The Book of the Year Read online

  She was replaced as the world’s oldest person by Jamaica’s Violet Brown, who turned 117 in March. A former cemetery record-keeper, she is the last surviving person to have been a subject of Queen Victoria. Her son, Harold Fairweather, 97, was the oldest child in the world who had a parent still alive, but sadly died just a couple of days after his mother was declared the world’s oldest person. Brown died in September and was replaced as the world’s oldest person by Nabi Tajima of Japan, who is also 117.

  Meanwhile, in Indonesia, a man who claimed – slightly implausibly – to have been the world’s oldest human died, ‘aged’ 146. Supposedly born in 1870, Mbah Ghoto was regrettably unable to confirm his age as Indonesia only started recording births in 1900, just as he was hitting his thirties. He claimed to have been 70 at the start of the Second World War.

  According to an interview Ghoto gave last year, he had been expecting his death for some time: 25 years, in fact, having had his gravestone made in 1992. When interviewed about his life in 2016, he told the reporter, ‘What I want is to die.’

  The world also got a new oldest man, 112-year-old Francisco Olivera of Spain, but his title could not be immediately verified because his birth certificate was lost during the Spanish Civil War. Dental records couldn’t help either as he lost his teeth four decades ago.

  OLIVE OIL▶

  Olive oil supplies are decreasing on Earth and increasing in space.

  In Italy, a million olive trees have been killed by a disease called ‘olive quick decline syndrome’. It’s caused by a bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, that insects carry on to the trees. It led to a 30 per cent fall in olive oil production this year and the highest prices for a decade. And worse is to come. Spanish officials confirmed that the disease, dubbed ‘the ebola of olive trees’, had arrived in Spain – and Spain makes more than half of the world’s olive oil. In August, an EU report suggested that the island of Mallorca chop down all its olive trees, and all plants within a 100-metre radius of infected plants, to combat the disease. Opponents say that if they do that, there will be virtually no vegetation at all on the entire island.

  Meanwhile, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos (see Amazon) announced that his Blue Origin space-flight start-up would be sending olive oil into space ‘to examine if olive oil will maintain its liquid shape once it has left the Earth’. Olive Oil Times reported that the experiment would help the Mediterranean diet become the ‘food for astronauts for many years to come’ – provided, of course, there’s any left on Earth.

  ON TOUR▶

  For a diplodocus see Dinosaurs; for a block of ice, see Icebergs; for Santa, see Saints; for a troupe of Zulu dancers with terrible GPS, see Sat Nav; for a giant crayon, see Yellow; and for a Facebook founder, see Zuckerberg, Mark.

  OPIUM▶

  Heroin-addicted parrots threatened Indian farmers’ livelihoods.

  In India, the farming of opium is legal so long as the end product is sold to the government (which regulates its use in medicine). Parrots, however, have started consuming it recreationally. One farmer estimates that they’ve stolen 10 per cent of his crop. To avoid capture, the parrots have learned not to squawk as they steal the opium. Attempts to deter them by beating drums and exploding firecrackers have proved fruitless.

  If it’s bad news for humans, it’s not that great for the birds either. Parrots swoop when the pods are ripe, chew on the morphine-rich stalks and return to their branches in an opium-addled stupor. They then fall into a deep sleep, which means they sometimes fall off their perches and die. Worse still, when the opium season is over they suffer from extreme withdrawal, losing their appetites and energy, and many of them die as a result.

  Farmers in Afghanistan, meanwhile, are replacing opium with pomegranates and mulberries. The project was started by a former heroin addict from Swindon who, on a visit to the country, worked out that mulberries could be more profitable per hectare than opium. He campaigned to replace one with the other, erecting placards across the countryside, appearing on Afghan TV and holding meetings for farmers, one of which was attended by 14,000 people. He’s persuaded 22,000 growers to swap poppies for mulberries, and the resulting Plant For Peace fruit bars went on sale in the UK in June.

