I love Eddie Izzard. Funniest 8 minutes ever.
”In the ’30s, Hitler: Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Second World War… Russian front not a good idea… Hitler never played Risk when he was a kid. Cause, you know, playing Risk, you could never hold on to Asia. That Asian-Eastern European area, you could never hold it, could you? Seven extra men at the beginning of every go, but you couldn’t fucking hold it. Australasia, that was the one. Australasia. All the purples. Get everyone on Papua New Guinea and just build up and build up…”
”Hitler ended up in a ditch covered in petrol on fire… so, that’s fun. I mean that’s funny. Because he was a mass-murdering fuck-head!”
”We stole countries! That’s how you build an empire. We stole countries with the cunning use of flags! Just sail halfway around the world, stick a flag in. “I claim India for Britain.” And they’re going, “You can’t claim us. We live here! There’s five hundred million of us.” “Do you have a flag?” “We don’t need a bloody flag, this is our country you bastard!” “No flag, no country! You can’t have one. That’s the rules… that… I’ve just made up!”
“My fist clenched; the hair on the back of my neck stood up. … I gritted my teeth and said [to the aide], ‘I’ll be willing to do that, as soon as I can get your ass qualified to fly low enough and slow enough to do it.’”
Did you take a vacation this summer? If you did, it was because your company generously allowed you a few paid vacation days. Unlike businesses in these other countries (all members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development), U.S. companies are not required to give employees time off. Despite working some of the longest hours in the world, we take very little vacation. No wonder you’re feeling burnt out. A collaboration between GOOD and Amanda Buck.
Everybody might be working for the weekend, but we’re also working toward expanding our countries’ economies. Each hour we work contributes to the gross domestic product. But by how much? This is a look at the GDP per capita of the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, compared with the average numbers of hours worked in each country. While we may be working hard in America, in Luxembourg, an hour of work really means something.
SOURCE: OECD
A collaboration between GOOD and Amanda Buck.
It turns out that various countries have very different attitudes toward life online. Some countries, such as the U.S., view the Internet as more of a general-purpose utility. Other countries, such as those in East Asia, view the Internet as a social tool first. For example, 44% of Filipinos think social networking is the most important facet of the Internet. Just 18% of Americans agree.
Every year, wars and natural disasters drive refugees from their homes, scattering them in far-flung corners of the globe. But where, exactly, do they go? Flight and Expulsion, an interactive infographic out of the Germany’s University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam brilliantly explores those mass migrations. What’s truly remarkable is how many useful cuts at the data there are — allowing you to see, for each of the last 20 years, where people fled from, where they went, and what countries have given the most succor in total.
(via forodreamland)
Imperium Fail.
Take that Spain! I’m not sure where this chart was made, but for pretty much every country who once had aspirations to be an Empire this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
This amuses me, reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw years ago that said something like “Portugal: World Power for 15 Seconds”
