug your brain and laugh. The first punchline doesn’t even have words. It’s just two stoner roommates, Frankie (Kristen Stewart) and Molly (Alia Shawkat), ripping a mega-hit and coughing at each other. Finally, they speak in unison: “Jinx.”
Frankie, a Stanford dropout, engineered the living room’s impressive “bong-a-tron.” Molly, a wannabe chef, bakes brownies spiked with pot and blue cheese. (We’re assured they‘re delicious.) These screw-ups share everything: a taste in thrift store cat paintings, a chillaxed attitude toward overdue bills and a comfy inertia that’s kept them both stunted, frustrating Molly’s boyfriend Josh (a likable Zack Fox). In turn, possessive Frankie thinks Josh is a buzzkill.
Soon, the insular twosome will share a mind, too, thanks to a telepathic drug they ingest like idiots, not that they have any gray matter to spare. That’s not entirely fair. The friends aren’t dumb; they’ve just been baked for so long that acting dumb is a habit. (Don’t worry, writer-director Dylan Meyer won’t force them to sober up.)
The plot is confidently stupid. A criminal courier (LaKeith Stanfield) mistakes Frankie for her more successful doppelganger Francis (also played by Stewart), saddling her with a briefcase that a trio of dangerous Danes are determined to steal back. Thus, our heroes must peel themselves off from the couch and go on the run with their resentful felines Dio and GG bouncing along in backpacks.
Voiced by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani, the pets have opinions their owners don’t want to hear. “I’m pretty sure they’re the ones who gave us fleas,” GG sneers. I like those comics and live with two annoying Maine Coons. Nevertheless, these cats are too chatty.
Meyer is a screenwriter-turned-filmmaker who met Stewart on the set of the underseen 2015 comic thriller “American Ultra.” In the years since, she has also become Stewart’s wife. That’s important only because “Wrong Girls” has the pinpoint silliness of soulmates who spend a lot of time goofing around at home. Meyer wrote the script a decade ago about her friendship with producer Maggie McLean, but no doubt she knows better than anyone how much the smart and sensible-projecting Stewart delights in acting the fool.
The jokes are as flawlessly tailored to Stewart as Chanel couture, be they zany schemes, spacey freak-outs or the sly middle finger Stewart flashes with her 818-tattooed knuckles while her character suffers a jerk (Tony Hale). And they custom-fit Shawkat’s mellower Molly, who trots behind in Frankie’s wake of destruction. The sci-fi twist in the script turns their relationship into a send-up of co-dependence. Their insular bond can’t last forever — can it?
Meyer subverts a couple tropes, embraces others. Comedy capers like this usually deflate in the third act when their pleasures get punctured by unfunny gunfire. The movie sees that trap coming and dodges it by the skin of its teeth. Nimbly, it manages to be both a pacifist film and a subversive one with no faith in the system as it stands. Characters deliver jabs at “Jeff Bozos” and the Epstein class while slyly revealing you shouldn’t trust their takes, either. Frankie invents a new nonsensical insult, calling Molly’s boyfriend Josh “such a customer.” Sure, whatever that means!
“The Wrong Girls” shares its own hive mind with David Wain’s also-good “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” released earlier this summer. Both are star-studded, hyper-L.A. chase comedies that treat their central contrivances as nothing more than scaffolding for the scenes that actually count. Who cares what happens to the Danes’ precious briefcase? We just want to see Frankie and Molly melt down upon learning that their favorite all-you-can-eat lunch spot is closing due to uncertainty in the buffet sector (a eulogy for the real-life Souplantation, whose absence remains deeply felt).
Even within the tenuous reality of the movie, Frankie and Molly aren’t focused on saving their own necks, especially after their clairvoyant powers kick in and the friends realize they can communicate with closed mouths. As lab-coated figures played by Kate McKinnon and Geena Davis attempt to deliver exposition, the pals drown them out chit-chatting about drivel. The stars know it takes skill to act dumb. Christina Applegate described it best: About her portrayal of hair metal bimbo Kelly Bundy in “Married … with Children,” Applegate said, “In her own mind, she’s a genius.”
