Cartographers declare Civil War
Technorati tags: Humor, Satire, Cartography, Civil War, Ministerial faux pas
Wind-Breaking News! A myAsylum exclusive!
Cartographers up in arms over the status of island nations!
(original image taken from fusionanomaly.net)
Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), This Week - Unexpected seismic ripples have been resonating through the cartographic community following a shocking disclosure made in Malaysia's Parliament this past week, when Minister Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz (whom some quarters allege is not a real minister anyway) stated that
“Singapore is not a real country, it is a small island. Singapore’s population is just three to four million and there are no opportunities for corruption, unlike in our country."
(source: Malaysiakini [subscription required])
While the Malaysian public and political fraternity had expected retalationary downunder tongue-action from neighboring Singapore, what has instead happened has been totally beyond expectation. And from a totally unexpected party. Cartographers.
Cartographers the world over have picked up on this disclosure and acted to finally come out of the closet, and be vehemently split into two factions - with one side being Pro Island Nation (PIN) and the other anti (AIN).
The leader of the pro Island Nation side, who only wished to be identified as Ayah PIN, stated that the minister's statement has caused the status of many nations to suddenly be in question.
"If Singapore is not a real country, then what about Fiji, Kiribati, Mauritius, Nauru and numerous other island nations? Does anyone have a clue how much work it's going to be to change all those maps, printed and online?"
On the other side of the argument, the AIN faction have hailed the ministers statement as being timely - about damn timely. A spokesman, who did not wish to be identified, spoke to myAsylum, from behind a grassy knoll.
"For year, we have been lobbying real, more continent-locked countries to issue a motion in the UN to revoke nationhood from these wannabe countries. We are in agreement with the esteemed Malaysian minister. In fact, we are even pushing for sanctions to be placed on larger island nations, to have their country-dom revoked. Beginning with Australia.
Those liberal freaks who are in favor of still having these wannabe countries keep whining about maps having to be changed. They ignore the bigger issue at hand here."
When asked what the bigger issue at hand was, the spokesman huffed and puffed and muttered something about blasphemy, Noman, and other nonsense, and rushed off into the sunset.
Meanwhile, Google reported that hackers, believed to be working with the PIN, almost managed to change the source code of their Google Earth application. It is believed that these hackers had intended to draw country boundries around every island imaginable.
(every island a nation, or not, in the full post)
PIN, in the meantime, has been busy preparing memoranda to present to the United Nations, and unlike AIN, believe in starting small. Their target? Brunei. PIN claim that Brunei is actually an island nation - to be exact, two islands bordering the South China Sea, and the sea of Sarawak. PIN claims that their action is merely trying to protect the sultanate's sovereignity.
AIN have not kept quiet, however, and in what can only be called a showdown, have allegedly been organizing clandesitne raids, in a bid to rid libraries and server farms the world over from "blasphemous depiction of islands as nations".
So far, physical violence has not been reported in this verbal battle, but unconfirmed reports have started to come in claiming that a vicious food fight spontaneously broke out in the cafeteria of Rand McNally & Company, at their headquarters in Skokie, Illinois. No human injuries were reported, but the carnage claimed the lives of six dozen apple cobbler pieces, twenty seven slices of pizza, nineteen scoops of vanilla ice cream, and an undisclosed amount of miscellaneous food bits - Chicago CSI has been sent in to identify the remains. Fifteen cups of Jell-o are so far still unaccounted for.
Such violence was not witnessed, however, in the offices of National Geographic, whose management reportedly imposed a lock-down, as soon as the Minister's statement was released on Malaysiakini. Some NatGeo staff have reported that they have been forced to sign an "I Promise" document, pledging to behave during office hours. Any disagreement, the document alledgedly states, should be "taken outside".
In the background, rumors have surfaced that plans are underway to reconcile the more moderate PIN and AIN, into a new organization, tentatively called PAIN. Negotiations, according to some one-eyed witnesses, are being led by an individual that looks suspiciously like Kevin Spacey. His relationship to the warring factions is not known.
The silent victims, in this latest controversy, are of course the users of online search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com. Unconfirmed reports have been received of 404 Page Not Found errors when trying to query keywords such as Haiti, Grenada, Palau and "Saint Kitts and Nevis". Could the reach of AIN operatives be wider than originally thought, or just a case of coincidental wrong-keystroke-itis?
Meanwhile, a seismic anomaly in Southeast Asia may just prove to be the catalyst towards reconcilliation between AIN and PIN. Attributed to the massive earthquake on Boxing Day in 2004, a landmass has mysteriously appeared - at the northern tip of Sumatera. A new island, in other words. This new landmass has tentatively been named Noman.
And as expected AIN and PIN cannot come to an agreement as to the soveriegnity of Noman. So far, no human inhabitatants have been reported, one of the prerequisites of an island being its own nation. Monkeys and flying creatures, however, are abundant.
Despite this, they can, however, agree on one thing - that Noman is an island.
