AARDVARKS▶
A zookeeper performed mouth-to-snout on an aardvark for an hour.
Only five aardvarks were born in Europe in 2016, so when one was born in the Polish city of Wrocław this year and struggled to survive, the head of the Small Mammals Division at the zoo there, Andrzej Miozga, did all he could do keep him alive. We spoke to Wrocław Zoo, and asked how you perform CPR on an aardvark. This is what they said:
‘Mr Miozga acted on instinct, he cut the cord, placed the baby on his fleece jacket and started rubbing it vigorously but gently with a towel. He then placed the baby’s snout in his mouth and blew the air in. At the same time he was doing chest compressions using his fingers and continued rubbing with a towel. After a few rounds the little heart started beating, but the cub still wasn’t breathing. So Mr Miozga went on with the mouth-to-snout ventilation. Finally the baby started breathing on his own. All together it took about one hour after he came out.’
Meanwhile, in South Africa, scientists finally caught aardvarks having a drink, 250 years after the species was first described. It had long been assumed that they get all the water they need from the juicy bodies of termites, but a zoologist at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, Graham Kerley, and his team announced that evidence exists for aardvarks drinking from puddles.*
If you’re a human who wants to drink like an aardvark, a bar in Exeter is selling an ‘aardvark cocktail’, served with real ants. The drink is made with rum, lemongrass and lime, and is served with an ant chaser. The bar owner, Patrick Fogarty, describes it as ‘crunchy yet satisfying’.
ABDICATIONS▶
The Japanese Emperor wanted to abdicate, but wasn’t allowed to tell anyone.
Japan’s Emperor Akihito is banned from making political statements – including any that suggest he wants to abdicate. As a result, he had to make a speech very delicately hinting at his concerns about being able to fulfil his duties. The government eventually worked out what he meant and voted to allow him to step down.
But Akihito still has the problem of a distinct lack of heirs. Once the new emperor takes over, there will only be three heirs in total (emperors have to be men, although there is now some debate about this). Some experts are worried that if the youngest heir, Prince Hisahito, has no sons, the 2,600-year imperial line will be broken. Hisahito is only 11, so it’s a little early to tell how this will play out.
As a young man, Emperor Akihito had a list of 800 candidates for marriage prepared for him, but rejected them all in favour of someone he met playing tennis. His main interest is marine biology and he’s an expert on the goby fish. Interestingly, when the goby equivalent of an emperor (the dominant male) dies, he is replaced by the next in line; but if there are no males, then a female changes its sex and takes the ‘emperor’s’ place.
ABKHAZIA▶
A country that most of the world doesn’t think exists, had an election that assumed most of its population didn’t exist.
Abkhazia, a self-declared republic that’s trying to break from Georgia, is currently recognised only by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and, bizarrely, the tiny Pacific island of Nauru. Still, despite the lack of more general recognition, parliamentary elections were held there this year. Technically, elections in Abkhazia are deemed invalid if less than 25 per cent of people vote. But although only 21 per cent of the population voted on this occasion, the election was still declared valid as it was decided that any citizens who hold Georgian passports should not be regarded as Abkhazian nationals.
The country was also the subject of a critically acclaimed Romanian documentary this year, called Ouale lui Tarzan, or ‘Tarzan’s Testicles’. It told the story of the world’s oldest primate centre, the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, in the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi. The institute provided the monkeys that the Soviet Union sent into space in the 1980s and was founded by a man called Ilya Ivanov whose lifetime obsession was creating an ape-human hybrid.
ADVERTISING▶
The advertising for the newly opened Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver claims it is six floors taller than it actually is.
Trump Hotels claim that the building is 69 storeys high when actually it is only 63. They arrived at their total by including below-ground storeys (which are mostly used for parking) in their calculations. In the course of his career, Trump has claimed that a 67-storey tower has 78 floors, that a 43-storey building has 46 floors, that a 44-storey building has 52 floors, that a 31-storey building has 41 floors, that a 70-storey building has 90 floors, and that he lives on the 66th floor of a 58-storey building.
Meanwhile, the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Toronto paid a reported $6 million not to advertise itself as a Trump hotel. The hotel decided to part ways with the Trump name following many years of construction delays, lawsuits and, more recently, because it had become a gathering point for protests against the president. The agreement they reached allows the management to remove all of Trump’s branding from the 65-storey building (which, incidentally, has only 57 floors).
For more on Trump’s towers, see Trump Tower.
AI▶
The world champion of the ancient Chinese game of Go was beaten by a three-year-old Brit, who then immediately retired.
