The Book of the Year Read online

  In an attempt to solve its own underpopulation problem, the Swedish town of Övertorneå considered the idea of giving employees an hour a week to go and have state-subsidised sex. The politician who proposed it, Per-Erik Muskos, did acknowledge it would be hard to enforce the idea, and impossible to know if employees hadn’t used the time to take a walk in the country instead. The town’s council turned down the idea, saying, ‘If sexual congress is considered a valid activity, then other activities should be approved, such as cleaning.’

  The French village of Auge also has a problem with low fertility. This year, a new baby was born there for the first time in 50 years, and it was such a rare occurrence that no one knew how to register the birth. A few days after having a baby in her garden – a location that pleased the father, who is a landscape gardener – mother Cyrielle Brugère took her newborn daughter to the town hall to get a birth certificate. This flummoxed the mayor, who admitted that she wasn’t sure how to fill in the form for a birth, and that the birth register had become so redundant that it was now used to register deaths. Happily, she successfully navigated her way through the paperwork, and said that she hoped news of the newborn would attract other families to the village.

  A high court judge in Rajasthan claimed that peahens get pregnant by drinking the tears of peacocks.

  One traditional method of increasing fertility is to flush the fallopian tubes with poppy seed oil. The practice is more than 100 years old, but was assumed to be an old wives’ remedy until a study this year found that 40 per cent of women got pregnant after having their tubes flushed with the oil, compared with 29 per cent who’d had them flushed with water. It’s thought that the oil is more effective than water in dissolving debris or mucus in there, and that this aids conception.

  FIDGET SPINNERS▶

  Fidget spinners were used to explain the Holy Trinity.

  For those not already in the know, a fidget spinner is a piece of plastic with three arms that you hold between your fingers and spin. You can either do tricks with it or just let it rotate for long periods of time. It’s been claimed, with little scientific evidence, that fidget spinners help children with ADHD to concentrate. What is certainly the case is that they quickly became the craze of the year. Teachers across the world were driven mad by them and many schools banned them.

  In May 2017, all top 25 toys on Amazon.co.uk were fidget spinners, and they accounted for 17 per cent of daily online toy sales. Overall, the fad generated somewhere in the region of half a billion dollars. However, they were almost completely unknown until this year, and their origins are uncertain. Many newspapers reported that they were invented in 1997 by a woman named Catherine Hettinger, that she was unable to afford the patent renewal fee of $400 in 2005, and that she therefore made no money from the craze. But the toy she invented is somewhat different, and it seems more likely that, as online magazine Inc. reported, the spinners evolved from the Torqbar, a high-end spinning office toy launched on GoFundMe.com in 2015. The popularity of fidget spinners in general was apparently boosted by New York teenagers Cooper Weiss and Allan Maman, who began printing their own versions of the toy on their school’s 3D printer at the end of 2016.

  Soon everyone was in on the act. Trendy priests suggested that the three arms of the fidget spinners could be said to represent God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, all spinning through heaven together … or something.* Celebrities as diverse as Kim Kardashian, Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho and rock band Arcade Fire marketed their own. NASA announced it would take some into space, to see how long they spin for. And during the UK general election, one newsagent in Devon sold red and blue fidget spinners alongside one another, thinking that their relative sales would reflect the final result. It didn’t quite work. Forty-seven per cent sold were Labour red and 43 per cent were Tory blue. Labour’s spin doctors were, of course, unable to replicate that result.

  FIGHTS▶

  For India vs China, see Bhutan; for journalist vs politician, see Body Slams; for man vs crocodile, see Dickheads, for Kuratas vs Eagle Prime, see Japan; for monk vs monk, see Jesus; for boxer vs ‘thunder master’, see Martial Arts; for McGregor vs Mayweather see Mayweather vs McGregor; for centurion vs tourist, see Rome, Ancient; for man vs shark, see Shark Attack; and for politicians vs water balloons, see Taiwan.

  FINLAND▶

  Finland started handing out free money.

