It worked. They won the America’s Cup by an impressive seven races to one against the reigning champions Oracle Team USA. Their tactics shocked the yachting world. But as one of the Kiwi team, Olympic bronze-medal-winning cyclist Simon van Velthooven, told reporters, ‘If you have half a brain and you know that your legs are stronger than your arms, why wouldn’t you give it a go?’
And it’s not just power. If you’re doing the winching with your legs then it leaves your hands free to do other things, such as operate the wheel that lifts the boat above the water.* It’s unclear what will happen in the next America’s Cup in 2021. Either every other team will have to consider cycling in the race, or – perhaps more likely – the practice will be banned.
It’s not just cycling that can help on a yacht. The high-tech sailing boats of the America’s Cup have so much aeroplane technology in them that the captain of the US team got a pilot’s licence to help him better understand his boat.
YELLOW▶
A yellow crayon went on a farewell tour.
Crayola announced this year that they would be retiring their yellow Dandelion crayon after 27 years’ loyal service. ‘Dan D.’, as it is known to some, went on a nationwide tour of America to say goodbye (or at least someone dressed as a giant crayon did). The announcement was supposed to be kept secret until National Crayon Day,* but after some boxes emblazoned with the slogan ‘Dandelion is retiring’ were sent out early, it was leaked on Twitter by Boston resident Frank Hegyi. He told the Boston Globe that his mother had instructed him to keep the news quiet, fearing that they’d get death threats, but he chose to break the news anyway.
Dan D. was replaced with a new shade of blue, the first new pigment discovered in over 200 years. The colour itself is called YInMn blue (short for ytrrium, indium and manganese), but the crayon’s name was chosen by the public from a shortlist that included Bluetiful and Dreams Come Blue (Bluetiful eventually won). Suggestions that didn’t even make the shortlist included: Sacre Blue, Blue Da Ba Di, Bluey McBlueface and Covfefe.
Tourists complained about a man parking his ‘ugly’ yellow car in the picturesque village of Bibury, with vandals even scratching the word ‘MOVE’ on his bonnet. Possessors of yellow car owners rallied in the owner’s support, and 100 yellow cars drove through the village in a motorcade.
YOGA▶
You can now buy a pair of pants that double as a yoga instructor.
The ‘smart’ yoga pants will gently prod you to help you know when you’ve got your limbs in the right positions. The company that produces them, Wearable Experiments, is already planning its next product: a smart sports bra that will do the same and tell you when to exhale.
The newest trend in yoga this year is ‘goat yoga’. A herd of goats wander around sessions, nuzzle people, jump on their backs and chew their hair: organisers say the animals help to produce ‘feel-good hormones’. It’s not certain what the goats think of it, but we do know that elsewhere yoga pants are being used to keep goats calm. Environmentalists are taking goats off the island of Redonda in the Caribbean by helicopter because they have no food on the island and have been starving to death. To keep them calm in the chopper, the environmentalists put yoga pants on the goats’ heads.
It’s not just goat yoga that’s on the rise. You can do puppy yoga in Brisbane, cannabis yoga in California, Beyoncé-themed yoga in Chicago and beer yoga in Germany. The last of those is exactly as it sounds: it’s yoga performed with a pint. Poses include ‘Drunken Warrior’ and ‘Earn Your Beer’.
YORKSHIRE▶
A group of Yorkshiremen donated their voices to a man who is losing his.
Jason Liversidge from Scarborough suffers from motor neurone disease (the same illness that affects Stephen Hawking) and will lose his speech in the coming years. But new technology will allow him to keep his accent. Scientists used recordings of a speech he gave at his sister’s wedding, plus those of other Yorkshire men who donated their voices, so that he will be able to keep his identity once the machine takes over his speech. It’s certainly an accent worth keeping: in a survey of employers conducted this year, 80 per cent said that someone’s regional accent can affect their chances of getting a job. After ‘the Queen’s English’, the Yorkshire accent was the one most associated with intelligence.
YOU’RE FIRED!
