The Book of the Year Read online

  DOGS, NON-HOT▶

  For taking drugs in New York, see Cannabis; for being nearly run over by a robot, see Cars, Driverless; for favourite musical genres, see Discoveries; for a long game of ‘fetch’, see Drones; for scaring wealthy teenagers, see Fyre Festival; for being abandoned in a palace, see Korea, South; for assuming political office, see Mayors; for watching their weight, see Obesity; for looking good for the camera, see Passports; for not being named Doggy McDogface, see Public, Don’t Ask the; for no longer being eaten, see Taiwan; for not doing a very good job of guarding, see Theft; and for falling out of a plane, strapped to a person, see Venezuela.

  DONALDS▶

  Fewer American babies were named Donald than Odin, Atticus or Augustus.

  Indeed, the name Donald has slumped to an all-time low in the US. When The Donald was born, in 1946, it was the 13th most popular name in the country, but now it’s the 488th. The situation is even worse in the former heartland of Donalds – Scotland – where only seven babies were named Donald in 2016. That’s the lowest number since records began and a 200 per cent drop from 2014, the year before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency. Donald Anderson, former leader of Edinburgh Council, suggested, ‘We need a character called Donald on Game of Thrones to make it popular again.’

  ‘Donald’ comes from the Gaelic name ‘Domnhall’, which means ‘ruler of the world’. ‘Melania’ derives from the Greek for ‘dark’. Together, therefore, the names of the US power couple make ‘Dark Ruler of the World’.* Yet for others, the association with the leader of the free world seems to be problematic. In an interview with Slate.com, Donald Bell, a 38-year-old from California, said, ‘I’m more sensitive about my name when I say it out loud to people. You can tell that people will flinch almost, not even meaning to, but just hearing the name, it produces such an emotional reaction in people. I’m just going to Starbucks for a cup of coffee, they ask me for my name, I have to say my name and then kind of apologise for it.’

  DOOMSDAY▶

  The Doomsday Vault – one of our last defences against climate change – was flooded thanks to climate change.

  The ‘Doomsday Vault’ is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on a frozen archipelago in the Arctic. Built by the Norwegian government in an abandoned coal mine, at the end of a 130-metre tunnel, it stores the seeds of almost a million varieties of plant at a temperature of minus 18°C. In the event of crop failures, a nuclear war or environmental crisis, the seeds can be used to regenerate plant species and restore diversity to the planet’s crops. There are other backups around the world, but this is the ultimate one.

  Unfortunately, last October unseasonably warm weather caused melted permafrost to flood into the tunnel. The melted water then froze, leaving a big ice plug blocking the vault’s entrance. This keeps happening – a little water gets in every single year, but never this much before. Thankfully the seeds were unharmed, and the vault is now being fitted with extra waterproofing.

  In March 2017, a Norwegian company opened a second Doomsday vault on Svalbard – for data. The Arctic World Archive is 300 metres below the surface in another converted mine. Norway, Mexico and Brazil have archived copies of their constitutions and important historical papers there on photosensitive film. The archive is offline (and therefore unhackable) and it’s apparently nuclear-proof, so it should offer peace of mind for the next 1,000 years. The firm responsible for the vault is called ‘Piql’, because they pickle your information like a gherkin.

  Donald Trump’s presidency prompted atomic scientists to adjust the Doomsday Clock – the imaginary clock that records how many minutes we are from nuclear apocalypse. It’s now at two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest it’s been since 1960. The scientists who set the clock said this was thanks in part to Trump’s ‘intemperate statements [and] lack of openness to expert advice’.

  In his will, a Ugandan man asked to be buried along with 200 million Ugandan shillings (£42,000) with which he hoped to bribe God to forgive his sins on Judgement Day. Within a month, fellow clan members dug up his coffin to claim the money for themselves.

  DRAGONFLIES▶

  Female dragonflies avoid male attention by faking their own deaths.

  This drastic strategy was observed for the first time this year in Switzerland by a researcher who saw it employed by 27 of the 31 dragonflies he studied. When being chased by an undesirable suitor, he reported, a female would suddenly plummet out of the sky, crash-land into the ground and lie motionless on her back until the male departed. She would then dust herself off and fly away.

