The Book of the Year Read online

  A vodka company in Canada also moved an iceberg around this year. To celebrate the country’s 150th birthday, an iceberg was lassoed off the coast of Newfoundland and taken to the coast by boat, before travelling across the country by bus.

  Harrods started selling water harvested from melting icebergs. The water is collected twice a year by an icebreaker that cuts blocks off bergs in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Harrods claims it’s the best-tasting water in the world, which explains why it’s selling the melted ice for £80 a bottle.

  ICELAND▶

  Iceland dug the world’s hottest hole.

  This year, geologists in Iceland finished drilling a hole right into the middle of a volcano. They reached a depth of 5 kilometres, where the temperature reaches 500°C. They hope to find volcanic rock mixing with naturally occurring groundwater, meaning they could use the steam down there to create geothermal energy.

  This is not the only way in which Iceland is leading the world. It’s also been ranked best for gender equality by the World Economic Forum eight years running. However, Icelandic women point out there is still some way to go. Each year on 24 October, they leave work early to protest the country’s continuing pay gap, timing their departure to coincide with the moment each day that, in comparison with their male colleagues, they effectively stop being paid. In 2005, they walked out at 2.08 p.m.; in 2010, it was 2.25 p.m.; and this year they left at around 2.40 p.m. Also this year, Iceland became the first country to introduce a law that will force all companies to prove that they pay women and men equally, which means that by the time it comes into force, in 2020, all workers in Iceland should theoretically be leaving work at the same time on 24 October.

  A drone takeaway service has begun in Iceland. Unfortunately the drones can only travel six miles, so after the chef puts food into the drone, it flies for six miles before a delivery driver takes it the rest of the way.

  IKEA▶

  IKEA admitted its mixing bowls can set your grapes on fire.

  IKEA customer and mixing-bowl owner Richard Walter was sitting outside one sunny day when he smelled burning. It turned out that due to its parabolic shape, his metal Blanda bowl was focusing sunlight precisely where his grape stalk was placed. IKEA admitted that such an occurrence was possible, but decided against recalling the product, saying, ‘It has been established that many different parameters would have to converge for the content of the bowl to overheat and that the risk for this to happen is very low.’

  Earlier in the year, IKEA was awarded the Design of the Year award in the prestigious Beazley design competition for its flat-pack refugee shelter that it created in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). There are now more than 10,000 of these shelters in use worldwide. IKEA also worked with NASA, sending some of its designers into a Mars base simulator. While it is hoped that they might one day make ‘tiny domes on a desolate alien world’, that wasn’t the primary reason for the project – they also hoped that studying the cramped conditions and awkward toilet facilities planned for Mars might help to improve living spaces on Earth.

  It was revealed in August that Game of Thrones character Jon Snow’s capes are made from IKEA rugs.

  IMMIGRATION▶

  Australia ran an ad in Baghdad encouraging people not to move to Australia.

  Australia’s government launched an advert specifically marketing Australia as a place to avoid. The anti-immigration billboards told Iraqis, ‘Do not try to come to Australia illegally by boat, you will be turned back,’ and featured a tough-looking man in military uniform.

  They needn’t have worried, however. A new report released by international relocation experts MoveHub showed a 5 per cent decrease in people moving to Australia. Instead, they’re all going to New Zealand. In the 12 weeks after Donald Trump won the American presidential race, applications to move to New Zealand from the US grew by 70 per cent.*

  Despite its rise in international popularity, not everyone is yet fully familiar with New Zealand. Late last year Chloe Phillips-Harris, a Kiwi tourist, was detained by immigration officials in Kazakhstan for a day and a half because they didn’t believe her claim that New Zealand is a country. They told her it was a state of Australia. Unfortunately, the large map of the world that hung in the interrogation room she was taken to didn’t help her to make her case, as New Zealand wasn’t on it. She was eventually allowed in, and spent six months in Kazakhstan.

