Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail

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The West Wing episode
"Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail"
Episode no. 38
Prod. code 226216
Orig. airdate February 28, 2001
Writer(s) Paul Redford and Aaron Sorkin
Director Jessica Yu
Guest star(s) Roma Maffia
Jolie Jenkins
Anna Deavere Smith
Clark Gregg
NiCole Robinson
John Billingsley
Jordan Baker
Brent Hinkley
Christopher Neiman
Season 2
October 4 2000 – May 16 2001
  1. In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Part I
  2. In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Part II
  3. The Midterms
  4. In This White House
  5. And It's Surely To Their Credit
  6. The Lame Duck Congress
  7. The Portland Trip
  8. Shibboleth
  9. Galileo
  10. Noël
  11. The Leadership Breakfast
  12. The Drop-In
  13. Bartlet's Third State of the Union
  14. The War at Home
  15. Ellie
  16. Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail
  17. The Stackhouse Filibuster
  18. 17 People
  19. Bad Moon Rising
  20. The Fall's Gonna Kill You
  21. 18th and Potomac
  22. Two Cathedrals
List of all West Wing episodes...

"Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail" is the 38th episode of The West Wing.

The title is a lyric from the Don Henley song "New York Minute", from the album "The End of the Innocence". The song is featured in the episode.

Contents

[edit] Plot

The staff again participates in "Big Block of Cheese Day". Toby is assigned to speak with a group of obnoxious young people protesting the WTO; a friend of Donna's asks Sam to consider a pardon request for an alleged Cold War spy. Sam, meanwhile, comes to grip with the revelation of his father's infidelity.

Toby Ziegler meets with the fictional group "World Policies Studies," which objects to the World Trade Organization, and C.J. Cregg meets with "The Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality", which would like legislation to support a specific map projection, namely the "Peters projection" which corrects the exaggerated representation of North America and Western Europe found in the standard Mercator projection.

[edit] Opposing the WTO

While World Policies Studies does not exist, there are many individuals and organizations which object to the World Trade Organization (WTO), such as Pat Buchanan[1], Harry Browne[2], and the anti-globalization movement.

[edit] Map projections

While the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality does not exist, there is a great deal of controversy over the use of particular world maps. A map projection is any method used in cartography (mapmaking) to represent the three-dimensional curved surface of the earth on a flat plane (paper or digital map). This process involves selecting of a model for the shape of the earth and transform geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude) to plane coordinates (eastings and northings or x,y).

Because it is not possible for a flat map to accurately represent the earth with the same scale throughout the entire map surface, the cartographer decides to make the scale depend on location but not direction, on latitude and direction, or on a combination of the two.

The most commonly used map is the Mercator projection, which was developed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, and is a conformal map. The Mercator projection exaggerates the size of areas far from the equator. Opponents often point out that Greenland is represented as being roughly as large as Africa, when in fact Africa's area is approximately 13 times that of Greenland.

The equal-area Peters World Map or Gall-Peters projection has been proposed as an alternative.

The Peters map is also called the Gall-Peters projection.
Enlarge
The Peters map is also called the Gall-Peters projection.

One obvious distortion of the Gall-Peters projection is that it stretches Africa, which in reality is about as wide east-west as it is long north-south, but in this projection appears to be almost twice as long as it is wide.

According to fansite The West Wing Episode Guide[3], an article published by Knight Ridder Newspapers quoted that sales for Peters maps from ODT Inc. had been about three per day before the show aired, but swelled to 120 orders in the five days following the episode.

[edit] References

  1.  The West Wing Episode Guide — Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail

[edit] External link