South Park creators rename show 'South America'

throw0101a

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616239

majorchord

That's genius.

PorciiVorbesc

Wouldn't 'America Park' been the correct renaming pun?

delichon

It would have been fascinating to watch the love-hate battle if Trump had renamed Lake Ontario to Lake Dolly.

randomImmigrant

Should Hacker News be renamed Hacker America?

Eddy_Viscosity2

He's probably already drafting an EO to NASA to rename the sun to "the america".

JdeBP

One of the few good things to have come out of this repeated silliness, is that for 2 years I've witnessed people reading more about what is being altered by these executive orders and sourced by Google Maps et al. and learning why the U.S.A. GNIS is such a woefully bad data source. And it's not because of the antics of Donald J. Trump. It's been a shit-show for 50 years: a tale of long-term multiple-phase projects losing funding and changing direction mid-phase, of technical debt never dealt with, of the consequences of data entry methodologies, and of cultural erasure because of magtapes encoded in EBCDIC. (Yes, EBCDIC. There wasn't a systematic deliberate plan to eliminate diacritics from the U.S.A. in the 1970s, as one might guess from observation. There was EBCDIC. In fact, there was initially a plan to put the accents back on , with extra data fields to record the correct names from state-level sources, after moving away from EBCDIC. During the Reagan Era. You can see today how that turned out.) One bizarre thing, almost as bizarre as the re-spelling of an entire country by EBCDIC, is that the name change from South Park to South America is tame in comparison to the sort of shenanighans that went on in the GNIS. Ghost towns that never existed got named after rural post offices in wide open unpopulated country, railway stations, steam train water stops, local stations serving farms, company executives, loads of springs in California, and in extreme cases things like a fish pond, survey marker trees, and a cage for a monkey. Or a lone building at a crossroads got the name of something else because a map font was difficult to distinguish, or a name printed by something else just happened to run over it. And then some people handy with computer automation enshrined this rubbish, by mass-importing it into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is still cleaning this up by hand almost two decades later. Oh the wonders that we have collectively done with computers! (-: The creators of South Park have a long way to go before they are anywhere near as mad as actual history is. * https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/USGS_GNIS * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliability_of_GNIS_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_Names_Information_S...