  INAUGURATION▶

  Donald Trump’s inauguration featured a large number of weird numbers:

  1,500,000: The number of people who saw Trump being sworn in as president, according to the President himself. The event was described by Press Secretary Sean Spicer as ‘The largest audience to ever witness an inauguration. Period.’*

  300,000–600,000: The number of people who attended according to actual crowd scientists. The low turnout isn’t surprising, really – Trump got only 4 per cent of the vote in Washington DC.

  #1.25: Maximum thickness, in inches, of signs permitted at the inauguration by Washington police.

  2: The number of cans of beef ravioli confiscated by security staff as a potential security risk. Security also confiscated non-collapsible umbrellas, cigarette lighters, and several bananas, which were deemed a risk because they weren’t chopped into pieces. The organisers seemed pretty sensitive: all the portable toilets were provided by a firm called Don’s Johns, but the inaugural committee decided the name might prompt jokes, so covered the name labels up with blue tape.

  4: Number of poo emojis Charlotte Church attached to her Twitter message to Trump when she declined to perform at the inauguration. Others who declined included Moby (‘I’d DJ … if as payment #trump released his tax returns’) and rapper Ice T (‘I didn’t pick up and blocked the number’). One person who did turn up was Lord of the Dance Michael Flatley, which prompted someone to redirect the website ‘colossalbellend.com’ to Michael Flatley’s website.

  0: Number of celebrities Trump clarified he had wanted to attend anyway, saying, ‘The so-called “A”-list celebrities are all wanting tixs to the inauguration, but look what they did for Hillary, NOTHING.’ Performers who did attend included the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the 2010 America’s Got Talent runner-up.

  16.95: Cost (in dollars) of the official inaugural photo-print of Donald Trump. It contained one spelling mistake: ‘No dream is too big, no challenge is to great.’

  5: Number of words summarising Trump’s inaugural address by George W. Bush, who reportedly turned to friends and said, ‘That was some weird shit.’

  INDEPENDENCE▶

  Lithuania’s missing Declaration of Independence turned up in Germany.

  The document was misplaced almost immediately after it was signed in February 1918. Exactly 99 years later, in February this year, a group of Lithuanian companies offered a one-million-euro reward to anyone who could find and return it. One month after that, a professor unearthed it in a Berlin archive. The German foreign ministry released a statement saying, ‘What a great find! This is perfect news for our Lithuanian friends. We celebrate together with them’ – although as Reuters noted, the statement didn’t mention whether they intended to return it.

  Meanwhile, another declaration of independence unexpectedly turned up in Chichester. Harvard researchers confirmed that the extremely rare parchment manuscript of the American Declaration of Independence – one of only two known to exist – dates back to the 1780s. It was produced either in Philadelphia or in New York. They could not explain how on earth it ended up in West Sussex.

  One area of the globe currently campaigning for independence is the Spanish region of Catalonia, which has a champion in Manchester City football manager Pep Guardiola. In June he led a protest of 40,000 people through the streets of Barcelona, delivered a speech and read out the Catalan independence manifesto, accusing Spain – whose football team he captained to Olympic gold in 1992 – of political persecution.

  India celebrated
the 70th anniversary of its independence in August, with ceremonies, a military parade, and an app: citizens were invited to submit suggestions for what they wanted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to talk about in his speech via an official mobile phone app.

  INDIA▶

  For slipper-related air rage, see Aviation; for potential war with China, see Bhutan; for bovine retirement homes, see Cows; for gaining an inch, see Everest; for a new definition of person, see Glaciers; for a curry button, see Inventions; for what the prime minister has in common with Darth Vader, see Music; for standing up in the cinema, see National Anthem; for high, flying birds, see Opium; for a diesel-powered solar train see Railways; for rat-arsed rodents, see Rats; and for planting a forest overnight, see Trees.

