I got rejected by the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea before I landed my job at Twitter.
Sure, the benefits are awful, but the job security is lifelong.
Who wouldn't laugh at those hats?
There needs to be a word for when you try and think of an analogy of a thing to ridicule it but can't because you realize the thing you're trying to analogize is in fact the perfect epitome to which all other similar situations should be compared and ridiculed.
Because this sort of situation does happen all too often.
North Korean Style! I laughed, too.
The spammers are catching up. Soon they will be commenting on posts before they are even written. (Cue eerie Twilight Zone music.)
Then they will start writing the posts themselves, and all will be lost.
Who wouldn't laugh at those hats?
From a distance, sure, risible to all. But in person, anyone who values their life. I have to wonder if it's a test.
I had known for a long time that the name "California" was from a 16th Century Spanish romance and that California was the name of an island in the romance, but I didn't know this:
The novel described an island, very close to the Garden of Eden, full of gold, which was ruled by strong and beautiful black women. This island was also populated by griffins, a fantastical lion-eagle hybrid, which the women kept as pets. Any man who found his way onto this island was killed and fed to the griffins.
So awesome. Also apparently the name comes directly from "Caliph." I want to sponsor an English-only movement to rename the state "Caliphate of Strong and Beautiful Black Women and Griffins."
8.1 Origin of the famous California as an island cartographic error that strangely persisted for so long.
8.last. Paradise.
6: There's an xkcd on that subject.
9: insight. early modern cartography was a bit like the early Internet. Lots and lots of information, but absolutely no quality control, accountability, or any way to guard against the impulse to kid yourself. Very hard to purge myths.
9.1: And presumably somebody going up the Gulf of California for a while, getting bored, and assuming there's another way out. Wouldn't be surprised if Drake or whoever first saw the Golden Gates figured that was the other entrance.
And the caliph->California connection is wicked hella cool.
Lots and lots of information, but absolutely no quality control, accountability, or any way to guard against the impulse to kid yourself. Very hard to purge myths.
I would say that's a fair insight for a lot of early modern cartography of interior geographies, especially Africa, Asia and the Americas. But it's less true of portolan/navigation charts. There was definitely some form of quality control and accountability in that charts were revised by mapmakers on the basis of reports from ship's captains and logs. It was a collaborative and iterative process and you wouldn't be selling charts for long if you had a reputation for gross inaccuracies where lives and precious cargo are at stake. But many early navigational charts while fairly accurate for coastal areas can be completely fanciful about interiors. One of the projects I've been planning involves creating a gazetteer of fanciful toponyms in my region as seen on early modern maps. Something a bit like the Pleadies/Pelagios projects.
I've also seen similar cartographic anomalies persist in my area like the appearance of Arrakis in one version of the Ptolemy map and an early Dutch map based on secret Portuguese information but only to completely vanish for several hundred years until the British and French started doing detailed hydrographic surveys of the Gulf in the early 19th century.
"Caliphate of Strong and Beautiful Black Women and Griffins."
I will vote for this initiative. I can probably get you 20 signatures for the petition.
On the picture in the OP, I can't help wondering what it is about the Asian military leg that makes it apparently impossible to trouser it in an adequate and non-ludicrous way. The Chinese are the same. Huge baggy trousers descending over the shoe or boot in great folds and flapping around in the breeze. They either need jackboots, kilts, shorts, or a better way to measure their inside legs.