  Parrots aren’t the only ones stealing opium. In Australia, poppy theft increased 24-fold within a year in Tasmania, which supplies half the world’s legal opium. Five hundred and sixteen poppy heads were stolen from its fields in the 2015–16 financial year, rising to 12,239 in 2016–17.

  In North Carolina, a $500 million opium-growing operation was busted when an investigator visiting on a completely unrelated matter knocked on the farmer’s door only to hear him say, ‘I guess you’re here about the opium.’

  ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK▶

  Scottish prisoners beat the system with a trick stolen from Netflix.

  More than 100 inmates at Saughton Prison in Edinburgh successfully got better food by claiming to be Jewish, after seeing the same trick performed on Orange Is the New Black. Officials were not happy, as a kosher diet is four times as expensive as the regular one on offer in the prison. If all those prisoners had actually converted to Judaism, the Jewish population of Edinburgh would have increased by approximately 12 per cent.

  Fittingly for a drama about a bunch of criminals, episodes of Orange Is the New Black were stolen. A group of hackers called The Dark Overlord stole and leaked episodes and threatened to release other stolen episodes unless they were paid £57,000 in bitcoin.

  The hack came just days after the papers reported an even more ironic case of hacking: the pirating of Pirates of the Caribbean. As it turned out, this was a hoax, but weeks later The Dark Overlord struck again, leaking eight episodes of a TV show called Funderdome online. It was widely viewed as The Dark Overlord’s ‘difficult second leak’, as very few people had heard of, or were interested in, Funderdome.

  ORANGUTANS▶

  The Indianapolis Colts announced their pick in the NFL draft using a trained orangutan.

  The publicity stunt, in which Rocky the orangutan pressed a touch-screen that named offensive lineman* Zach Banner as the American football team’s newest player, was widely enjoyed by fans, but commentator Mike Mayock thought that it made a monkey of the whole thing, and threatened to walk off set.

  It wasn’t the only time orangutans and touch-screens came together this year. A Dutch animal sanctuary introduced what they called ‘Tinder for orangutans’, whereby their orangs were shown pictures of other apes, and researchers evaluated their responses. The plan was to discover whether females can show a preference for potential mates by looking at pictures on a tablet, before the suitors are flown all the way from South East Asia to the Netherlands.

  Back in the apes’ native home, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation rescued a rare albino orangutan – the first albino encountered by the foundation in its 25 years of existence. Taking something of a risk, they asked the Internet to name the white-furred animal, but for once the public came up with a decent name: Alba, meaning white. The foundation sensibly ignored other suggestions such as Meringue-utan, White Walker and Orang No-tan.

  OSBORNE, GEORGE▶

  The new editor of the Evening Standard managed to miss a scoop even though he was the sole source for it.

  After being sacked in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, George Osborne – the former chancellor and architect of ‘Austerity Britain’ – did his bit for employment statistics by taking on six new jobs.

  The biggest surprise was the announcement that he’d be the new editor of London newspaper the Evening Standard. He explained he could edit the newspaper in the morning and pop over to the House of Commons for parliamentary votes in the afternoon. Some people said he lacked journalistic experience, which is unfair – as a student at Oxford he edited the now unfortunately named student magazine, the ISIS, and even printed an edition about cannabis on hemp paper. His further experience is limited to being rejected for graduate traineeship at The Times and the Economis
t, although as a freelancer he briefly worked on the Telegraph’s diary column and managed to get two articles published in The Times.

  Osborne racked up more post-chancellorship jobs thick and fast. They included a fellowship at a US think tank (for an estimated £120,000 a year), a one-day-a-week job advising US fund management firm Blackrock (£650,000 a year), a role at the Washington Speakers Bureau (earning £786,000 in about nine months), an unpaid position as chairman of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, and, of course, he kept his minor role as MP for Tatton (£76,000 a year).

  The strain of juggling all these jobs may have proved too much, and eventually Osborne decided to stand down as an MP. This was a big news story, which naturally he wanted to give to his own newspaper. Unfortunately, he told the Evening Standard too late for that afternoon’s deadline, with the result that it didn’t make the first edition and was all over the Internet before anyone read it in the Standard. Soon, however, he tired of having only five jobs, and announced that he would be taking an extra, unpaid sixth gig as an honorary professor of economics at the University of Manchester. The students’ union described the news as ‘distasteful’ and ‘upsetting’.

