Web Monitor
16:11 UK time, Wednesday, 6 January 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: answering the unanswerable, fake countries and fugitive hero status.
• Slate magazine's unanswerable question of 2009 was "If a Siamese twin commits murder, does his brother get punished, too?" A reader vote demanded some kind of answer to the question so . The nearest he came to an answer was by looking at a pregnant convict, as the hypothetical case had no legal precedent:
"That said, there have been a few recorded instances of conjoined criminality. By one account, the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, were arrested over a scuffle with a doctor who tried to examine them, but never prosecuted. Nor were they ever charged with bigamy, despite having taken two wives."
• Fake countries have to try harder, says . He takes a trip around what he calls Limbo World - the areas which want to be their own countries. He's taken a trip from Somaliland to Kurdistan going to ministries and collecting visas for countries that don't exist. His best anecdote goes like this:
"On my most recent visit to the Republic of Abkhazia, a country that does not exist, I interviewed the deputy foreign minister, Maxim Gundjia, about the foreign trade his country doesn't have with the real countries that surround it on the Black Sea. Near the end of our chat, he paused, looked down at my leg, and asked why I was bleeding on his floor. I told him I had slipped a few hours before and ripped a hole in my shin, down to the bone, about the size of a one-ruble coin. Blood had soaked through the gauze, and I needed stitches. 'You can go to our hospital, but you will be shocked by the conditions,' Gundjia said. So he pointed me to the building next door, where in about 20 minutes I had my leg propped up on a dark wooden desk and was wincing at the sting of a vigorous alcohol-swabbing by the health minister himself. I was not accustomed to such personalized government service."
• If you haven't already heard of him, Colton Harris-Moore is an 18-year-old fugitive in the US. Bob Friel at Outside magazine gets us who, he says, has gained hero status on Facebook for allegedly stealing a couple of planes. Friel delves into who would support him:
Colt's Facebook fan club now has more than 9,000 members. A big Swedish contingent came aboard recently, along with a number of marriage and wanna-do-you proposals and plenty of helpful suggestions for the 'Barefoot Burglar', such as 'You should steal the space shuttle.'"
Links in full
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