One way and another, it’s been a bad year for humankind. We’ve been defeated by Artificial Intelligence at no-limit Texas hold ’em poker, Ms Pac-Man and the fighting game Super Smash Bros. And an AI has been developed that can write AI software better than humans. But perhaps the most crushing defeat came when AlphaGo, an AI program developed by Google’s DeepMind Technologies, beat the world champion, China’s Ke Jie, 3–0. AlphaGo was born in 2014, and was classed as British in the Go rankings as the team behind it is based in London. After beating the world champion it immediately retired. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that winning these games had been ‘the highest possible pinnacle for AlphaGo as a competitive program’.
Owing to its incredible complexity, Go had been one of the final games at which humans could still beat the machines. Ke Jie later said, ‘Last year, it was still quite human-like … but this year, it became like a god of Go.’ Ke Jie’s Chinese fans didn’t see the interview, though: China (presumably for reasons of national pride) wouldn’t allow the match to be shown on television or streamed online.
AIRDROPS▶
Australia is dropping sausages over its outback. They come in two flavours: toad and kangaroo.
For years Australia has had a problem with cane toads (which are not indigenous to the continent). Many of its native animals eat them, and because the toads are toxic they tend to kill their predators. To combat this, scientists are dropping cane-toad-flavoured sausages, laced with a chemical to make predators feel sick, over the outback in the hope that it will deter them from biting real toads in the future. Rather more brutally, the Aussie government is also dropping poisoned sausages to deal with their feral cats, who are apparently partial to a kangaroo wiener.
This year Canada also combated an environmental issue with airdrops – of pregnant bison. Banff National Park has not had any bison for more than 100 years, and the ecosystem suffers from their absence. Conservationists collected pregnant bison from the nearby Elk Island and took them to the pastures of the Rocky Mountains. They spent the last 25 kilometres of their journey packed into shipping containers, dangling underneath a helicopter by a rope. Their horns were covered in plastic hoses to stop them injuring each other in transit.
For another flying sausage, see Drones. For a walking sausage, see Stick Insects.
ALIENS▶
Eleven ‘promising’ alien signals were reported this year. Unfortunately, they all turned out to be from mobile phones on Earth.
The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia listens for radio signals that might indicate signs of intelligence from 692 of the nearest stars to Earth. It turns out, however, that the signals that aliens might send are very similar to those given out by mobile phones.
This wasn’t the only ‘alien’ mystery that may have been solved this year. The Wow! signal was named in 1977, when an anomaly was found in a list of data, and astronomer Jerry R. Ehman was so impressed that he circled the numbers on the computer printout and wrote the comment ‘Wow!’. Antonio Paris, an astronomy professor at St Petersburg College in Florida, has now suggested that the signal didn’t come from an alien life form but from a couple of comets that were passing by at the time. Not everyone is convinced. Alan Fitzsimmons, a scientist at Queen’s University Belfast, has described the theory as ‘rubbish’.
The hunt for ET moved up a gear after the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) – the world’s largest – joined the search. FAST is so vast that you could fill its dish with enough cornflakes to supply every person on Earth with one bowl’s worth every day for a year – and still have some left over. Sited in Guizhou Province, south-west China, it hasn’t proved universally popular: its construction involved the forcible displacement of 9,000 villagers.
AMAZON▶
The founder of Amazon.com became the world’s richest person for just four hours.
A surge in Amazon stock on 27 July increased Jeff Bezos’s net worth by $1.1 billion, to $90.9 billion, which meant that he overtook Microsoft’s Bill Gates (who is worth a measly $90.7 billion). However by the middle of the next day, Bezos’s stock had fallen back, and a few days later he was down to third place behind Amancio Ortega, the owner of fashion company Zara.
Amazon’s stock performance was largely thanks to increased sales. In the early days of the company, a bell would ring every time there was a sale, and staff would gather around to see if they knew the person who had made the purchase. They don’t do that any more. If they did, then on their biggest sales day in 2017 (Amazon Prime Day, 11 July), a bell would need to be rung more than 80,000,000 times.* Each second is very important to Amazon. They have calculated that if their pages loaded just one second slower, it would cost them $1.6 billion in annual sales.
Amazon expanded beyond the online sector this year, opening a physical bookshop in New York. The company recognises that people have a habit of browsing in shops before buying their books online, and so registered a patent that stops customers in Amazon shops (including Whole Foods, which they acquired this year) from checking out competitors as they look around.