The film is just wonky enough to wonder if some beats got chopped out of it, like a go-nowhere running joke about how Hale’s front door won’t close or an aside about how Stewart’s Frankie once Jerry-rigged an escape parachute, which cinematographer Todd Banhazl seems to be reminding us of when he lingers on a shot of an awkward shindig’s helium décor. Banhazl does pull off one of the few inventive psychedelic sequences I’ve seen in a while. (To see another, go stream the giddy new campus comedy “Pizza Movie.”)
Or maybe “The Wrong Girls” is simply making an artistic statement about the joy of sloppiness. Here, to be chaotic and colorful is a badge of honor. Just compare the girls’ cluttered digs with their pursuers’ sterile white suits. In that same spirit of excess, there’s an extra scene in the end credits that goes over like a lead balloon. No one in my theater chuckled. But I respected it anyway for insisting on these jokers’ right to remain an unapologetic mess.
‘The Wrong Girls’
Rated: R, for drug use and language throughout, some sexual references and graphic nudity
Thursday’s defeat – which drops Rangers into a Conference League play-off against Czechs Jablonec – comes on the back of the nightmare news Youssef Chermiti was ruled out with a long-term knee injury just after Rangers rejected a big-money bid for the 22-year-old.
It means Rangers have had to set their sights on recruiting a new striker in addition to the wingers and defenders McInnes had already targeted. He says the club are “working so hard to get the necessary type of players”, with PSV Eindhoven winger Couhaib Driouech set to be the latest arrival.
Halliday thinks the squad “shouldn’t be that imbalanced this late into the transfer window” and reckons they need “three centre-halves, one left-back, two, arguably, three wingers”.
“But the current squad that’s available should be enough to beat Dundee United, it should be enough to beat Hibs and, to be honest, it should be enough to beat Jagiellonia Bialystok,” he said.
Rangers were obviously hoping reuniting McInnes with Lawrence Shankland would be a winning formula after they went so close to wrenching the title away from Celtic while at Hearts last season.
However, former Rangers striker Steven Thompson thinks Shankland is already finding out the extra pressure he faces as the club’s new captain.
“It’s the weight of playing for Rangers, the weight of not having the start that he wanted, and the weight of taking a bad touch,” he said.
“At previous clubs, if you take a bad touch and give it away, you might get a few pelters. Here tonight, when Lawrence Shankland’s link-up play wasn’t that good or he should’ve had a shot when he didn’t, they are on you and it is going to take him a bit to get used to that I think. It’s not physical, it’s mental.”
Asked what would constitute a successful season for his side, Barry-Murphy said: “We don’t know. I think one of the beauties of this season is that, for a lot of us, we’re going into the unknown.
“Our feeling is that we can surprise a lot of people. We have a real hunger and appetite to improve on what we did last season.”
Barry-Murphy is preparing for a blockbuster start to the campaign, with Welsh rivals Wrexham at the Cardiff City Stadium for a south-north derby on 17 August.
The former Manchester City academy coach says he is unsure whether any more new signings will be completed ahead of Wrexham’s visit, with Lincoln City midfielder Jack Moylan still the only outfield player recruited by Cardiff this summer.
“I don’t think so,” said Barry-Murphy when asked if Cardiff were close to a new signing.
“If you start anticipating timings or what may or may not happen, you just waste a lot of your time and your energy.
“Our focus is purely on the game on Monday and making sure that anything that could or maybe would distract us, doesn’t.”
Barry-Murphy said injured Wales forward Rubin Colwill could return for Wrexham’s visit, but fellow international Dylan Lawlor is unlikely to be fit to face the Red Dragons.
As an aspiring young quarterback at Muleshoe High in the early 2000s, Lincoln Riley attended a football camp at Texas Christian University, run by a coach known even then as a mastermind of defense, a man whose ideas and 4-2-5 scheme would one day be disseminated across college football.
Gary Patterson had just been elevated from defensive coordinator to head coach at TCU, a job he would occupy for the next two decades. Around the same time, his staff saw something in Riley. They talked briefly about giving him a shot at safety on Patterson’s vaunted TCU defense.
“Needless to say,” Riley told The Oklahoman in 2018, “it didn’t turn out.”
But a quarter-century after first crossing paths at that camp, it’s now the young quarterback giving the old ball coach a chance to prove himself.
When USC announced it was hiring Patterson as Riley’s defensive coordinator in January, ears perked up across college football. On one hand, Patterson, 66, is a freshly minted College Football Hall of Famer and one of the great defensive minds of the modern era. On the other hand, he hasn’t led a college football team since 2021, when he was forced out at TCU, and a lot has changed in the sport since. Not to mention it’s been more than 25 years since Patterson last served as a coordinator.