Dan: Did you know that Donald Trump was not the first host of The Apprentice to be sworn into office this year?
James: Oh God … Lord Sugar isn’t the King of England now, is he?
Dan: Well, no, but you’re not that far off. João Doria became mayor of São Paulo on January 1st, and he used to be the host of the Brazilian Apprentice. Though, unlike Trump, Doria hasn’t carried on firing an employee almost every week.
Andy: Yeah, Trump’s been on a firing spree. Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Anthony Scaramucci, Sean Spicer …
Anna: Steve Bannon was one of the biggest, but now he’s left the world of politics he might return to the World of Warcraft. He used to be an investor in a company that went into virtual worlds, found virtual objects and sold them for real money.
Dan: That’s right. He also profited from the sitcom Seinfeld, didn’t he? I think he made about $2 million after investing in the company that made it.
Andy: He’s invested a lot in the arts, and he wrote a sci-fi remake of Titus Andronicus, which featured intergalactic travel and ‘ectoplasmic sex’ between a human and a space queen.
Dan: What? He actually sat in a room, wrote that script and said, ‘Here’s something that will make me lots of money?’
Anna: Don’t pretend you wouldn’t watch that film, Dan.
Dan: No, I’m not really into Shakespeare’s early work.
Andy: Trump also fired Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Priebus did an interview with Bannon, where the two told the world that they were great pals and worked well together. But when Bannon put a friendly hand on Priebus’s thigh, Reince instinctively batted it away like a very annoyed wife. It was such an awkward moment.
Dan: Another guy fired by Trump was Anthony Scaramucci. After being sacked, he signed up with a Hollywood PR firm. He’s thinking that he could use his fleeting fame to his advantage, but the firm is called Fifteen Minutes, so that doesn’t bode well for his long-term prospects.
James: Well, he’s not exactly a stranger to short-term jobs. He lasted 10 days in this one. He told the press afterwards, ‘I didn’t think I was going to last too long, but I thought I would last longer than a carton of milk.’
Anna: At least he has a sense of humour. I looked into it, and his 10 days as communications director was the shortest on record. Before that, the record belonged to Jack Koehler, who served for 11 days in the Reagan administration before it turned out that he’d been in a Nazi youth group.
Dan: Crikey. Well, going back to The Apprentice, Trump actually tried to trademark the phrase ‘You’re fired!’ in 2004, but it was rejected because it was thought to be too close to a board game called ‘You’re Hired!’.
Anna: There was also an objection by a pottery shop in Chicago with the name ‘You’re Fired!’.
James: He should’ve tried changing his catchphrase slightly differently, like ‘You Are Fired!’.
Andy: Well, going by the last year, it looks like he’s going to get a lot more chances to say it.
YOUGOV▶
As well as conducting high-profile political polls, YouGov also learned people’s views on sandwich shape, Hogwarts houses and when to flush the loo.
On 31 May, YouGov released a controversial poll, referred to as ‘shocking’ (New Statesman), ‘brave’ (Guardian) and ‘stupid’ (Spectator), that correctly predicted the general election would lead to a hung parliament. It was the only polling company to foresee this. On the same day, it published another poll that found that 23 per cent of people think the 1980s was the best decade for music and 22 per cent think it was the 1960s, while only 4 per cent think it was the 2000s and 2 per cent think it’s been the 2010s.
▶ 68 per cent of people in the UK have their washing machines in the kitchen, compared with only 9 per cent in the US.
▶ 35 per cent of Brits think they could outrun a T. rex.*
▶ 8 per cent of Brits and 7 per cent of Americans worry about people posting hurtful things about them online, compared to 34 per cent of French people.
▶ 60 per cent of Brits make rectangular sandwiches while 28 per cent make triangular ones.
▶ A quarter of young Brits got sunburnt during the heatwave in the first weekend of April.
▶ Harry Potter fans think that the celebrity most likely to be in Slytherin is Donald Trump; the one most likely to be in Hufflepuff is Mary Berry; the one most likely to be in Ravenclaw is David Attenborough; and, slightly unimaginatively, the one most likely to be in Gryffindor is Daniel Radcliffe.