It’s not the only patent application that Amazon has filed in the past few months. They have also invented an underwater warehouse, in which everything is stored in watertight boxes at the bottom of a lake. Each is assigned a unique sound, which, when triggered, inflates a balloon that floats the box to the surface. The idea is that this will be more efficient than having people or machines fetch the packages, because they’ll be transported by the water buoyancy instead. Amazon also holds a patent for a flying warehouse.
ANTARCTICA▶
The Foreign Office warned Britons to look out for terrorists in the Antarctic.
The population of Britain’s 660,000 square miles of Antarctic Territory may only be 250 but, as the Foreign Office points out, you can never be too careful. According to official guidelines it issued in May, ‘although there’s no recent history of terrorism in the British Antarctic Territory, attacks can’t be ruled out.’ Visitors should therefore ‘be vigilant’, but they’ll probably be fine: the last crime to be committed anywhere on the continent was back in 2003, and involved computer hacking. Even that wasn’t home-grown – it was done remotely from Romania.
One Briton who braved the terrorist threat was Patrick Bergel, great-grandson of Ernest Shackleton, who made the first ever crossing of Antarctica by car. It was a month-long, 3,600-mile trip, sponsored by Hyundai, in a normal family car (although it was adapted to run on jet fuel). To avoid littering, the team had to drag all their excrement behind them in a huge fuel drum.
When he was first asked to make the journey, Bergel hadn’t even taken his driving test. He modestly insisted that ‘compared to what my great-grandfather did, this was one thousandth as hard’.
As if going on four wheels wasn’t hard enough, Canadian Hank Van Weelden attempted a 700-mile bike ride on a custom-made, £10,000 bicycle across Antarctica. He was meant to complete the journey in 30 days, but, after six days of pulling a 90-kilo pack in minus 40°C temperatures, he dropped out. He later said, ‘I got a taste of it … and I got my ass kicked by it.’
APOLOGIES▶
For a Cambodian actress who was just too sexy, see Bans; for a politician who wrestled a journalist to the ground, see Body Slams; for a priest who made a fashion faux-pas, see Carnivals; for mistakenly banning a Roman God, see Censorship; for a name worth apologising for, see Donalds; for accidentally invading a country, see Gibraltar; for a bouquet of flowers from the taxman, see HMRC; for hiring interns via a bikini competition, see Nuclear Power Plants; for speech-stealing in Ghana, see Plagiarism; for planting over a children’s football field, see Trees; and for breaking a passenger’s nose but denying freezing a giant rabbit to death, see United Airlines.
APPS▶
If you want to make an emergency confession, there’s an app for that.
A new app, developed in Spain and called Confessor GO, tells you where your nearest priest is for confession, and maps the best route to him. Handily, it also tells you the priest’s name and the year he was ordained. In addition, it includes the Ten Commandments to prompt you to recall what you might need to confess. Unlike Uber, the priest doesn’t come to you, but on the plus side, he doesn’t charge extra at busy times.
Other recent apps have been built that will help you if you want to:
▶ Find a celebrity-lookalike partner. The dating app Badoo has added a feature that allows users to look for celebrity lookalikes. Soon after launch, there were 1,405 people on the app who (supposedly) looked like Ed Sheeran.
▶ Find out where the nearest iceberg is, providing you’re in Canada.
▶ Stop buying things while drunk. Once you’ve consumed alcohol up to a self-imposed limit, the app stops your bank card working. However, for the app to take effect you need to be sober enough to inform it that you’ve been drinking.
Donald Trump has only downloaded one app on to his phone – Twitter. He has, however, inspired over 250 apps for Android alone, including one that measures how many times a man interrupts a woman, one where you can draw your own executive order, and a third, DJ Trump, which uses a huge archive of words The Donald has said to enable you to make the US President say anything you want.
ARRESTS, HUMAN▶
A Mafia boss famous for having a permanent erection was caught in Spain after seven years on the run.
Francesco Castriotta said his priapism was thanks to his out-of-control cocaine habit. As he sat in court during a previous hearing with a bag of ice on his aching groin, one policeman remarked that he could ‘expect a stiff sentence’.
Other notable arrests included:
▶ A man in India was arrested for trying to create a fake ID card using the name Osama bin Laden. He even uploaded a blurred photo of the former Al-Qaeda leader as the profile picture. Police discovered the man’s real name was Saddam Hussain.
▶ A woman in Bangladesh, who believed she was her husband’s third wife, had him arrested after discovering she was in fact his 25th, of 28. Police arrested him at the home of his 27th wife.