  They do this because if a female’s eggs for that particular cycle have already been fertilised, further copulation is not only fruitless but could damage their reproductive tracts. Twenty-one of the 27 females who attempted the ploy were successful. In the other six cases, the males were simply too persistent.

  Scientists created cyborg dragonflies by hitching tiny solar-powered backpacks on to live dragonflies and connecting the devices to their nervous systems. The scientists controlled the insects remotely, via the backpacks.

  DRIVING▶

  Police in Bath launched a crackdown on bad drivers, but only managed to find one.

  As part of Operation Close Pass, a national campaign to make motorists aware of the dangers of driving too close to cyclists, Bath Police got plain-clothes officers to ride along the city’s Lower Bristol Road, with instructions to pounce on drivers who passed them too closely. Unfortunately, the day they selected happened to be one when traffic congestion was so bad that, most of the time, cyclists were overtaking motorists. Only one driver was stopped.

  Undaunted, the police moved to a different road. However, this one was rather wider and motorists gave them all plenty of room. The police admitted that the operation hadn’t caught many people out, but noted that ‘there was lots of passing interest’.

  Another nationwide crackdown, on drivers using their mobile phones at the wheel, was a bit more successful. Among the 8,000 stopped were: a driver who was texting about her lost puppy; a van driver who was swerving because he had his pet parrot perched on his steering wheel; and a journalist who was caught using her phone while on her way to cover the launch of the crackdown.

  Authorities in Nigeria started testing bad drivers for signs of insanity. Drivers in the capital, Abuja, who jumped red lights were pulled over, put into ambulances and given a one-hour test of their mental competency. The acting director of road traffic services, Wadata Aliyu Bodinga, said, ‘To my great surprise, none of them has actually been found to be mentally unstable.’

  DRONES▶

  Drones were used to trace a chihuahua, herd sheep, and spy on the Lannister family.

  Following a failed search party by dozens of volunteers for a chihuahua that had been lost on a Welsh mountain for five days after running off to fetch a stick, a heat-seeking drone found the animal within 20 minutes. Meanwhile, over in Australia, farmers started using drones to a) herd their sheep, and b) find them in the first place. Drones were used for espionage, too: Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham revealed that while shooting in Spain, ‘We were being live-streamed while we were filming … Everything we’ve done has been infiltrated, which is terrible.’

  Elsewhere:

  ▶ Edmonton Airport in Canada installed a drone painted like a falcon, with fast-flapping wings, to clear birds from flight paths. (It’s been programmed to make sure it doesn’t accidentally fly into flight paths itself.)

  ▶ Scientists in India tried using drones to drop ‘seed bombs’ that will generate entire forests.

  ▶ And in Sweden, a team experimented with flying defibrillators to people who are having heart attacks, and found that it’s four times quicker than sending an ambulance.

  One of the more bizarre ideas of the year came from tech firm Windhorse Aerospace, which announced it was looking at making a prototype of an edible drone. If it works, the one-way drone could deliver food and medicine to famine-hit ar
eas and then be eaten itself. Founder Nigel Gifford said the frame might be made of honeycomb and the landing gear possibly from salami.

  Also in drone-sausage news, hot-dog firm Oscar Mayer launched what it called ‘the first unmanned hot-dog-carrying aircraft designed for remote location delivery’ as a publicity stunt (realistically, the drone could only carry a single sausage and would be much slower than land-based distribution systems). It wasn’t the very first in the field, however: last November an Australian man called Tim got in trouble for having a sausage sandwich delivered to him by drone – ordered from a nearby restaurant – as he sat in his hot tub. The Internet called him a ‘Goddamn Australian legend’; the Civil Aviation Safety Authority pointed out that his actions contravened rules governing drone use in public areas and fined him AUS$900. To add to his woes, the local council saw the video, spotted that he didn’t have a proper fence around his hot tub, and forced him to put one up.

