My favorite for that sort of thing is the USPS international postage calculation site here.
Check out the drop-down menu at the top under Select a Destination.
Eritrea is one that does not naturally pop to mind as a separate country for me as it was a province of Ethiopia through my formative years and a long time after that. And because I'm an imperialist.
1: Neat. And reminds me that a Venezuelan friend reports USians often mishearing her nationality as "Minnesotan".
I also recently realized that I didn't have Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks mentally filed away as two separate places.
1: That flag link that Carp linked the other day had tons of obscure places as well (of course included random cities etc.) ... but they are all places.
6: The friend in the OP had heard that news, actually.
Eritrea is interesting (in my very white-people way) because there was a point where the local "Ethiopian" restaurants had to double down on being Ethiopian restaurants or declare themselves Eritrean restaurants. Small sample size, admittedly.
I have yet to see Timorese cuisine.
Anyone still remember Upper Volta? I once took the autogiro there from Siam.
Eritrea? I've never even met 'er.
I've been to Upper Volta! They kept calling it something else though. It was probably just whatever "Upper Volta" is in French.
11: I've seen that a little bit in MSP, there being one bar/restraunt that declared itself Eritrean/Eithiopian, while still being primarily known for hosting a lot of raggae shows and selling Red Stripe. Strangely, I haven't seen any restaurants declare themselves Oromo, despite a good chuck of the Eithiopian population here being Oromo nationalists, complete with separatist Oromia flags on the backs of their cars.
I've only learned the locations of many places, expecially the former SSRs, in the last couple of years by playing that Travl Findr map clicking game.
15: Like freaking Bouvet Island.
I have yet to see Timorese cuisine.
I have a friend who's a bit of a foodie and goes to East Timor fairly often. If you want a report, I'll ask him.
14: Upper Volta is now Burkina Faso. Giant Panda Guerrilla Dub Squad can educate you on the finer points.
And nice try, Stanley, but your foodblogging has made your anti-Bhutanese stance plain for a long time now. Not one Bhutanese dish. Not one. Coincidence? I think not.
¦¦
There's a Sofitel in Nanjing, and I've been resisting the urge to point to it and say, "That must be where the rape of Nanking happens!"
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Bhutan is lovely and the people are very nice, but the food isn't very remarkable.
There's a Democratic Republic of the Congo?
True story: I first learned of the existence of Eritrea as a young intern reviewing unsolicited manuscripts for a media organization. I opened an envelope from one J0shua H@mmer, who had submitted an article proposing that the U.S. support the plucky independence movement in this little corner of Africa. I put it in the reject pile.
25: Two states! We want two states!
My 10 year old loves maps and place names. He know by heart the names of the capitals of for example Micronesian islands. Kiribati or Nauru, say. I am looking at a hand-drawn map of a proposed metro system for Dar es Salaam, done after lots of poring over maps of the real city. He did Wichita similarly earlier this week.
maybe send them along to the cities? they might could use the help.
31. I would seriously suggest you advise him to design an El for Dar es Salaam. The ac issues would be a killer.
I've heard Bhutanese food veers between bland and sort of terrible. Also, they serve meat dishes, but it's illegal to slaughter animals there. If you ask where the meat came from, they apparently say "oh, you know. Animals die."
31: I spent half my youth drawing maps (often imaginary places--but I'd also do things like my version of congressional districts); unfortunately I viewed it as kind of a shameful semi-secret*. Somewhere I stumbled on the fact that Claes Oldenburg was a big map drawer in his youth. And I've met a couple of folks in real life and the Internet who've admitted to doing the same. Here is a link to a site he might like, The Map Room, (although checking it I see the blogger has a post as of June 30th saying he is stopping--but a lot of good stuff in the archives). Strange Maps as well, of course. Unfortunately the website of the guy who drew the maps highlighted here is no longer active, but you can see a few examples.
*My mom: "No one's going to pay you to stay in your room all day drawing maps!" Unlike her alternative of going outside and setting off cherry bombs** with Barney Graves which was clearly on the road to the big bucks.
**OK, she wasn't fully clued into the cherry bomb part; she preferred the generic term, "playing".
Thanks; We've glanced at those, but he vastly prefers doing his own stuff or google maps of real places. He's branching out to population and income. Kiev is shrinking, I hear.
He considers topography in his maps, but hasn't taken much of an interest in statics to work out about how strong the supporting columns should be. At least not yet.