▶ A man was arrested by New York State Police for driving under the influence of alcohol. This only came to international attention because Joseph Talbot didn’t want anyone to know about it. After learning that his local paper, the Times of Wayne County, had covered the story, he tried to buy every copy of the relevant edition to stop people finding out. Unfortunately, the fact that he managed to purchase around 900 copies became a story in its own right – and then spread.
ARRESTS, NON-HUMAN▶
For a box under arrest, see Art; for a rubber duck under arrest, see Ducks, Rubber; for a pigeon under arrest, see Iraq.
ART▶
A giant snow globe was made using the confetti meant for Hillary Clinton’s election night.
It was designed by artist Bunny Burson, whose former works include collages made from ‘chads’ – the punched-out pieces of ballot paper that famously decided the 2000 Presidential election in favour of George W. Bush. It took Burson two weeks to find the confetti that had been loaded into Hillary’s victory cannons ready to celebrate the election result last November, and when she did, she got the company who produced it to write a letter of verification. She then placed the confetti in a glass case with the slogan ‘And Still I Rise’ which she took from a poem by Maya Angelou, a close friend of the Clintons.
In a less overtly political act, French artist Abraham Poincheval attempted to live like a chicken, and successfully hatched nine eggs. He sat on the eggs in a glass case, in a Paris museum, for a month. They were underneath his bottom on a ‘laying table’ which had a dug-out section to stop the eggs from being squashed. Poincheval said that his work, Egg, ‘raises the question of metamorphosis and gender’. Despite animal scientists saying that the task was nearly impossible due to humans’ lower body temperature, after 21 days, nine of his original ten eggs hatched. The chicks were sent to a farm.*
In America, Russian artist Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich faced potential charges of public lewdness, criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct after he was arrested for having himself delivered, naked inside a clear plastic box, to the exclusive Met Gala in New York. This was the fifth time he’d had himself sent to an art event – his aim being to donate himself to institutions that have ‘difficulty understanding or accepting performance art’. In a statement, his friends clarified that the box had also been arrested. In their view, the charges were ludicrous. ‘Even the policemen were showing signs of having fun.’
ASHES▶
Carrie Fisher’s ashes were placed in an urn shaped like a massive Prozac pill.
The giant pill was one of her favourite ornaments. At her funeral in January her brother said of it, ‘We felt it was where she’d want to be.’
This year people have also chosen to have their ashes sprinkled:
▶ In the toilet of a baseball stadium. The ashes of New York plumber and baseball fan Roy Riegel have been sprinkled in baseball stadium toilets all over America by his best friend, Roy McDonald. McDonald said he has sometimes used the toilet at the same time as scattering his friend, but that ‘I always flush in between.’
▶ Over a ferry. A ceremony on an Australian ferry went wrong when the ashes were blown back on deck and over the passengers. The daughter of the deceased said it was her mother ‘having the last laugh’.*
▶ In a hockey penalty box. Hockey player Bob Probert had his ashes sprinkled in his team’s penalty box (aka the ‘sin bin’) because, having been involved in 200 mid-match punch-ups in the course of his career, he had spent 3,300 minutes there.
▶ In two separate places. A survey of Britain’s funeral directors revealed that they’re now agreeing ever more frequently to split ashes up to stop angry families arguing over them.
ARTICLE 50
Andy: The letter we ended up sending to activate Article 50 was six pages long … but it was nearly 100 pages long.
Dan: That’s a big edit.
Andy: They didn’t start with 100 pages and cut it down! Government sources said there were two options, but they eventually picked the six-pager. Maybe they thought sending 100 was a bit excessive.
Dan: Who wrote the letter? Was it Theresa May?
James: Well, she probably had some civil service assistance, but she definitely signed it. She gave it a ‘wet signature’ – i.e. with pen and ink – but unfortunately, she signed with a Parker pen that was once manufactured in Britain but is now made in France.
Anna: And Article 50 was ratified in Norman French. As a law passes in the House of Lords, the Lords say the words ‘La Reyne le veult’, meaning ‘the Queen allows it’.
James: Another thing about the letter is that it was delivered by Sir Tim Barrow, the UK’s permanent representative at the EU. He took it from Britain’s embassy in Brussels to the EU headquarters, known as the ‘Space Egg’.
Andy: ‘Space Egg?’
James: That’s just a nickname. It’s a futuristic oval building, set inside a cube made from recycled window frames from across Europe. But the location is pretty interesting. The back of the building was a Nazi headquarters during their occupation of Europe.