▶ Only 5 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds think it’s fashionable to wear muddy jeans (see Jeans).
▶ British people overwhelmingly prefer dogs to cats.
▶ Brits are equally split on whether or not to flush the toilet if they go in the middle of the night.
ZHOU, YOUGUANG▶
The world lost a former scarecrow who improved China’s literacy rate by more than 600 per cent.
Zhou Youguang (1906–2017), who died aged 111, was the ‘father of Pinyin’, a method for writing Chinese in the Roman alphabet. Thanks to his system, China’s capital, 北京, could be written as ‘Beijing’. In fact, it was down to Zhou’s system, introduced in 1958, that we now call it Beijing. Prior to the standardisation of Pinyin, the city was known to the West as Peking.*
It is thanks to Pinyin that China’s illiteracy rate, which stood at 85 per cent in 1958, is now just 5 per cent. Despite this, Zhou wasn’t seen a national hero. In fact, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution Zhou was sent away to be ‘re-educated’ and was exiled to a farm where he was given a job as a scarecrow, literally chasing birds from farmers’ fields.
Following his ‘rehabilitation’ in 1985, he became part of a team that translated the Encyclopaedia Britannica into Chinese. He then worked on the second edition, and continued translating articles until the day he died, completing one article a month.
It was this translation work that caused Zhou to become very critical of the Chinese government: he noticed the lies it was feeding the public by learning the truth in the encyclopedia. His controversial views led to many of his books being banned (he wrote over 30). However, he was never deterred from stating his opinions. ‘What are they going to do,’ he asked the BBC, aged 106, ‘come and take me away?’ His works include The Shock Wave of Modern Culture, Chinese Characters and the Question of Culture and One Hundred Years Old, But Publishing a New Book.
Zhou died on 14 January in Beijing, in a hospital called Peking Union.
ZIKA▶
Google fought zika by releasing millions of sterile mosquitoes.
Google’s science arm, Verily, has created a robot that can incubate mosquitoes and infect them with the naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria, which sterilises male insects. The robot can also sort males from females, and roughly 1 million sterile male mosquitoes can be raised a week.
In a 20-week trial, sterilised males were released from vans that drove around the streets of Fresno, California. The hope is that they will inundate local females with their useless sperm, thus leading to a massive drop in the mosquito population and a simultaneous decline in mosquito-borne diseases like the zika virus. If the trial is a success, the plan is to raise and then release 20 million sterile males. Residents needn’t worry about being bitten by the extra mosquitoes, as they have also been bred not to bite.
ZIMBABWE▶
Robert Mugabe’s wife named Robert Mugabe’s corpse as the successor to Robert Mugabe.
Robert Mugabe said he is keen to stand in the 2018 Zimbabwean presidential elections, by which time he’ll be 94. He suggested that if he dies before the polls, his wife, Grace, should stand in his place, but Grace said that she would rather his corpse became president. She changed her mind a few months later, however, saying that perhaps he should name a successor instead.
Mugabe celebrated his 93rd birthday with a 93-kilo cake shaped like Zimbabwe, and a party that cost $800,000, even though 5 million of his citizens are currently dependent on food aid. The party also featured banners thanking the president for ‘optimising the use of your resources for our people’.
Whether it’s Robert, Grace or someone else, the Mugabe family are going to figure in public life for a while. This year, for example, one of the new appointees to the country’s censorship board was Mugabe’s daughter Bona. The board is responsible for monitoring films, books, and pole dancers, making sure their dances are not indecent. One of Bona’s colleagues in her new role is former minister Aeneas Chigwedere, a man whose own son sued him two years ago on charges of witchcraft and ‘possessing goblins’.
In Zimbabwe, it’s customary to give a couple cash on their wedding day, but the country is suffering such a severe shortage of banknotes that local banks have started renting out card machines so people can transfer cash electronically instead.
