The Book of the Year Read online

  BANDITS▶

  Bank robbers and other bandits sought in America this year included:

  The Shirt Mask Bandit. Wore a shirt as a mask. Still got caught.

  The Incognito Bandit. Nobody knew who he was, until he was apprehended.

  The Bag Trick Bandit. Kept putting his hand in a bag and pretending to have a gun.

  The Coast to Coast Bandit. Only robbed banks in New York and Los Angeles.

  The Texas Butthole Tickling Bandit. Robbed the homes of single men and poked them as they slept.

  The Blueberry Bandit. Stole $100,000 worth of blueberries and other fruits.

  The Foul Mouth Bandit. Swore at people as he robbed them.

  The Lunchtime Bandit. Only robbed banks between noon and 1 p.m.

  The Hangover Bandit. Stank of booze.

  The Bedrock Bandit. Stole a large fossil from a Denver shop by shoving it down his trousers.

  The Spelling Bee Bandit. Passed cashiers a note saying this was a ‘robery’.

  BANKNOTES▶

  Jane Austen looks too attractive on the new £10 note.

  The only completed portrait of Austen in her lifetime is of the back of her head. Painted in 1804 by her older sister, Cassandra, it shows Jane sitting by a lake, but unfortunately facing the wrong way. We can’t even see her hair because she’s wearing a massive bonnet. The Bank of England has used a prettified version of the only front view we have of her – a rough sketch, also by Cassandra, about which her niece wrote, ‘There is a look which I recognise as hers … though the general resemblance is not strong.’ Another niece added that it was ‘hideously unlike’ her.

  It’s not the fact that the Bank of England is using an inaccurate portrait that has upset Austen’s biographers, though. It’s the fact that the Bank has opted for an ‘airbrushed’ version, based on Cassandra’s original sketch and painted after Jane’s death by her nephew. Her angry biographers say the portrait makes her look far more attractive than she actually was.

  The notes are made of a plastic substance called polypropylene, a material which has also been used in thermal underwear, model planes, Tic Tac boxes, the stickers on Rubik’s Cubes, and parts of Tenerife Cathedral. To make it thin enough to be turned into notes it is blown into a giant bubble which grows to the height of a four-storey building, before collapsing in on itself. The result is a thin transparent film that is waterproof, rip-resistant and slippery. Too slippery, in fact – cash machines across the UK have had to be upgraded because most of the old machines couldn’t properly handle the plastic notes.

  Somalia announced plans to press their first banknotes since 1991 (as a result of this long gap, up to 98 per cent of Somali banknotes currently in circulation are counterfeit). Officials also said that they will upgrade the design from the old one, which featured a woman with a baby strapped to her and waving a rifle, a shovel and a rake.

  BANKS, NON-SPERM▶

  The World Bank’s chief economist refused to sign off the World Development Report if more than 2.6 per cent of the words it contained were ‘and’.

  Theoretically, the day job of the World Bank is to provide loans to developing countries, but at the moment its management seems to be more concerned with a long-winded style of writing known as ‘bankspeak’, which the bank worries makes financial statements at best dull and at worst unreadable. In particular, it wants to clamp down on ‘and’, the overuse of which, according to chief economist Paul Romer, is the reason why only 32 per cent of reports created by the bank are ever read by anyone other than the author. Up until now, the ‘and’ rate in World Bank reports has been 3.4 per cent, so the institution has a little way to go to achieve its self-imposed limit. Donald Trump’s ‘and’ rate in his inauguration speech, by comparison, was 5.2 per cent. Paul Romer’s ‘and’ rate in the ‘about me’ section on his personal website is 3.28 per cent.*

  The Bank of England is similarly concerned about impenetrable language and is taking steps to address the problem. According to Nemat Shafik, the former deputy governor for markets, she and her colleagues have been studying the prose style of the Dr Seuss books to find ways to make the bank’s communications more comprehensible among the general public.

  BANKS, SPERM▶

  Richard Branson opened the world’s first dyslexic-only sperm bank.