  Any modern army needs to be able to deal with the threat of drones. France now employs golden eagles to attack them (they train the birds by having a drone deliver all of their meals) while America takes out drones in the most American way possible: with a massive flying bomb. General David Perkins told a military symposium that a drone, worth around $200, had recently been intercepted by a Patriot missile, worth around $3 million.

  DUCKS, RUBBER▶

  A rubber duck was arrested in St Petersburg.

  That, at least, was the claim of Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, as Russian Special Forces confiscated a giant duck that was being paraded by anti-corruption protesters. As it was taken away, protesters yelled, ‘Not the ducky! Don’t arrest the ducky!’

  The background to this is a video posted last year by opposition leader Alexei Navalny showing a luxurious summer home, used by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and paid for by the public, which boasts, among other things, three helipads, a ski slope and a ‘house for a ducky’. Ever since the video was released, rubber ducks have become a de facto symbol of the opposition. Protesters in St Petersburg, for instance, keep putting a duck house outside a building owned by the company financially connected to Medvedev. Each time the company removes it, the protesters simply put another in its place. When the story of Medvedev’s mansion first broke, Russians joked that they’d be willing to quack and dive for bugs, if the prime minister allowed them to live in his luxury duck house.

  Russia wasn’t the only country to have rubber duck issues this year. To celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary, the province of Ontario hired a six-storey-high, 13.6-ton rubber duck called ‘Mama Duck’ to sail around the Toronto waterfront. Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, whose own giant rubber duck predates Mama Duck, claimed the duck was an ‘illegal counterfeit’. But Mama Duck’s owner, Craig Samborski, an events producer who calls himself the ‘world’s largest rubber duck owner’, replied that the studio had ‘zero rights to the concept of enlarged bathroom toys’, and that Hofman had charged ‘exorbitant prices for rudimentary drawings of a duck’. All the while, lots of people thought that, fake or not, the duck was a waste of taxpayers’ money – the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Ontario Director, Christine Van Geyn, said, ‘This giant rubber duck isn’t all it’s quacked up to be.’

  DUTERTE, RODRIGO▶

  The president of the Philippines can’t control his duterte mouth.

  In 2016 Rodrigo Duterte, the Filipino president who has been condemned around the world for his brutal and murderous campaign to rid the country of organised crime, made a promise to God that he would never swear again, after he heard a voice threatening to down the plane he was travelling on if he did not stop.

  He didn’t stick to his promise. In January 2017, when asked about a UN investigation into his activities, he responded, ‘I do not care if you are Obama or Ban Ki-moon. You just don’t reprimand me in public […] I will kick you out, you son of a bitch.’ When the New York Times criticised his human rights record, he retorted, ‘New York Times: Asshole.’ He dressed down the national police live on television, saying, ‘Don’t dare me to a gunfight [because] I will not back down, you sons of bitches.’ And when the European Union rebuked him for his deadly war on drugs, he called them ‘sons of bitches’ too, adding, ‘Why don’t you mind your own business? Why do you have to f*** with us, goddamn it?’

  God’s opinion of these outbursts is unknown. But this year, perhaps sensibly, Duterte turned down an offer of a private jet from the former owner of Philippine Airlines.

  In May, Duterte appointed a pop star and sex blogger as his assistant communications secretary. Mocha Uson is lead singer of the band Mocha Girls and known for performing lap dances on stage. Duterte described her as ‘a little bit sexier’ than others who supported his election campaign, but said this shouldn’t be held against her.

  EASTER▶

  Bunnies were banned for Easter.

  Pets at Home, Britain’s biggest pet retailer, announced it wouldn’t be selling any rabbits between Good Friday and Easter Monday because so many of them are abandoned every year in the subsequent weeks. It seems that people infected by the Easter imagery buy bunnies on impulse and then are unable to look after them; shelters take in 67,000 abandoned rabbits each year.

  In Manchester, organisers of a performance of an Easter passion play* tried to fund it by offering to crucify people in exchange for money. Their crowdfunding page declared that for £750, donors could get ‘the full crucifixion experience’ – which, it transpired, would have involved hoisting them on to a cross for a few minutes then lowering them back down again. The idea was shelved after Reverend Canon Falak Sher, chairman of the play’s organising committee, got wind of it and argued that it was blasphemous, dangerous and – perhaps most importantly – very tasteless.