Those were fair concerns, considering all that’s riding on Riley getting it right with Patterson, his third defensive coordinator in five seasons. But after seven months with him on the job, you won’t find anyone at USC — players, coaches or administrators alike — with an ounce of distress over Patterson’s stamina.
“I think I would have had more reservations had I not known him,” Riley said. “But that fire still burns very, very hot.”
That much was obvious in the spring when Patterson jumped into the middle of a tackling circuit to teach proper technique, and ended up running through the whole drill. He even delivered a blow at the end.
“He knocked the guy back,” said safeties coach Paul Gonzales, who coached with Patterson for a decade at TCU. “For a 60-year old guy, he still got some pop.”
USC defensive coordinator Gary Patterson watches practice in March.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Riley is betting big on that translating to the Trojans’ defense this fall. Over his four seasons as USC’s coach, there’s no mistaking what’s held Riley back from reaching the same heights at USC as he had at Oklahoma. The Trojans finished 124th, 104th, 87th and 65th in yards allowed per play during those years.
At TCU, Patterson’s defenses finished No. 1 in yards allowed five times during a 10-year stretch. Yet in the second half of his tenure at TCU, there was a noticeable decline, as his defenses finished in the top 25 of that same category just twice.
It was during that time that Riley’s offense went toe-to-toe with Patterson’s defense on numerous occasions. Riley, who was in his first head coaching job at Oklahoma, got the better of Patterson in each of their four meetings, piling up at least 498 total yards each time out.
“There was never anyone who was more of a pain to gameplan for or try to move the ball against than this guy,” Riley said.
During his five years away from coaching, Patterson said he actually spent more time studying the game than he had at TCU, where he was often consumed with other responsibilities. After consulting briefly at Texas and Baylor, Patterson took a job with an Amazon college football show, he says, primarily for the subscription service that came with it. Every Sunday morning, he’d watch whatever college game he wanted, just to stay fresh.
When he did return to coaching, Patterson didn’t just want to install the same scheme he used at TCU. So he closely studied Ohio State and Indiana’s defenses, which gave up a combined 32 touchdowns last season — seven fewer than USC’s defense (39). He took cues on how both clamped down better than anyone else in the red zone, where they each allowed opponents to convert touchdowns just 37% of the time.
“All I did was do football,” Patterson said. “I mean, it’s like getting married. I mean, it’s like I got nothing else. I wasn’t doing anything else.”
Those habits haven’t changed at USC. When other assistants took time for vacation this summer, Patterson stayed in the facility. He wanted to hone in on how to install his defense for a second time this fall. So he came in every day before 7 a.m., in a mostly empty office — just to beat the traffic.
“You want to change things, it’s a full-time job,” Patterson said. “It’s not one of those things that you do 70 or 80% of your time.”
It also gave him time to get to know his new players, each of whom have been summarily stunned by their veteran coach’s vitality.
“I don’t know how old he is, but he‘s out there like he’s 30,” linebacker Desman Stephens said. “He‘s still being active with us. He’s showing us drills. Like, if he want it done right, he gonna show you the exact way how to do it.”
So far, at USC, Patterson has had his hands on just about every detail of the defense. Which is precisely what Riley envisioned after watching him coach at TCU — and why he wasn’t worried about the game passing Patterson by.
“He was such a hands-on head coach,” Riley said. “He wasn’t a head coach just kind of doing a practice schedule, doing the speech, getting out early. He didn’t just straight CEO this thing, right? He was still calling defense, still game planning. He was very involved in every aspect of that program through all those years.”
USC defensive coordinator Gary Patterson fist bumps linebacker Desman Stephens during practice on Aug. 5.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
He won’t have to do that at USC. And Patterson seems perfectly fine with that.
But while others still wonder if he can make a successful return to college football, with a scheme that hasn’t been tested since 2021, Patterson is pretty confident his decades of experience count for something, too.
“It’s an advantage for me compared to somebody that’s 30 years old and doesn’t have kids, never been married, doesn’t know what it’s like to grow somebody up and raise a family and do things,” Patterson said.
“This is, I think, my 45th season. … “There’s not a lot of guys in this profession of the age where you can go back to all the things that I’ve learned through all the years.”