  The project was launched as part of a campaign designed to remove the stigma of dyslexia, and was inspired by a 2015 news story that the UK’s largest sperm bank was turning away donors with the condition. This is surprising, as the UK is currently suffering a severe sperm shortage. The National Sperm Bank – an organisation set up in 2014 to deal with the shortage – closed last year, having attracted only seven donors.

  The best place to store human sperm might be in giant tubes inside the moon. That’s the conclusion of a team of scientists from the University of Yamanashi, Japan, who managed this year to breed mice from some freeze-dried mouse sperm (see Mice, Space). They think that storing sperm on the moon might prove a useful safeguard for humankind in the event of a nuclear apocalypse or catastrophic environmental disaster.

  Turkish Angora goats also got their own sperm bank this year. The number of goats that produce the finest wool has declined sharply in recent years, but scientists predict that goats inseminated with high-quality sperm from the new bank will give birth to animals that produce three times as much wool.

  A scientific study by the University of British Columbia found that smoking marijuana makes men’s sperm cells ‘mellow’ and start swimming in circles.

  BANS▶

  Ban-happy countries of 2017 included:

  ▶ Country: Cambodia

  Banned: Actress Denny Kwan

  Reason: Being – according to the country’s Culture and Fine Arts Ministry – ‘too sexy’ to act. Her ban is in place for one year. Kwan has apologised and said she will try not to be so sexy in the future.

  ▶ Country: Ukraine

  Banned: Steven Seagal

  Reason: Being a threat to national security. The ban stems from Seagal’s association with other post-Soviet countries, notably Russia. Last year, for example, he was personally presented with a Russian passport by Vladimir Putin (Putin’s spokesperson claims, however, that Seagal was only given a passport because he would not stop asking for one). The action hero joins a ‘banned’ list that includes any Russian movie made since January 2014, the lead singer of Limp Bizkit and Gerard Depardieu.

  ▶ Country: Uzbekistan

  Banned: A video game that doesn’t exist

  Reason: Thirty-eight video games have been banned by the government because they conflict with the country’s values. The list includes Call of Duty: Black Ops; Dead Space; Left 4 Dead; Left 4 Dead 2; and Left 4 Dead 3. There is no Left 4 Dead 3.

  ▶ Country: Turkey

  Banned: Wikipedia

  Reason: Turkey is reportedly unhappy with some articles on Wikipedia that associate the state with terrorism. According to the ‘Censorship of Wikipedia’ Wiki page, the country had previously only censored specific articles, such as ‘Vulva’, ‘Human Penis’, ‘Vagina’, ‘Scrotum’, and ‘2015 Turkish General Election Polls’.

  BEAUTY PAGEANT WINNERS▶

  For Miss World see Gibraltar; for Miss Great Grimsby and District, see Journalists; and for Miss USA see Nuclear Power Plants.

  BEER▶

  A Danish brewery made a batch of beer using 50,000 litres of two-year-old urine from a music festival.

  Rather than follow the normal route of using animal manure to fertilise the barley that then makes beer, the Nørrebro brewery opted for music-festival urine instead. The brewery was at pains to point out that no actual urine would end up in the beer (named ‘Pisner’). The vital fluid was collected from the Roskilde music festival held two years ago – the brewers were only aiming for 25,000 litres and managed to pull in twice as much. At the time, an organiser said, ‘We’ve got urinals right next to the stages … so we’re hoping to collect some rock star pee.’ Drinkers
may therefore now be enjoying beer brewed with the urine of Pharrell Williams, Florence (and her Machine), and Sir Paul McCartney. The batch turned out fine, at least in taste terms: one satisfied drinker said, ‘If it had tasted even a bit like urine, I would put it down.’

  Meanwhile, in Belgium, MPs were told that they would no longer be served free beer and wine during parliamentary sessions. The decision followed a report by an ethics committee that concluded a) that most workplaces don’t give you free alcohol, and b) that the ready availability of alcohol was making some MPs ‘quite unpleasant’. Initially, MPs voted against the removal of their booze privilege, but there was such a large public outcry about it that they eventually agreed to pay for their drinks from now on.

  Californian brewery Stone Brewing has developed a beer made from recycled sewage water. It’s called Full Circle and tastes ‘very clean’, according to the man who made it.

