The Book of the Year

by No Such Thing As A Fish

  Whyte & Mackay, which now owns Mackinlay & Co., decided to replicate the whisky. A crate of it was sent to Scotland and handed over to master blender Richard Paterson, aka ‘The Nose’. Paterson is a master distiller who last year celebrated 50 years in the industry. His skills at tasting and blending whiskies are so valuable that his nose was once insured for £1.6 million.

  Paterson sampled the whisky by inserting a syringe between the cork and the bottle neck, and extracting enough liquid for the purposes of analysis and imitation. It took him months to recreate the blend. Once Paterson was done, the original bottles were returned to Shackleton’s hut in Antarctica and placed back under the hut, as part of a programme to protect the legacy of Antarctic exploration that took place between 1898 and 1915.

  Every single drop of the original whisky will remain undrunk – except for one small vial, that is, which now sits in the pocket of a man called The Nose.

  WHITE HOUSE, WINTER▶

  The walls of the winter White House are covered in fake news.

  Time magazine asked the Trump Organization to take down a fake version of its cover that hangs on the walls of Donald Trump’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago.

  A reporter noticed the mocked-up magazine cover while visiting one of Trump’s golf clubs. It soon emerged that it also hangs in three others, including Mar-a-Lago. Time requested that they be removed, and published an article entitled ‘How to Spot a Fake TIME Cover’. The framed front covers, supposedly from 2009, show a photograph of Trump accompanied by the words ‘Trump is hitting on all fronts’ and ‘The “Apprentice” is a television smash!’ In reality, that edition featured Kate Winslet on the cover.*

  Trump, incidentally, spends about a quarter of his time at Mar-a-Lago, so lobbyists who want to get his attention have obtained its IP address and started geotargeting their online materials to the estate. The president and his staff in the property are now flooded with adverts very specifically meant for them while they’re there.

  Curiosity about what actually goes on at Trump’s properties has led Democrats to introduce a bill demanding greater openness. The bill is called Making Access Records Available to Lead American Government Openness Act, though it’s better known by its acronym, MARALAGO. What we do already know is that the place is a health and safety hazard: in April, inspectors recorded 13 violations of food safety there, including incorrectly prepared fish, and raw meat kept at temperatures too high to be safe.

  Arguably, Mar-a-Lago is finally fulfilling the purpose its original owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, intended for it. She left it to the US government in her will, hoping it would become a de facto winter White House. Unfortunately, no president wanted to live there and it was on the verge of being demolished when Trump discovered it. His offer of $15 million was initially rejected, so he bought the land between the Mar-a-Lago and the ocean and threatened to build a hideous house (his own admission) there in order to block Mar-a-Lago’s sea view. This drove the price down, enabling Trump to purchase it in 1985 for $5 million.

  Trump’s decision to pull America out of the Paris climate agreement may cause Mar-a-Lago’s value to depreciate further. Projections released this year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that most of the property will be underwater by 2100.

  Mar-a-Lago isn’t Trump’s only Florida purchase. The Guardian revealed that he also owns a quarter of an acre of isolated, unprofitable, mosquito-ridden land in the poorest part of Florida. No one knows why. He bought it for $1 from a woman who owned a studio specialising in lingerie shoots. When the Guardian tried to contact her, she not only failed to respond, but also immediately closed her Facebook and Instagram accounts.

  WIKIPEDIA▶

  Garfield had 20 sex changes in two days.

  In an interview a couple of years ago, Garfield the cat’s creator said the cartoon character is ‘not really male or female’. When satirist Virgil Texas recently came across the interview, he went to Wikipedia and changed Garfield’s gender to ‘None’. An edit war then broke out. Over the next 60 hours his/her/their sex switched back and forth constantly, until Wikipedia’s administrators lost patience and suspended all editing on the page.