I knew about Eritrea very soon after its independence, because I routinely went through the chart of countries and their characteristics that came annually in a kid's current affairs magazine published by Scholastic whose name I now forget. I remember being highly intrigued to see an addition to the otherwise very static list (I hadn't been paying as much attention during the breakup of the USSR, I suppose), and similarly again when Palau became independent the following year. When looking at world maps, I would always check their currency by looking for Eritrea and Palau. I had stopped doing that by the time East Timor came along, though.
I used to suck at African geography, particularly at visualising the actual spatial relations, but now I rock. Why? Because my daughter keeps roping me into playing Ten Days in Africa. (Capital of Mauritania? Nouakchott, natch.*) A bonus is the hilariously semiotically overdetermined design (Neuland-style typeface all over the place, a board that looks like some BOAC poster from a 1960s travel-agency, etc.). And you can get games for the other continents too, so geographical mastery of the whole globe becomes a possibility.
*There's a Nouakchott?
Per usual, Wikipedia has a useful aggregation. And it does not really support my informal memories which was that of a relative dead spell between the massive de-colonization of the late-50s and early-60s until the USSR breakup. But a lot in between were various island colonies becoming independent with relatively little impact on maps (likewise other "late" full colonies like Portugal's). Bangladesh stood out. The various British colonies/protectorates kind of slipped under my radar--and most of their actual prior relationships to the UK were confusing.
8: Does your friend know about East Timor?
Timor-Leste, please.
If we arm Eritrea then we won't have to pay her and everyone can go home.
BR and I played some quiz where you have to type the names of all of the countries within some time limit. (Maybe 9 mins.)
Our friend's 14 year old daughter crushed us. I think we got 120 in the time period whereas she got 133.
It was humbling.
39: I am rather proud of what happens when you sort that list by "date of last subordination".
I've heard Bhutanese food veers between bland and sort of terrible. Also, they serve meat dishes, but it's illegal to slaughter animals there. If you ask where the meat came from, they apparently say "oh, you know. Animals die."
"Terrible" seems a little unfair. The national dish is cheese and chilies (one sees the latter drying on rooftops everywhere). I think it's a pretty old practice in the Himalayas to drive push lead nudge the odd yak, sheep or goat off a cliff so its meat can be taken but, you know, sometimes a snow leopard leaves a dead animal with some meat on its bones, too. But there is even a pizza place in Thimphu. The crust was pretty chewy, but, you know, cooking at altitude is tough.
44: Yeah, I did that , and saw that.
There's a surprising link between Bhutan and the University of Texas-El Paso.
Geo-creepy: "They were made from highly tensile and elastic polymers and the first ones were trialled in ">Jersey."
Try again...
Geo-creepy: "They were made from highly tensile and elastic polymers and the first ones were trialled in Jersey."
(Starts hohum-supercreepy, becoming creepy-but-interesting stuff some way down...)
In 1911, how many Germans would have predicted that within 40 years their government would be testing polymer sex dolls on the Channel Islands?
35 --Hey, me too. Actually got the government to publish one when I worked for a state agency. (I thought it ought to be questionable if descendants/assignees of white people were claiming that their ranch was settled (and irrigated) during a time when the particular area was subject to a treaty with an Indian tribe that forbade White occupation. Sure, there were squatters. You think you are a descendant of one, let's see some proof. So, I had to review all the treaties, and assign a trigger date to each part of the state.)
51: In 1911 Germany was fairly scientifically advanced - in particular in the fields of chemistry and synthetic materials - had an aggressive naval and foreign policy and was frankly a bit kinky (see, for example, the death of the Chief of the General Staff from natural causes while dancing in a tutu and ballet slippers for the entertainment of the Kaiser), so, while the average German probably wouldn't have guessed it unprompted, if you'd suggested the idea to him he'd probably have thought it plausible.
[The Nazi sex-dolls] were made from highly tensile and elastic polymers...
Imipolex G, no doubt.
Note the byline: DAILY MAIL REPORTER.
DAILY MAIL REPORTER is equivalent to the movies' Alan Smithee director credit - the reporter in question refused to have their name on the final product.
I took that to mean "Actually we just copied all this stuff from this guy's book, which go read."
And I guess the roots of Barbie in a German "sex" doll were fairly well known (mentioned in Wikipedia)--but not by me.
'I was actually researching the history of the Barbie doll that was based on a German sex doll of the 1950s.
'Ruth and Elliot Handler from America visited Germany in 1956 and saw the Lilli dolls that were sold in barbers' shops and nightclubs - and were not for children.
'Ruth didn't realise this and bought one and realised later they were not toys. But Ruth and her husband used the doll as a foundation for what became Barbie.So Rat Race was onto something with the Barbie/Klaus Barbie Museum.