  A ‘fake beer factory’ was busted in China. Workers were making 600,000 cans of fake Budweiser every month, scooping the beer in from plastic containers with their bare hands.

  BEES▶

  Two thousand bees were stolen in Beeston.

  It may not have been the biggest bee heist of the year, but it was the one that happened in the most appropriately named place. One way and another, it wasn’t a good year for bees: as well as the ones stolen in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, 200,000 were stolen in Kent, a million in Austria, a $1 million bee-stealing ring was uncovered in California, and more than 400 independent beehive thefts were reported in New Zealand in just six months.

  Why steal bees? Well, firstly, they’re very hard to identify: it’s hard for a bee owner to look at one and say with any certainty, ‘That’s my bee.’ Secondly they’re worth a lot: the price of renting a beehive in California, where almond growers rely on them to pollinate the trees, can be as much as $200 for the season. And the prices have been skyrocketing in recent years, due to abnormally high mortality rates among bees (last year bee deaths in the US fell to their lowest level for years, but even so a third of all bees in the US died).

  British bees are also under threat, but Tesco stores in Cornwall and Devon have been doing their bit to help them. They collect any sugar that has been spilt (and is therefore not fit for human consumption) and leave it out for the bees to help them keep going through the winter. It has to be white sugar: brown sugar gives bees dysentery.

  BELARUS▶

  The president of Belarus celebrated Freedom Day by arresting 700 protesters in Minsk.

  To be honest, Belarus doesn’t have much freedom to celebrate at the moment: its press is the second least free in Europe, only beaten by Turkey, which has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world. After President Lukashenko’s crackdown on protesters, the headline on the website of the largest state-controlled Belarusian newspaper, Belarus Today, was ‘Everything is calm in Minsk’. A public outcry led to the headline being deleted two days later.

  Belarus invented a fictional country to be the enemy in its war games with Russia, Zapad 2017. Belarusian citizens enthusiastically adopted the idea and made up a foreign ministry, flag, history and Wikipedia page for the nation of Veyshnoria. Hundreds of Belarusians applied for Veyshnorian citizenship on a spoof website.

  BHUTAN▶

  India and China clashed over Bhutan, meaning a third of the world’s population could have gone to war over a country with the same population as Buckinghamshire.

  The dispute was over a region known as Doklam in Bhutan and Donglang in China. When China started building roads in the area, Bhutan asked its friend India for help. India sent troops, who first formed a human chain to stop the construction work and then set up camp in the area. China responded by moving in its own troops. India wasn’t acting entirely altruistically: it owns a strip of land nearby called ‘the chicken neck’ which separates one part of India from the rest. If China were to invade, 50 million Indians would be cut off from the Indian mainland.

  So China and India – which have a combined population of 2.6 billion and around 400 nuclear warheads between them – both sent troops to an obscure area in Bhutan. War was not in anybody’s interest though, so to avoid conflict the troops were all unarmed. They weren’t allowed to strike each other either, and if one side tried to advance, the other could only stop them by chest-bumping and jostling them out of the way. Fortunately, after a 73-day standoff, the leaders of the two countries met and agreed to pursue a peaceful solution.

  Meanwhile, Bhutan is dealing with the rise of an alt-right movement, but unlike the nationalism in Europe and America it is mostly interested in diet. The vegetarian-right is a loose coalition of politicians and commentators who think it should be a crime to eat meat in the country. It’s already illegal to kill animals for meat in Bhutan, but you can import it to eat, and paradoxically the country is, per capita, the highest meat consumer in South Asia. The veggie-right is pushing to make it illegal both to import meat and to eat it.

  One reason Indians are worried about road-building in Bhutan is that China is improving its roads in disputed territories much faster than India’s specially created ‘Border Roads Organisation’. That said, what the organisation lacks in speed, they make up for in poetry. Recent roads built in Bhutan include signs such as ‘After drinking whisky, driving is risky’; ‘Going faster will see disaster’; and the slightly less successful couplet: ‘Don’t hurry, be cool, since heaven is already full’.