  ÖTZI▶

  A private detective was hired to solve a 5,300-year-old murder.

  Ötzi the Iceman is the oldest intact human ever found. He died 5,300 years ago, after being shot in the back with an arrow, and was found in 1991 by hikers in a high mountain pass in the Northern Alps.

  This year the museum where Ötzi is on display hired a professional detective – Chief Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police Department – to solve the mystery of his death. ‘The usual cold case that we have is 20 or maybe 30 years old,’ Horn said, ‘and now I was asked to work on a case 5,300 years old.’* He determined that ‘it looks a lot like a murder’, that Ötzi had been shot from 30 metres away, and that he was taken by surprise, as his own bow wasn’t strung.

  Horn said the body was in better condition than some he has had to work on, but, disappointingly, failed to pin down the killer’s motive. He said it was probably caused by ‘some strong personal emotion’, but also conceded, ‘I don’t think there is a high likelihood we will ever be able to solve that case … I don’t like the fact that we have an unsolved homicide here.’

  Recent examination of Ötzi’s stomach contents revealed that among the final things he ate was goat bacon. It’s a discovery that has rocked the bacon world, since it shows that bacon is twice as old as was previously thought.

  OZONE▶

  Decaf drinkers discovered they are killing the planet.

  The ozone layer had a good year – there’s now strong evidence that the hole in it is shrinking, thanks to the 1987 ban on dangerous CFC chemicals. But there’s bad news, too. It turns out that a previously obscure chemical called dichloromethane (DCM), used to extract caffeine from coffee and tea, is very bad for the ozone layer. In fairness, it should be noted that it’s not only used for decaffeination – it’s also used in paint strippers, hairspray and deodorant, so coffee drinkers aren’t solely to blame. There’s currently twice as much DCM in the atmosphere as there was in 2000. If current trends continue, the recovery of the ozone layer will take 30 years longer than it otherwise would have.

  Ozone gas caused a brief hoo-ha this year when it emerged that some medical centres are now offering women the chance to pump it into their vaginas to induce ‘wellness’. There are various problems with the procedure: for one, ozone gas is toxic to humans. Consequently, not only could the treatment easily kill a patient if a gas bubble got into her bloodstream, but it could even harm patients accidentally inhaling it while in the treatment room. As expert Dr Jen Gunter put it, ozone gas may be ‘natural’, but only ‘in the way that cyanide is natural. It has some uses in nature but it’s really, really bad for people.’ There is, also, no evidence that it promotes ‘wellness’.

  PAINTINGS▶

  Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee Bubbles sold five paintings. The gallery owner described them as ‘abstract’.

  Bubbles’s pictures featured in an exhibition called ‘Apes That Paint’, in which artworks created by chimpanzees and orangutans were displayed. He made $3,750 altogether from the sales, which will be donated to the Center for Great Apes, in Florida, where he lives. All the artists whose work was on show are retired, after careers in entertainment or medical research, and live at the Center. Other famous apes there include Jonah, who starred in the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, and BamBam, who played a character called Nurse Precious in the soap opera Passions. Bubbles took up painting after Jackson’s death, and according to the Center he also enjoys listening to flute music, but his favourite activity is ‘playing in tubs of water’.

  Elsewhere in art news:

  ▶ The world learned of a painting that’s been hidden in the Antarctic for 118 years. It’s a watercolour of a dead bird painted by one of Captain Scott’s companions, Dr Edward Wilson, who died along with Scott in 1912. It was found in a pile of papers in one of their huts, covered in mould and penguin excrement.

  ▶ The oldest known Australian oil paintings were found at London’s Royal College of Surgeons. The paintings, produced between 1800 and 1807, are – predictably – of kangaroos.

