Not in the Pacific…yet
My pal Leslie Stepp turned me on to these islands which were slated to be in the Atlantic but had to be moved to the Indian Ocean. And they’re still moving quite quickly across the ocean towards Sri Lanka and will someday pass India and eventually emerge into the Pacific. These are a pair of islands that have a curious nature of weathering away on their west sides as they accumulate sand on the right sides and they basically relocate eastward at a positively shocking rate of nearly 3/4 mile per year.
I think I’ve been here…
This creates tremendous havoc when establishing who owns what property but somehow they manage. The capital city of Bodoni has an international airport and tourist trade was brisk until the pandemic.
It was the Guardian newspaper that first brought attention to this tiny country when it was first established in 1977 near Tenerife, Azores. But because two airplanes inconveniently crashed into each other shortly before the story broke the editors decided it might be more sensitive to move the islands to another part of the globe so they did. How is such a thing possible you ask? And well you might. You see it was an April Fools joke and it was supposed to be a few pages of nonsense in the paper but the idea took hold and advertisers clamored to be included; buying space in the special supplement at the highest prices ever.
The Guardian was besieged with phone calls asking how to get to the islands and immediately a San Serriffe Liberation Front emerged objecting to the dictator. Texaco announced they would hold a Grand Prix on the islands and offered free tickets to someone lucky enough to answer a battery of tough racing questions.
CNN was quoted in the Washington Post saying that Bondoni was the location of a secret meeting between Pope Benedict and Osama bin Laden in April of 2010. I dunno, it looks fishy to me.
There are plenty of other islands and countries that are light on actual real estate but that many folks are sure they have visited. Who can forget the rousing time we had at Groucho’s party in Fredonia. .
Or the time the tiny army of Grand Fenwick invaded NYC
With the internet it is much harder to pull stunts like this and I may just have to declare that irony is finally dead. We live in a world where butt implants are a thing and the highest paid prize fighters are old men who stand in the ring for twenty minutes poking at other old men and are handed 10 million.
One thing I know for sure, well nearly for sure. And this is that I don’t know anything and nothing surprises me so if an island or two floats past my yard I’ll just wave, turn over and go back to sleep.
It sounds Shifty you see
Let’s put that Freedonia guard uniform to use!