ZOMBIES▶
Illinois named October 2017 its ‘Zombie Preparedness Month’.
The idea behind this, according to the state legislature, was that ‘If the citizens of Illinois are prepared for zombies, than [sic] they are prepared for any natural disaster.’
Spain, however, will be in trouble if zombies attack. This year, the country’s opposition asked what plans the government had in place in the event of a zombie apocalypse. The hope was that the government’s inability to respond to this would highlight their general lack of answers to anything. Instead, the government came up with the considered answer that Spain has: ‘no specific protocols for such an event because by that moment little can be done’.
The man who we can thank for our current epidemic of zombie films died this year. George A. Romero’s 1968 masterpiece Night of the Living Dead was the first low-rent, high-thrill zombie film. It’s worth noting, though, that while the protagonists in his movie had all the attributes of modern zombies – hostile, hungry and unconsciously walking to the next victim – he actually called them ‘ghouls’. In an article published by Vanity Fair just before he died, Romero explained how he disliked modern zombie flicks such as Brad Pitt’s World War Z. ‘I can’t pitch a modest little zombie film, which is meant to be sociopolitical,’ he said. ‘I used to be able to pitch them on the basis of the zombie action, and I could hide the message inside that. Now, the moment you mention the word “zombie”, it’s got to be, “Hey, Brad Pitt paid $400 million to do that.”’
A study at Leicester University considered how quickly a zombie outbreak could spread. According to ‘A Zombie Epidemic’, published in the Journal of Special Physics Topics, by day 100 of an outbreak, just over 100 lucky (or unlucky) humans would be left.
Hawaii banned ‘smartphone zombies’ – people who stare at their phones while crossing the street – on pain of a £75 fine.
ZOOLOGY, CRYPTO-▶
A New Zealand scientist announced a hunt for the Loch Ness Monster’s dandruff.
Neil Gemmell, Professor of Genetics at University of Otago in New Zealand, travelled to Scotland this year to talk to cryptozoologists ahead of his scheduled hunt for the Loch Ness Monster in 2018. He plans to bottle up some of Loch Ness’s water to analyse it for environmental DNA (eDNA), which comes from the excrement, skin cells, urine or dandruff that organisms constantly shed, and leave behind in their habitat. If Gemmell finds any DNA that he can’t identify, it could be a clue to Nessie’s existence. Of course, he doesn’t expect this to happen – rather, he’s using the monster hunt as a way of publicising this method of analysis, and to discover more about non-crypto life under the surface of Loch Ness.
Professor Gemmell’s announcement came as welcome news to the Nessie community, which hadn’t had the best start t
o the year. Gary Campbell, the keeper of the Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, said he believed Nessie had gone missing. She hadn’t been seen in over eight months. It was particularly concerning given that in 2016 there were more sightings than any other year in the 21st century, which Campbell said was thanks to smartphones and webcams (one sighting having been made by a man in America watching a live stream from his computer). Much to the community’s relief, 2017’s dry spell came to an end in late April when a self-confessed sceptic* from Manchester submitted a (predictably grainy) photo.
Other cryptozoology spots this year include one made by a prominent sasquatch hunter who runs a Facebook group called Bigfoot 911. John Bruner, from North Carolina, published what he believed was absolute proof of Bigfoot on camera. He claimed the photo, snapped while he was hunting in the Appalachian Mountains, captured a creature that stood over 8 feet tall. However, after he published the photo a wandering shaman came forward and identified himself as the beast in the picture. Gawain MacGregor had been walking in the forest on the night of the incident, dressed head to toe in animal skin, and conducting his own search for the mythical (or not) creature. The members of Bigfoot 911 still deny that they photographed the shaman, and insist the creature they saw ‘moved with speed unmatched by any human’.
Meanwhile, on another Facebook page, North Carolina police posted: ‘If you see Bigfoot, please do not shoot at him/her, as you’ll most likely be wounding a fun-loving and well-intentioned person, sweating in a gorilla costume’ (see also Marathon, London).
The Book of the Year Page 30