  Wikipedia also suspended editing of its Calibri page after it turned out the history of the font was being used as evidence in a huge Pakistani corruption investigation that led to the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.* Sharif’s daughter Miriam, who was herself being investigated for corruption, showed a court documents dated 2006, typed in Calibri font. However, Calibri only became available in 2007. When this fact emerged, another edit battle began, with supporters of Sharif updating the page to say that the font had been available since 2004, presumably in order to get the PM out of trouble.

  Machines have editing wars on Wikipedia, just like humans. Oxford University researchers have found pairs of bots that have been undoing and redoing each other’s work for years, sometimes arguing over extremely small points of grammar. The fights they have are often down to their nationality: it turns out that bots behave differently depending on which country they were built in. German bots are the least argumentative, while Portuguese are the most quarrelsome. English Wikipedia bots undo each other’s work three times as often as English Wikipedia humans.

  All this confusion might explain why China just made its own version of Wikipedia that doesn’t allow editing. It’s been set up by the publishing house that produces the physical Encylopaedia of China, and the government intends it to be a rival to Wikipedia. A team of 20,000 government-approved experts and academics has been employed to write it. No one else will be allowed to contribute.

  WINE▶

  French and Spanish ministers called for a truce in the ‘War of the Wines’.

  France and Spain’s agricultural ministers were forced to meet to defuse the furious battle French vintners have been waging against imports of cheap Spanish plonk. The French think Spanish winemakers have been cheating by giving their bottles misleadingly French names and putting pictures of baguettes on them.

  This year, protesters from France’s militant vintner alliance CRAV (Comité Régional d’Action Viticole, or Regional Action Committee of Winemakers) continued their protests, which consist of attacking tankers of Spanish wine and throwing cocktails (Molotov, specifically) at premises that store it. In March, the French agriculture minister appealed for calm after seven tankers full of wine were poured onto the ground. Two months earlier, CRAV found a tanker suspected of carrying foreign wine, interrogated the driver, and, on learning that it was Spanish, dumped it all over the highway.

  This conflict has been rumbling on for some time. Last year French farmers hijacked Spanish wine lorries and poured 90,000 bottles’ worth of wine down the drain while local French gendarmes stood by and watched. Elsewhere, balaclava-clad winemakers in a port town in Languedoc cracked open vats of imported wine, flooding the streets and people’s homes with thousands of litres of cheap booze.

  There was a bit of good news for drinkers of both French and Spanish wine after a US study on mice suggested that red wine prevents muscles from ageing. It’s down to a chemical compound called resveratrol. Unfortunately, to get the equivalent amount of resveratrol to the mice in the study, the average human would need to drink at least 2,000 bottles of wine a day.

  Thanks to the US trade embargo, it’s hard to get crucial winemaking equipment in Cuba. So instead of using airlocks during fermentation, Cuban winemaker Orestes Estevez rolls a condom over the top of each bottle. It stands up as the wine ferments and gives off gas – when the condom goes limp the wine is ready.

  The oldest known bottle of Bordeaux was found under a mound of dirt in a French wine cellar, where it had been hidden for 270 years. It took over four years of testing the bottle – chemically examining the glass, stopper, shape and wear and tear without opening it – to verify that it dates back to 1750.

  WITCHCRAFT▶

  Canada’s government is trying to legalise ‘pret
ending to be a witch’.

  The C-51 bill is an attempt by the liberal government to tidy up old legislation, some of which dates back to colonial times. Among the laws that they propose scrapping is one that states that it is illegal to ‘pretend to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration’. So if C-51 passes, it will no longer be illegal to pretend to enchant people or to practise ‘crafty science’ for fun, although it’ll still be illegal to use these methods to commit fraud. The change of law will mean that, as well as dabbling in the occult, people will be able to participate in duels, sell a ‘crime comic’, and advertise drugs as a way to restore ‘sexual virility’ – all of which are currently illegal.

  Witchcraft also made a comeback over the border in the USA this year, where Blink-182 singer Matt Skiba, who claims to be a witch, claimed that his spellcasting was responsible for the failure of an upmarket music event (see Fyre Festival). And around the world, on the summer solstice, witches cast a spell to ‘Bind Trump’, calling on demons to cause him to fail.

