Every so often, in conversation, I want to describe a commonplace human-scale object being scaled up to ludicrously large proportions. This tends to happen in science-fiction type contexts; for example, I was just whimsically discussing mammoth pieces of cue chalk, in the context of playing ‘celestial snooker’ to deflect an asteroid from an Earth-intersecting orbit. My usual habit in these cases is to describe it as ‘a piece of cue chalk’ (or whatever) ‘the size of New Mexico’; and people occasionally ask me why it always seems to be New Mexico with me.

My best guess is that it's because (as I mention above) the usual conversation of this type is SF-related, or SF-like; and I have a long-standing mental association of New Mexico with science fiction. This is because a lot of SF invents place names on human-colonised planets by means of prepending ‘New’ to some existing Earth place name (up to and including the silly – I'm fairly sure I've seen at least one novel containing a place called ‘New New York’, though I can't place it right now); and when I first saw the name ‘New Mexico’, it was in some SF I was reading as a child (though I can't remember what), and I somehow formed the immediate assumption that it was just another SF place name invented in this way. It was some time later that I discovered it was actually a real place and not one made up by an SF author, and I still remember feeling slightly surprised and disoriented by that. So now, when I'm in an SFish conversation and need the name of a large piece of land for the purpose of illustrating scale, New Mexico tends to be the first one that springs to mind.

Does anyone else have an unusual favourite place name to use for this sort of purpose? (Come to think of it, what would qualify as a usual one? Is there an ISO standard, perhaps, for scale-illustrative place names?)