Dan: Ah, speaking of the Nazis, I read that Article 50 was put in place partly because of right-wing politics. The guy who wrote it did so at a time when Austria had a far-right politician called Jörg Haider, and people were worried he might be elected. So Article 50 was written partly to make it easier for a country to storm out of the EU.
James: Yes. The guy actually who wrote Article 50 is called Lord John Kerr, and what I love about that is that in Spain his name would be Juan Kerr.
Andy: But, hang on, nobody in Spain would get that joke. They all speak Spanish. Except for the British expats, and after Brexit they won’t be around to explain.
Anna: Well, it’s not just expats. We also need to work out what to do with the words ‘United Kingdom’ in the Lisbon Treaty, which is the document underpinning the whole EU. There are 12 mentions of the UK in it, and at the moment they think they’ll leave them in, as it’ll be too much bureaucratic hassle to remove every mention.
Dan: Is it true that the Article 50 letter was given a load of fake routes before Sir Tim delivered it to confuse saboteurs?
Andy: Maybe. It definitely did have an armed guard on the Eurostar, and the Daily Telegraph reported that his path to the Space Egg was kept secret in case ultra-Remainers grabbed the letter from him.
James: But I went on Google Maps and did the journey from one place to the other and it’s extremely short, so there’s not much space for alternative routes.
Andy: That’s right. It’s about 300 metres.
Anna: Or 328 yards, as we’ll call it after 2019.
AUSTRALIA▶
For exotic sausages, see Airdrops; for a faceful of mum, see Ashes; for people who are not quite as Australian as they thought, see Citizenship; for destroying priceless collections, see Cock-Ups; for punching a crocodile, see Dickheads; for the world’s biggest footprint, see Dinosaurs; for herding from the air, see Drones; for giving carp STDs, see Fish; for what not to put in your ballot papers, see Glitter; for billboards asking people not to visit, see Immigration; for a homeless messiah, see Jesus; for multiple marsupials, see Kangaroos; for a ‘royal’ family, see Micronations; for a patriotic pop song, see National Anthems; for old kangaroos, see Paintings; for dangerous Leons, see Queensland; for those happy about hacking, see Ransomware; for ancient sloths, see RIP; for a rapper in the sea, see Runner, Doing a; for milking a killer, see Spiders; for boobs see Swearing; and for MPs in khakis, see Ties.
AVIATION▶
The King of the Netherlands revealed he’s been secretly moonlighting as an airline pilot.
Since ascending the throne in 2013, King Willem-Alexander has been co-piloting commercial flights twice a month, without telling passengers. He only ever pilots short-haul flights, though, and makes sure to always return home the same day, in case he is suddenly needed as king.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, two MPs went one better, and took control of a plane they weren’t even on. After learning the MPs had missed their flight from Kabul to Bamiyan, supporters of the pair apparently organised a team to stop the plane from landing at Bamiyan Airport by blocking the runway. It was therefore forced to fly back to Kabul, where it picked up the two politicians. According to Al Jazeera, one of them, Abdul Rahman Shaheedani, said, ‘Everyone will now know who I am, and what my power is.’ Shaheedani added that he hadn’t asked his supporters to force the plane to return to Kabul.
Another MP embroiled in an aviation scandal was Indian politician Ravindra Gaikwad, who admitted to hitting an air steward 25 times with his slipper, and breaking the steward’s glasses. His excuse was that he had been given an economy seat rather than business. Air India explained that Mr Gaikwad had been placed in economy rather than business because there was no business class on this particular all-economy flight.
AVOCADOS▶
The world’s first avocado restaurant, where every dish contains avocado, opened in New York. It ran out of avocados on its first day.
Once all the kinks were ironed out, the restaurant became very popular. They went through 650 pounds of avocado a week, helped, no doubt, by the fact that diners who particularly like avocados can double the amount of avocado on their dish for an extra $2.
Avocados reached peak hipster this year. Millennials were told the only reason they can’t afford houses is that they keep spending their money on avocado on toast. They’re dangerous, too – they were blamed for a rash of brunch-time hand injuries to people ineptly trying to cut them up. The British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons demanded that warnings should be placed on all avocados.
While demand has increased, supply has fallen. Avocados are an ‘alternate-bearing crop’, which means that every other year the harvests are smaller. Add that to flooding in Peru and workers’ strikes in Mexico, and you have what America’s National Public Radio (NPR) has dubbed the Guacapocalypse. And with President Trump planning large tariffs on goods coming from Mexico to pay for his wall, it may be that avocado-lovers will soon be waiting even longer to get on the housing ladder.