  The idea behind what is known as ‘Universal Basic Income’ is that if you give everyone in the country a certain amount of cash, it will reduce poverty, increase individual freedom, and also cut down a lot of admin in the welfare department. Basic income may well become necessary if robots take over all of our jobs, and it was presumably welcomed by Helsinki’s bus drivers: the city got a fleet of driverless buses this year.

  Finland’s trial initially applied to unemployed people, and the deal is that they will keep receiving $600 a month even if they get a job. It seems to be working, with people on the scheme reporting lower levels of emotional (as well as financial) stress. Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, also likes the concept; he is giving more than 26,000 people in Kenya a regular salary through the charity GiveDirectly. Not everyone thinks it’s a great idea, though: critics have suggested people may lose the motivation to work, and that the lack of personalisation of welfare may hurt the most needy. Last year, the people of Switzerland actually voted against receiving free money every month.

  Finland held the 22nd World Air Guitar Championships this year. It was won – for the second time – by Matt Burns, whose stage name is Airistotle. The stated aim of the championships is to bring about world peace with no guitars. Burns said of his victory, ‘You do not have to be in good shape for this, which is a huge plus.’

  FIRST AID▶

  Scientists discovered that you can save your life by slamming your body into a chair.

  People can now perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on themselves. Doctors from London’s Royal Brompton Hospital wrote in the journal Thorax that if you start choking on food you can self-Heimlich by thrusting a hand into your abdomen or by pressing yourself sharply on to a chair. They tested both methods after swallowing pressure sensors to measure the effects.

  Dr Henry Heimlich, the man who first popularised the technique in 1974, died in late 2016. He had campaigned against slapping people on the back when they were choking, saying that it was dangerous (it’s not). The American Red Cross thought his campaign against what he called ‘death blows’ was so dubious that it reinstated back slaps as its first recommended option, advising the Heimlich manoeuvre only if that didn’t work. Heimlich was so angry to be associated with back-slapping that he asked the organisation to remove his name from its training procedures. The American Red Cross therefore renamed the manoeuvre ‘abdominal thrusts’.

  Heimlich developed his technique to deal with what was sometimes known as the ‘beefsteak disease’ (because it often involved people choking on large lumps of meat).* He and his team worked out the answer after two years of experiments that involved putting balloons down the throats of anaesthetised beagles. The last time he used his technique was at the age of 96, when he saved an 87-year-old woman who was sitting next to him at dinner in his retirement home. She later wrote to him, ‘God put me in this seat next to you,’ although she didn’t suggest why God had made her choke on her burger in the first place.

  A Bristol woman saved a stranger’s life immediately after finishing a three-day first aid course. A few hours after Rachelle Miller had been practising CPR on a dummy, real-life human Lewis Bond, who had driven over to collect a fish tank, had a heart attack outside her front door. She kept him alive until paramedics arrived.

  FISH*▶

  Australia gave its carp herpes.

  Ninety per cent of the fish in the Murray River are carp, which is an invasive species. They were introduced into Australia in the 1800s, and have out-competed native species ever since. They’re worth little to fishmongers, as due to A
ustralia’s strict biosecurity laws they can’t be sold overseas, and so the government wants to kill as many as possible. According to the coordinator of the National Carp Control Plan, Matt Barwick (who one politician has dubbed ‘The Carpinator’) the best way to do this is to give them the fatal koi herpes virus, so Australia started testing the idea.

  The move has worried scientists, especially, it seems, Professor Cock van Oosterhout of the University of East Anglia, who told the Daily Telegraph that it was an ‘irreversible high-risk proposal’. The Australian government claims its tests have shown that other species in the rivers can’t contract the virus, but van Oosterhout says the herpes could evolve to attack other animals.

  Meanwhile in Sweden, Gothenburg’s anti-bomb team were called out to defuse a fishy package that turned out to be 10 kilos of frozen cod. ‘This could only happen in Gothenburg,’ one reporter wrote, but he’s wrong: in the past couple of years fish have been mistaken for bombs in both Hamburg and Manila. In 2013, an actual bomb was found in the belly of a squid in Guangdong, China.

  In January, a Japanese man known as the ‘Tuna King’ spent £500,000 on a single 470-pound bluefin tuna. A regular purchaser of large tuna (in 2013 he spent over £1 million on one), he uses them to publicise his restaurant, and reckons he makes back his investment in additional customers who come to see his massive fish.