  ▶ In Georgia, a painting longer than a football pitch moved to a new home. The 374-foot-long, 40-foot-high structure was successfully relocated from the Atlanta Cyclorama & Civil War Museum (to make way for a zoo) to the Atlanta History Center, 12 miles away. Two huge holes were cut into the roof of the 100-year-old Cyclorama building, and the 131-year-old oil painting The Battle of Atlanta was split in two, rolled up and lifted out by a crane. It was transported on the back of a truck to its new home, where it was lowered through the roof, unrolled and reassembled.

  ▶ A painting by Kandinsky became the most expensive painting by the artist ever to be sold, going for a record £21 million. Twenty-two minutes later, the record was broken again by a different Kandinsky work, which sold for £33 million.

  It was revealed this year that former White House adviser Steve Bannon owns a huge painting of himself dressed as Napoleon. It was a gift from Nigel Farage.

  Drivers in Sussex, Wisconsin, were shocked when they drove past a water tower bearing the huge letters ‘SEX’ after the letter painters took a break in the middle of painting the word ‘SUSSEX’.

  PARLIAMENTS▶

  The Houses of Parliament spent £8,900 on killing moths.

  The total amount spent on pest control during the course of the last year was around £130,000, including £16,000 to hire a hawk to keep pigeons at bay. More than 1,700 traps were set – not surprising given that there were 411 recorded mouse-sightings (up from 313 the year before).

  And it’s not just vermin that are a problem. Parliament is in a state of terrible disrepair: it’s draughty, full of asbestos and is prone to flooding (in 2012, MP Ben Bradshaw discovered that urine from the lavatories on the floor above him was leaking through the ceiling and on to his desk). What’s more, the Palace of Westminster is a huge fire risk and had to be made subject to a fire safety order in 2005. This means that it can only continue to be used if fire safety officers, working in shifts, patrol it 24 hours a day.

  Perhaps China might be prepared to help. This year the Chinese government announced that it would spend $58 million building a new parliament for the Republic of Congo as a gift. In recent years, China has generously constructed a new parliament for Zimbabwe, refurbished Sierra Leone’s parliament and foreign ministry, renovated Zambia’s government buildings, erected a new presidential palace in Mozambique, donated security facilities to Ghana’s parliament, and given $25 million to help build residences for the Ugandan president and prime minister.

  China wasn’t the only country to build a new parliament this year: the Russian defence ministry built a miniature model of Germany’s Reichstag parliament building, so the country’s youth soldiers could practise storming it. It was built in Russia’s ‘Patriot Park’, nicknamed
‘Military Disneyland’, for Russia’s Youth Army – a network of children being taught military skills by the real army. In April, 2,000 people re-enacted the storming of the Reichstag in 1945 – although observers noticed that the replica building appeared to have been modelled on the contemporary Reichstag. A German foreign ministry spokesman reacted with surprise, saying ‘We wouldn’t build something like that for the education of German youth.’

  After electing a solitary woman MP, the Tongan parliament found that it no longer had a word that accurately described all its members. ‘Matu’a’, which was used while the parliament was all-male, means ‘a group of old men’, and, as someone rightly pointed out, the Tongan version of ‘a group of old men and one old woman’ wouldn’t sound that great. Eventually they just used the word ‘mau’, which means ‘we’.

  PASSPORTS▶

  Brexiteers looked forward to new blue passports, but blue travel documents are already used in the UK: by refugees.

  The ‘traditional’ blue design was actually used on British passports for only 68 of the 477 years that they have existed, but it seems certain to return when Britain reveals its post-Brexit design. If that happens, Britain will join the list of blue-passport countries, which currently includes the USA, Australia, El Salvador, Venezuela, Israel, Iraq, Syria and North Korea. It may at least save money, since the main reason they were blue in the first place was that it was an extremely cheap ink to make.

  Britain’s passports ceased to be the world’s most powerful this year, losing that position to Germany. Germans can visit 176 countries around the world without needing a visa, while Britons can visit only 173. At the bottom of the table is Afghanistan, whose passport gets holders into just 24 countries without a visa being necessary.