Paper Restaurant

My daughter is a big fan of John Green, an author of young adult novels. He lives in Indianapolis where she went to college. Green’s most well known book is The Fault in Our Stars which was made into a pretty good movie a few years ago.

My daughter liked his books so much that I started reading them. One of his books is Paper Towns, which introduced me to the mapmaker’s concept of a paper town. A mapmaker will put a nonexistent town on his map as a marker for copywrite infringement. It makes the case against a plagiarist easy to prove. I often see this same thing in print when an obvious stray word or misspelling is used. Perhaps this is done so that scanning software used in academia can detect a cheater.

Tonight I was goofing around with Google Maps when I stumbled upon a paper restaurant. The restaurant is The Abyss and it is located outdoors behind our local elementary school. Using street view one can clearly tell that the restaurant is located where some swing sets are.

The Google Map entry even includes several customer reviews. Many of the reviewers’ names are comical (Dippy, Alden’s Got a Dumpy, for two). All but one of the reviews are 5 stars.

As you can see from the screenshot, the “restaurant” is between the school and some tennis courts. The entire surrounding area is suburban neighborhood.

Maybe someday I’ll ride over and have a paper meal.

3 thoughts on “Paper Restaurant

    1. An interesting question. The answer is yes and no. It shows up on the map but not on the listing of restaurants to the left of the map. It has been suggested that this may be a student project to create and maintain a web page. Students wouldn’t have the money to pay Google for ad space.

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