  Meanwhile, in Portugal, FC Porto accused rivals Benfica of paying a witch doctor to help them win football matches. They say that Dr Armando Nhaga was paid 1,000 euros for every game Benfica won in the domestic league and 10,000 euros for every game they won in the Champions League group stages. The magic did seem to work as Benfica won the league for the fourth year in a row, though in the first game that Nhaga was said to be employed, Benfica actually lost 4–0 to Borussia Dortmund. Most football fans would have been able to predict that result, but rather than blaming it on the form of the two teams, the witch doctor said that the Benfica team had not informed him of the correct time that he needed to cast the spell.

  Two constituencies in Papua New Guinea’s election had to have recounts after some candidates alleged witchcraft had been used to suck votes out of the ballot boxes.

  WONDER WOMAN▶

  This summer a fired UN ambassador became the world’s biggest superhero.

  Wonder Woman was the largest grossing film of the summer. Before this, in early 2016, the character was named an honorary UN ambassador. However, unlike the cases of Winnie-the-Pooh, Tinkerbell and the red Angry Bird (all UN ambassadors themselves), there was an immediate backlash, with over 40,000 people signing a petition against the appointment. The main objection was that it would be better to find a real-life woman to be an ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls. As a result, the United Nations fired her from her role.

  This would have been a huge disappointment to her creator, William Marston. When first promoting her, he said, ‘Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.’*

  Gal Gadot, who played the lead role in the film, said the training she did for the movie was tougher than the two years of compulsory service she did in the Israeli army. Not only that, she was five months pregnant when she filmed reshoots for the film. Her Wonder Woman outfit was chopped out around the stomach and replaced with green cloth so they could CGI out her baby bump.

  A similar bit of airbrushing occurred in the new Justice League movie (which also features Gadot as Wonder Woman). It has also been claimed that Henry Cavill, who plays Superman, had to do reshoots sporting a massive moustache, as they coincided with the filming of his new Mission Impossible movie. As a result, the studio had to shave Superman virtually with CGI.

  In signing the contract to make Wonder Woman 2, the director Patty Jenkins – fittingly, given the film’s content –became the highest-paid female movie director ever.

  WORLD RECORDS▶

  For flaming stuntmen, see Game of Thrones; for long-distance runners in fancy dress, see Marathon, London; for one-fingered piano-playing, see Music; for the footballer who’s the biggest poser, see Selfies; for a coconut climbing champion, see Trees; and for a giant horse’s head, see Turkmenistan.

  X MARKS THE SPOT▶

  A man looked for sunken gold using a treasure map made in space.

  In 1963, Gordon Cooper, the first astronaut to pilot a solo space mission,* was aboard his spacecraft, looking for nuclear sites by monitoring magnetic signals on Earth. He kept getting anomalous readings from under the sea in the Caribbean, and concluded they must be caused by sunken Spanish treasure from the golden age of piracy. So, as he orbited the Earth 22 times, he made a map of where they were. He didn’t tell anyone until just before he died in 2004, when he shared the map with his treasure-hunter friend Darrell Miklos. Miklos went looking for the treasure this year and has so far found nothing but an anchor that may, or may not, be from one of Columbus’s ships.

  Back on dry land, police urged art dealer Forrest Fenn to call off the hunt for his buried treasure after a second person died searching for it. Seven years ago, Fenn hid a chest full of gold nuggets, jewels and gemstones, now worth about $2 million, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and wrote a cryptic poem that he says provides the clues for where to find it. Many have tried, but no one has yet succeeded in solving his riddles. Colorado pastor Paris Wallace died this year as he braved the difficult terrain looking for the chest and so police have advised people to stop looking for the booty. Wallace’s wife (a fellow treasure hunter) disagrees, and believes the search should continue.

