from greater minds than mine

I got an email from Uncle Brian this morning that cracked me up. After I read it I had to read it out loud to my parents and we all laughed. Then I decided it was worth sharing. Hope he doesn't mind :)

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I noticed your blog comment on geography. A couple personal notes:
- Which spelling? Their spelling, our spelling, the State Department's spelling, their language letters or ours, etc.? For example, is it Germany, Deutschland, or FDR (Federal Republic of Germany)? Is it China or PRC (People's Republic of China)? Is it England, Britain, Great Britain, United Kingdom, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Is it Siam or Thailand? Switzerland or Helvetia? I got interested when I tried stamp collecting many years ago -- why did countries spell their names on their stamps that way? (And today, why is the internet domain code for Spain es, for example, or Switzerland ch?)
- How many countries? We had an office argument about countries a few years ago, and I did some research. There is no official formal agreement on what constitutes a 'country', and consequently no agreement on how many there are. There have been members of the UN that were not countries, and countries that were not in the UN. Is Puerto Rica a country? How about the Knights of Malta? (I believe they occupy an apartment in the Vatican these
days.) And how about the Vatican? The Antarctic? And lots of islands scattered about the Pacific that have various relationships with bigger countries, some of which they don't agree to. There used to be a deserted atoll in the Pacific that you could buy; would that make you a country?
It's a very interesting area to research. You wouldn't believe how many islands and island groups there are in the Pacific. (There used to be a web site that listed them, with maps.) Geography is a good topic to turn kids loose on.
BrianT