One of Our 50 is Missing New Mexico Magazine Humor Column

One Of Our 50 Is Missing

Cartoons of the Month After more than two decades, thousands of our readers have shared their experiences of lost New Mexico in the "One of Our 50 is Missing" humor column. Tell us your experiences at fifty@nmmagazine.com or on our message board.

By The Book:
Dr. Jerry Everhart, associate professor of the College of Education and Technology at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, relates an unusual experience with a student that had him scratching his head.

Everhart says that, early in the semester, all students in one course were to bring their newly purchased mathematics texts to class. One dedicated teacher-in-training was sold the wrong edition by an online distributor and realized it just before class. “She called me in a panic, and she apologized profusely,” Everhart says. “After calming her, I told her to bring the book to class and that we’d compare her text with mine.”

When the student passed the book around the classroom the next day, her classmates and Everhart enjoyed a chuckle: across the cover of the book, in large blue letters, was the following: “International Edition.”

Arizona Shuffle:
While reading the September 2008 issue of Maxim magazine, Bill Dixon, of Silver City, says his eyebrows rose after he read about the location of this month’s bitter football grudge match between Arizona State and the University of Arizona.

“I was surprised to learn that the game was to be played in our enchanted state,” Dixon says. Explaining further, Dixon says that the “Gameday Getaways” section included a map of the U.S. in which a graphic of a football stadium was superimposed on the state of New Mexico.

“Maybe the graphic artist moved this game out of Arizona due to the fact that the rivalry gets pretty intense,” Dixon speculates. “Once again, New Mexico gets lost in the shuffle.”

Needing Direction:
Melinda Symmes and her husband, Robert, reside in Long Beach, Mississippi, and each year make the long journey to New Mexico’s El Morro National Monument to work as volunteers. But it was a conversation with a friend on the East Coast that stirred matters up for Melinda.

“We have recently bought a National Geographic nine-disc topo map for New Mexico, since we like to camp and hike,” Symmes says. “I was talking to a friend in Connecticut, and she asked what Robert was doing, and I told her that he had just finished uploading the New Mexico topo discs to his GPS [Global Positioning System satellite navigation device], and was now putting them on my computer.”

When Symmes explained to her friend what topo discs and a GPS system were, the conversation took a sharp turn into Bizarro World. “You mean you’re putting a topo for a whole country on your computer?” the friend asked. Symmes calmly explained that New Mexico is a state, not a country, to which her friend responded, “Am I supposed to know that?”

Missing Link:
Delia Neal, of Mesa, Arizona, was reading an article on the Fox News website about the caterpillar invasion in Las Cruces, when she noticed that, in the phrase “New Mexico State University,” the word Mexico was tagged, indicating an embedded link.

“Sure enough, when I clicked the tagged word, a search including all things ‘Mexico’ popped up. “Fox may be fair and balanced, but apparently it has problems with U.S. geography.”