  One man who wasn’t searching for gold but got lucky anyway was piano tuner Martin Backhouse. He can now retire early because he found £500,000 worth of loot inside a piano. This is particularly fortunate as he recently developed tinnitus, making it hard for him to work. The piano belonged to a couple who had owned it since 1983, before donating it to the local college last year. They never realised it contained a hoard of 19th- and early-20th century gold coins wrapped in some old Shredded Wheat packaging until the college employed Backhouse to tune it. He initially mistook the treasure for moth repellent.

  XBOX▶

  Stallion83, who held the Xbox scoring record for 11 years, was knocked off the top spot because he was too busy having sex.

  All users of Xbox products can accumulate points by completing certain tasks in their games. This gives them a ‘Gamerscore’, which indicates more about their devotion to playing games in general than it necessarily does about their skills at a particular game.

  The most devoted gamer of all time is undoubtedly Ray ‘Stallion83’ Cox, who has had the top Gamerscore for 11 years. But this year, because he got married and went on honeymoon, he was away from his console for long enough to be overtaken by another player: Stephen ‘smrnov’ Rowe.

  After returning from honeymoon, Stallion83 worked to get back to the top, and after a few weeks of dedicated gaming he did so, reaching 1.6 million points before tweeting: ‘Now back to having all the sex.’

  XI JINPING▶

  Winnie-the-Pooh was censored in China because he looks too similar to Xi Jinping.

  Memes noting the physical similarities between the Chinese premier and honey-obsessed bear first spread across social media in 2013. In 2015, the most censored image in China was one of Xi standing up in a car with his head through the sunroof, alongside Pooh in his own toy car. Now, Chinese social media users are having problems making any reference to Pooh on the Internet. Posts that mentioned him on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, were suddenly forbidden, and gifs of the bear disappeared from the messaging forum WeChat. The government hasn’t confirmed the reason for the ban, but we know that Xi hasn’t taken kindly to humorous comparisons in the past: online references to the Chinese food staple, steamed buns (baozi), were censored because they’ve been used as a nickname for Xi ever since he was photographed eating one in 2014.

  The letters ‘RIP’ were also blocked on social media in China in July, after the death of famous government critic and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Weibo banned anyone not only from posting ‘RIP’, but also the word ‘Nobel’ or the candle emoji.

  Xi Jinping also hit the headlines in April when he met Donald Trump. Afterwards Trump said that until the two of them had spoken, he’d as
sumed that China could easily deal with the threat of North Korea. However, Xi had explained the background of relations between China and North Korea to him: ‘After listening for ten minutes, I realised it’s not so easy,’ Trump said.

  Reporters were allowed to accompany Xi Jinping when he visited an army barracks in Hong Kong, but they received written instructions in advance that they weren’t allowed to bring pens, books, umbrellas (a symbol of the region’s pro-democracy movement) or opium.

  For seven years, between the ages of 15 and 21, Xi Jinping lived in a cave. Under Chairman Mao, his family was sent to live in the tiny, windowless room cut into a rural hillside. The lifestyle is still relatively common: over 30 million people in China live in caves today.

  XYLOPHONES▶

  In excellent news for writers of A–Z current affairs books, there was some xylophone news.

  A man in Virginia was arrested for stealing a 1.5-metre xylophone from a children’s playground. The instrument was bolted to the ground, but as it was worth a remarkable $4,000 it’s not too surprising that it was pinched. However, it must have been quite hard to find a buyer on the black market: when the police found the perpetrator, a week later, he still had the xylophone in his possession.

  Astonishingly, this wasn’t the only xylophone crime in the US this year. A woman from Florida was arrested for attacking a man who wouldn’t stop playing a xylophone. The lady told police that she had asked him to stop. When he refused she ‘dumped a pot of cold cooking grease on him’.

  YACHTING▶

  New Zealand won the world’s biggest yachting race – on exercise bikes

  Every racing yacht has a number of crew members known as grinders. Their job is to manually rotate the winches (known as coffee grinders) that raise the sail and move the boom (which controls the sail’s angle). The job is usually done by hand, but in this year’s America’s Cup, the Emirates Team New Zealand squad attached the grinders to pedals and brought in professional cyclists to do the work.