  FOOD AND DRINK▶

  People in Japan started panic-buying crisps.

  After a series of typhoons destroyed the country’s potato crop, people started stockpiling packets of crisps, for fear of running out. They were selling for £8 a bag – six times their normal price. This was not the year’s only food shortage:

  ▶ Courgettes in Europe. Bad weather in Spain – one of Europe’s main courgette producers – ruined the crop and led to prices quadrupling across the continent. The inclement conditions damaged other supermarket staples, too. Tesco temporarily banned their customers from buying more than three iceberg lettuces each, and Morrisons customers were limited to three heads of broccoli per trip.

  ▶ Milk in Qatar. One consequence of the diplomatic dispute between Qatar and neighbouring Saudi Arabia (see Qatar) has been the cutting of all dairy trading links between the two countries. In an attempt to counter the effects of this, one Qatari businessman flew 4,000 cows to his motherland in order to bring milk to the masses.

  ▶ Croissants in France. Falling milk yields led France to announce a butter shortage. Even more worryingly, this threatened to cause a croissant shortage (croissants are typically 25 per cent butter).

  ▶ Bacon in the USA. The Ohio Pork Council prompted alarm when it reported that US bacon reserves were at their lowest level since 1957. It later suggested that there was no need to panic-buy, as America still had 8.2 million kilos of pork belly reserves. The BBC summed up the overreaction with the headline ‘Aporkalypse No’ (for other aporkalypses, see Boar).

  ▶ Vanilla ice cream across the planet. Madagascar grows 80 per cent of the world’s vanilla, so when a cyclone in March destroyed huge numbers of vines, the price rocketed and vanilla ice cream disappeared from shelves. In September, vanilla was 20 per cent more expensive than silver, costing £530 a kilo to silver’s £440. In 2012, a kilo of vanilla cost just £23.

  In a bid to encourage German tourists to visit Mexico, the Mexican government partnered with a creative agency to build an artificial cloud that rains tequila, and then installed it in a Berlin gallery. Thanks to some clever technology, the cloud emitted a thick tequila fog whenever it rained in Berlin.

  Monks in the earthquake-hit town of Norcia in Umbria released a limited-edition beer that was fermenting in the vats when the quake hit, claiming that the vibrations gave the beer a unique flavour.

  FOOTBALL▶

  The England women’s team reached the semi-finals of Euro 2017, thanks to one player paying attention in a meeting.

  With the game between England and Spain on a knife-edge, English defender Ellen White slipped, causing the ball to bounce off her leg and hit her arm. The referee gave a penalty for handball. However, another English player, Lucy Bronze, calmly explained to the referee that she’d got the rules wrong. Before the tournament, UEFA held meetings with the players to clarify the rules, and in one of those meetings UEFA said that if the ball deflects on to someone’s arm then it couldn’t be handball. The referee had forgotten this, but Bronze said, ‘I really paid attention [in those meetings]. I had my book out and everything, making sure if I was playing I knew exactly what was a yellow card and red card.’ The referee reversed her decision, and England went on to win the match, before proving themselves the equal of the English men’s team by getting hammered in the semi-finals.

  In the European Women’s Under-17 Championships, FIFA turned to Abba for help in their penalty shoot-outs. There’s long been a set approach to shoot-outs: a coin toss to see which team will take the first penalty, and then five penalties each taken in the sequence Team A, then Team B, then Team A, then Team B again, and so on. The problem is that whichever team goes first tends to have a psychological advantage – indeed the statistics suggest that Team A will end up winning 60 per cent of the time. A new, theoretically fairer system has therefore been trialled, which, rather than going ABABABABAB, follows the tennis tie-break pattern of ABBAABBAAB. It’s hoped this will make penalties fairer, but the first time it was ever used things went pretty much as you would expect – the shoot-out was won by Germany.

  A non-league footballer in Aberdeen missed the goal so badly the ball ended up 1,800 kilometres away in Norway. His shot went into the River Dee and floated into the North Sea. Sometime later, the footballer’s club, Banks O’Dee FC (whose name was on the ball), received an email from Vanna, a small island off the coast of Norway, saying the ball had washed up on their beach. Club secretary Tom Ewan said, ‘We lose about two balls a month. We just never realised this is where they might be ending up.’