  INSECTS▶

  For a cocktail served with ants, see Aardvarks; for a hive of criminal activity, see Bees; for insects that fake their own deaths, see Dragonflies; for wormburgers, see Farming; for the bug spray that was made a bit too strong, see Kim Jong-Nam, Assassination of; for robo-bees, see Pollination; for the world’s largest living stick, see Stick Insects; for spiders (which aren’t insects) that have started walking like ants (which are), see Spiders; and for the bug that’s reinvented the umbrella, see Umbrellas.

  INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION▶

  The International Space Station is selling office space.

  A Finnish company called Space Nation bought a compartment that’s only 50cm x 50cm x 30cm, for £17,000.* Its plan is to become a landlord to scientists – it has turned its office into a block of 18 ‘flats’, each measuring 10cm x 10cm x 10cm, and plans to rent out each one to other space agencies that want to conduct small-scale experiments in zero gravity. The first ‘tenants’ are slated to arrive on the ISS in 2018.

  NASA is conducting a number of its own experiments, notably trying to work out how to bake bread that can be consumed on the Space Station. Bread has been banned from space since 1965, when two astronauts sneaked a corned beef sandwich on board and the crumbs ended up getting everywhere. Since then, astronauts have had to eat tortillas. However, a team of German scientists is now developing crumb-free bread.

  Another problem NASA is trying to resolve is the fact it is running out of spacesuits. All astronauts on board the ISS are wearing hand-me-downs. The space suits they wear date from 1981 and have been worn by astronauts since then, even though they were intended to last only for 15 years.* To date, over 3,400 suit-related incidents have been recorded, including one alarming occasion when a suit started to leak (spacesuits are filled with water for drinking and cooling purposes) while being used on a spacewalk. Had the astronaut not acted quickly, he might well have become the first person to die in space – by drowning.

  An error on board the International Space Station was spotted by 17-year-old Miles Soloman from Sheffield, who realised that the radiation sensors were recording incorrect data. NASA said it was more appreciative than embarrassed by this. When asked what his friends thought of his discovery, Miles said, ‘It’s really a mixture of jealousy and boredom.’

  INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY▶

  The TV show Loose Women was cancelled on International Women’s Day.

  The ITV show, presented by four women and focusing on women’s issues, was replaced on 8 March with coverage of (male) Chancellor Philip Hammond’s hour-long budget speech. Women did warrant a mention in his spending plans: viewers had the satisfaction of watching Hammond awkwardly say the word ‘tampon’ as he explained how the tampon tax would benefit women’s charities. He complained that he had planned to reveal three new measures for women, but that Theresa May had given two of them away on Mumsnet a few hours earlier.

  Marking International Women’s Day in Canada, the prime minister’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau* posted on Instagram that women should ‘celebrate the boys and men in our lives who encourage us to be who we truly are’, and share online photos of themselves holding hands with their ‘male ally’. Perhaps not surprisingly, she was widely criticised for missing the point of the occasion, though it should be noted that she’s heavily involved with more than ten women’s charities.

  In Russia, where men traditionally give women flowers on International Women’s Day, companies offered bouquets for hire. Women could rent flowers for 10 minutes – enough time to take a selfie with them to share on social media – and so give the impression of having a male admirer, without having to fork out on a full purchase.

  INTERNET▶

  The Russian website that regulates the banning of websites accidentally banned itself.

  Russia doesn’t have an overarching firewall to stop access to banned sites. Instead it uses an agency called Roskomnadzor that creates a blacklist of pages it expects Internet providers to block. Russian anti-censorship campaigners bought up old expired websites from that list and linked them to government sites – with the result that the government sites became blocked. The regulator’s own site – https://rkn.gov.ru – was also targeted, leading to a situation in which people could no longer reach the list of blocked sites, because it, itself, was blocked.

  Iran similarly seeks to control Internet access, but this year its attempt to block Internet porn went a little too far. Its plan was to remove access to certain sites by effectively forcing computers to look in the wrong direction for the pages. However, neighbouring networks as far away as Russia and Hong Kong were also accidentally blocked, meaning that Internet users in dozens of other countries were unable to access superbigcocks.com and 255 other websites.