  BLINK-182, LEAD SINGERS OF▶

  For the one who was named UFO Researcher of the Year, see Aliens; for the one who believes he successfully cursed a music festival, see Witchcraft.

  BOAR▶

  Hunters in Texas are now allowed to sneak up on wild boar in hot air balloons.

  The Texas government – which is currently fighting a two-million strong ‘hog apocalypse’ – legalised shooting boar from hot air balloons because they’re quieter and steadier than helicopters. State representative Mark Keogh said the plan was a ‘western, swashbuckling, cowboying type of way to deal with things. It’s part of the culture.’

  Boar are everywhere. This year they’ve been wandering the streets of Rome, feeding on the garbage that the new city’s mayor has been unable to get removed on a regular basis. Near Vienna, one ‘massive’ boar chased Britain’s ambassador to Austria, while he was walking in the woods. He got away, but injured himself scrabbling up a pile of wet logs. (For the record, the best way to escape a charging boar is to climb up something.)

  Since Japan’s 2011 nuclear accident, the abandoned town of Fukushima has been overtaken by hundreds of ‘potentially radioactive’ wild boar. Sadly, this won’t lead to a thriving sausage industry – people can’t eat them due to the radiation risk. The logical answer – hunting and burying them – has its problems, too, since Japan is running out of grave space. There is a special incinerator that can filter out radioactive materials, but unfortunately it can only handle three boar a day – and 13,000 have been killed in the last two years alone.

  In Iraq, three ISIS militants who were preparing an ambush in some reeds were killed by a herd of wild boar. Five others were injured.

  BOATS▶

  The world’s first zero-emissions boat set off around the world. The trip will take twice as long as the first ever around-the-world voyage.

  The boat, Energy Observer, is covered in solar panels and wind turbines. As well as powering the ship, they provide energy to take water from the sea and remove the hydrogen, which is then stored in tanks and used for power when it’s still, cloudy or night-time. The boat is slow, travelling at an average speed of 10mph, and it will stop at 101 ports along the way to promote renewable energy. The full journey will take six years, which is twice as long as Ferdinand Magellan took in 1522.

  It’s not the slowest boat of the year, though. That honour belongs to an engineless barge made of recycled material that has been pulled all the way from Liverpool to Riddlesden in Yorkshire by artist and university lecturer Ben C
ummins. He hopes to reach London by 2037. ‘Some people get married, or get a mortgage,’ he told reporters. ‘I’ve got this.’

  Perhaps the pluckiest small boat of the year is called Undaunted. It’s 42 inches long and looks a little bit like a top-loading washing machine. Its owner, Matt Kent, hoped to cross the Atlantic in it, but had to turn back after just 24 hours when it developed problems. He’s planning to try again next year, after the hurricane season. Matt describes Undaunted as ‘a great storm shelter’ but also as ‘a terrible boat’.

  For Mr Boats Botes see Names; for Boaty McBoatface see Oceans and Public, Don’t Ask the.

  A family in Scotland launched a Playmobil pirate ship into the North Sea with a note asking anyone who found it to take a photo and send the ship back to sea. It reached Denmark, then Sweden (where it was found in a tree), and it was then picked up by a Norwegian research vessel which took it to Cape Verde so that it could sail the Atlantic.

  BODY SLAMS▶

  A US Republican candidate charged with body-slamming a journalist made his fortune in customer service.

  Guardian journalist Ben Jacobs reported that when he asked Republican candidate Greg Gianforte about his party’s healthcare plans, Gianforte grabbed him by the neck, slammed him to the floor and broke his glasses.* Gianforte’s election campaign was not affected by this incident (largely due to the fact that Montana has an early voting system and half the votes had already been cast) and he successfully won a seat in the House of Representatives the very next day. During his acceptance speech, Gianforte apologised to Jacobs for the attack.

  As well as founding RightNow Technologies, which sold software that advised businesses on how best to answer customers’ questions, Gianforte has set up a foundation dedicated to supporting the work of faith-based organisations. In 2009 it helped fund a creationist museum in Montana that aims to prove that dinosaurs and humans co-existed. One exhibit features Noah’s ark with dinosaurs aboard.