  FORTUNE COOKIES▶

  The world’s leading fortune cookie writer retired after 30 years due to writer’s block.

  Wonton Food Inc. is the largest supplier of fortune cookies in the world, producing over 4.5 million every day. For the last 30 years most of the fortunes have been written by one man, the Chief Fortune Writer, Donald Lau. He initially got the job because no one else in the company could speak good enough English.

  Unfortunately, he is now stepping down as he can no longer think of what to write. ‘I used to write 100 a year,’ he told Time magazine, ‘but I’ve only written two or three a month over the past year.’

  A fortune that Lau wrote back in 2005 led to the company being investigated. It seemed innocent enough: the encouraging words ‘All the preparation you’ve done will finally be paying off’, and a series of lucky numbers, 22, 28, 32, 33, 39, 40. The numbers turned out to be a bit too lucky, though: Lau had unwittingly predicted five out of six winning balls in that week’s lottery. One hundred and ten fortune-cookie readers who had taken his advice were able to claim their share of a huge payout. Sadly, Donald Lau was not one of the 110 winners.*

  FRANCE▶

  For the French artist who became a chicken, see Art; for why Paris will probably never lend Australia anything again, see Cock-Ups; for a birth in the death register, see Fertility; for croissant shortages, see Food and Drink; for grandmothers delivered to your door, see Old Age; for an international booze battle, see Wine.

  FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION▶

  Emmanuel Macron won the presidency of France, narrowly beating ‘nobody at all’.

  Here’s how the top five ranked:

  ▶ 5th place – Jean-Luc Mélenchon

  The far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, won almost 20 per cent of the votes cast in the first round of the French presidential election. He proposed a top rate of tax of 100 per cent, addressed multiple rallies simultaneously through a hologram,* and campaigned via a computer game called Fiscal Kombat, where players picked up bankers and then shook them upside down so money came out
of their pockets. One of his slogans was ‘Can’t Stenchon the Melénchon’, which a lot of French people didn’t understand. It turned out to be a play on Donald Trump’s line ‘Can’t Stump the Trump’, using the supposedly common English phrase ‘stench on’. English people didn’t understand it either.

  ▶ 4th place – François Fillon

  François Fillon won just over 20 per cent of all votes cast. He was dogged by scandal throughout the campaign. His wife, who described herself as ‘very English’ despite being born and raised in Wales, was accused of falsifying documents related to her job – an allegedly fake job working as Fillon’s parliamentary assistant. Fillon then got into even more trouble for failing to declare nearly 50,000 euros’ worth of suits from a Paris tailor.

  ▶ 3rd place – Marine Le Pen

  Marine Le Pen beat Fillon by just over 1 per cent, and so went into a run-off with the eventual winner, Emmanuel Macron. Until it became a drag on her campaign, she was president of the far-right National Front, founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose other claim to fame is that he popularised the duffel coat in France. The two fell out in 2014 when Jean-Marie’s Dobermann killed Marine’s Bengal cat.

  ▶ 2nd place – ennui

  Marine Le Pen may technically have come second in the election, but some commentators pointed out that if you counted the four million abstentions, blank and spoiled votes, and the 25 per cent of the electorate who didn’t vote at all (unusually high for France) she actually came third. The apathy was probably due to the fact that neither of the leading candidates was particularly popular. The most common reason given for voting for Macron was to oppose Le Pen. Only 16 per cent said that they voted for him due to his policies.

  ▶ Winner – Emmanuel Macron

  This was the first time Macron had won any kind of election, and his victory might have surprised some of his old teachers; he wasn’t a great student, recalling many years later that he was ‘terrible at maths and statistics’, despite later becoming Minister for the Economy. He was much better at literature, theatre, and finding a future wife – he met his partner, Brigitte, aged fifteen, when she was a teacher at his school. He was in the same class as her daughter and according to his biographer, when he began to act lovesick, Macron’s family believed he had a crush on the daughter.