  INVENTIONS▶

  A new washing machine in India has a button specifically for curry stains.

  The StainMaster, released by Panasonic, features five other cycles aimed at Indian consumers, including a button to remove other sauces, one to remove traces of hair oil and one specifically designed to clean saris.

  Panasonic has also recently invested in projects including the world’s first laundry-folding robot (which can fold individual T-shirts in as little as 10 minutes) and an almost completely invisible television (when switched on it functions as a normal television, but when switched off it becomes a transparent sheet of glass, indistinguishable from a window).

  In controversial invention news:

  ▶ The US supermarket Trader Joe’s claimed to have invented a new product called a ‘puff dog’. Critics claim it’s just a sausage roll.

  ▶ Donald Trump claimed to have invented the phrase ‘priming the pump’. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation is from 1819.

  ▶ Historic England spokesperson Celia Richardson claimed that the Cornish pasty was invented in Devon.

  ▶ Researcher David Leishman claimed that the Scottish drink Irn Bru was invented in America.

  IRAN▶

  One hundred and thirty-seven women and one three-year-old girl unsuccessfully attempted to run for president of Iran.

  Iranian law states that any citizen over the age of 18 can apply to run for president, but that anyone who is not a ‘religious and political rejal’ will be disqualified. The word ‘rejal’ is variously translated as ‘personality’ or, more commonly, ‘man’. As a result, all women who tried to run were denied candidacy.

  More than 1,600 people applied this year, and all but six were disqualified. Those who missed out included Ghassem Sholeh Sadi, a former lawmaker, who believed that he was banned for wearing a tie, which is often associated with Western decadence (for other political ties, see Ties); Abolghassem Khaki, a factory guard who hoped that by becoming president he would realise his dream of competing against Donald Trump in a swimming race; and Hassan Seyedkhani, who announced that if he won he would make his twin brother foreign minister. It’s the least he could do: Hassan’s brother refrained from running for president out of respect for him since he is older by two minutes.

  One man, clearly not fazed by the ‘rejal’ ruling, or indeed the over-18 law, attempted to register his three-year-old daughter for president. He said that he was doing it to launch her political
career. The authorities refused even to register her.

  After the regime removed his government-issue bodyguards, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned to crowdfunding to pay for their replacements. He issued a press release saying he wanted ‘to thank the great nation of Iran’, followed by account details for donations.

  IRAQ▶

  Iraq started importing oil from Huddersfield.

  Despite the fact that Iraq produces five million barrels a day, Yorkshire firm Sterling Oil now sells oil back to them. This is thanks to its engineering process, which blends oils together with additives to make the crude more useful and valuable. Sterling already sells oil to the United Arab Emirates, which produces three million barrels of the stuff every day.

  The liberation of Mosul from ISIS was a rare piece of good news for Iraq this year. A by-product of the city’s freedom was that Iraqis could play football again without the weird rules imposed by Islamic State. ISIS had allowed people to play, but banned referees’ whistles in case they made devils gather. They had posted someone with scissors at the pitch entrance to cut any ‘idolatrous’ insignia off players’ shirts, matches had been interrupted for prayers, and the Olympic rings had been sawn off the stadium with an angle grinder for being ‘the sign of infidels’.

  In some other places under ISIS rule, football referees were banned entirely because they implement the laws of FIFA, rather than Allah. ISIS also brought in the sharia system of ‘Qisas’ whereby players can exact revenge if their opponents injure them.

  Meanwhile, the US forces in Iraq were embarrassed to confess that over the last few years they had lost kit and equipment in Iraq worth approximately $1 billion. Amnesty International asked for the details and found that the Department of Defense had not kept records on large amounts of military hardware. The Pentagon claimed the report was ‘overblown’, which is comforting.