Free Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 by John Michael Scalzi

honoring the ten new members of the European Union, some folks couldn’t help but notice that Cyprus, one of the new members, was represented on the stamp by an island shaped like Crete, another Mediterranean island that is part of Greece, a current EU member not being honored on the stamp.
    An Post spokesperson Anna McHugh quickly moved to suggest that the long, thin, rather Crete-ish island positioned where Crete would be on most maps was actually the rather more squat island of Cyprus: “That really is meant to represent Cyprus, but we’ve had to take some cartographic license. We simply didn’t have room,” she said. “Cartographic license” in this case being an “industry term” meaning “We screwed up royally but don’t want to admit it.” Well, we bet that doesn’t make the Cypriots feel better about being represented by a completely different island that is part of an entirely differentcountry. Perhaps Ireland wouldn’t mind if Cyprus issued a stamp and represented the Emerald Isle by the island that now hosts England, Scotland, and Wales. Yes, we imagine that’d go over just fabulously.
    Another interesting bit from the stamp: the Irish island seems to have lost the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, a cartographic flight of fancy that didn’t go over particularly well north of the border. Steven King, an adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party in Belfast, mailed An Post a copy of the 1998 peace treaty that allowed for Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, although King allowed the slight probably wasn’t intentional: “I’m sure it’s just sloppiness. I’m not genuinely offended,” he said. “We use British stamps up here anyway.”
    Sources: Associated Press, BBC

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No Straight Edge Required
    I nquiring minds wanted to know: when the Hampshire, England county council authorized county staff to repaint lines in the road East Boldre in the New Forest, why did they make the lines so uneven? It seems that while one of the lines was straight, the other, usually about fifteen feet apart from the first, dipped towards the other lines by a couple of feet in more than one place. The result was very uneven lines on the road. Was this necessary? Did it mean something? Was someone drunk?
    â€œOh, those uneven lines,” said the members of the county council. Well, you see, that wavy line is there for safety reasons. Yes, you see, because nothing signals safety like lines making it appear as if the road narrows. Well, needless to say, most people weren’t quite following the logic for that particular explanation.
    So finally the county council cracked and admitted their lie and their mistake. The lines were uneven because someone couldn’t read the plans. Council leader Ken Thorber owned up to it to the local press, “What we really wanted was simple straight parallel lines, one down each side of the road 480 cm [that’s about 15 feet] apart. Unfortunately there was a problem with the drawings which were badly folded and creases made some of the measurements look like 430 cm [14 feet] and 420 cm [13 feet] instead. The painter followed the instruction which resulted in a straight line down one side of the road and a wavy one down the other.”
    Good thing the plans weren’t crumpled. The lines might have lead directly into trees.
    Source: Ananova

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Are You There, Vishwakarma? It’s Me, Yadav
    I t’s probably not easy being the railways minister for the country of India. The rail system in the world’s second most populous country has more than 60,000 miles of rail, much of which is old, unreliable, and in nasty state of disrepair. With 300 accidents a year in the system, nearly every day brings news of troubles small and large, and every now and again you get a real whopper, like a train hitting a boulder and derailing in 2004, an accident that killed 20 and