  Meanwhile, an off-licence in Ireland started selling Buckfast Easter eggs this year, packaging up chocolate eggs with a bottle of the notorious tonic wine. The Devon-based monks who make Buckfast Tonic Wine advised people against buying the boxes, arguing they might encourage children to drink. Ironically, despite being made by monks, Buckfast has an ungodly reputation in Scotland, where the vast majority of it is consumed. A 2009 report found that 43 per cent of Scottish prisoners had drunk Buckfast just before committing their last offence, even though it accounts for only 1 per cent of Scotland’s overall alcohol sales.

  Police in Nice arrested a man during Easter Mass because he was waving something that ‘looked like a sausage’.

  EBAY▶

  eBay users sold Cheetos shaped like laser guns, Bart Simpson, the Virgin Mary and penises. Lots of penises.

  The craze for selling snacks that look like something else began in February, when a Cheeto resembling Harambe the gorilla (killed at Cincinnati Zoo in 2016) appeared to have been sold for $99,900. In fact, the buyer pulled out before completing the transaction, but that part of the story didn’t reach a lot of people, so they searched through their snack packets hoping to strike Harambe-shaped gold. Over the following months, many more Harambe-shaped Cheetos came on sale, along with snacks shaped like all sorts of other objects. For some reason, Cheetos seem to lend themselves to looking like penises.

  Odd-shaped Cheetos weren’t the weirdest things on sale on eBay this year. Someone bid more than $1,500 for a bag of air from an Adele concert; a slice of toast with an image of Jesus was listed at $25,000; a 14cm-long bran flake was listed on the British site at £1,000; and a mouldy sandwich that looked like Mickey Mouse was on sale for $30,000.

  ECUADOR▶

  Ecuador elected as president the author of a joke book entitled World’s Best Jokes.

  Lenín Moreno believes that laughter can help the body to heal. And it isn’t the only book he wrote on the subject: as vice president he was the author of another called Being Happy Is Easy and Fun.

  His narrow victory in this year’s election makes Moreno the world’s first paraplegic head of state. He says that his disability helps him as a politician: ‘When you don’t have legs, you look d
own. That’s what I learned: that there’s another life, another existence, that there are other human beings that need a lot from us. For me, this is a novel experience that I thank God for.’

  The Tajikistan president, Emomali Rahmon, wrote and published a book of his own quotes this year. It’s called Wise Thoughts and Sayings of the President of Tajikistan, Founder of Peace and National Unity, and is 464 pages long.

  ELECTIONS, GENERAL▶

  For an election in a country that doesn’t exist, see Abkhazia; for a footballer of the year turned president, see Bulgaria; for a country that voted by marble, see Gambia; for a party with a milk packet as its logo, see Kenya; for a president who claimed victory a month before voting opened, see Rwanda; for a president called Mr Cheese from Buffalo, see Somalia; for a singing dentist turned president, see Turkmenistan; for a corpse becoming president, see Zimbabwe.

  For General Elections, see UK General Election.

  ENERGY▶

  The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum converted to solar power.

  The museum, which celebrates all things coal, installed 80 solar panels on its roof, hoping to save up to $10,000 a year. The man who installed the solar panels said he was surprised to get the job, saying, ‘I was like, are you for real?’, while the museum’s communications director, Brandon Robinson, admitted to reporters that ‘It is a little ironic.’

  Meanwhile, in Britain, a windy couple of weeks in June made the the country’s wind turbines so productive that there was little need for coal-powered electricity. However, because it costs so much to turn coal power stations on and off, they were all kept online, and people were actually paid to take electricity for a short while, meaning that their final energy bills were lower than they would otherwise have been. Earlier in the year, the UK went a full day without needing any energy at all from its coal power stations for the first time since 1882. This was partly due to low electricity demand after the Easter holidays, and again, a few particularly windy days.