The funny thing about geography

The funny thing about geography’s that much of East Asia and Russia are actually west of the American West Coast, so we go to California eastwards. Likewise Australia’s south of the Philippines so we go southwards when getting there. America’s west of Africa and Europe so they go eastwards there. Both Africa and Europe are west of Asia but then again, Africa and Asia are culturally nonwestern while the Americas and Europe are. In some respects, both South-East Asia and Africa show similarities to other Eastern cultures but also sometimes to Western cultures due to colonisation.

Hong Kong is east of Mainland China but is culturally Westernised due to British influence, so the same thing can be said of Macau when it comes to Portuguese occupation. Mexico’s interesting because it’s west of Spain but it’s westernised by Spain for centuries but that’s similar to the Philippines to some extent especially when prior to aeroplanes that Spanish ships would sail westwards here. Any African would’ve gone southwest to the Philippines if it weren’t for aeroplanes. Likewise, Japan and Taiwan are north of the Philippines and they went south over here.

Today, it’s somewhat more straightforward where Nigerians and Spaniards can go to the Philippines eastwards. But geography still has its peculiarities where you still go south for Australia and north for Taiwan if you’re a Filipino.

Poland, where are you?

Poland did exist at some point or another before though admittedly I’m not that intimated with it. What I do know is that at some point it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, then parts of it became part of the Russian Empire (eventually at some point, Poland became a Soviet satellite). Also part of Poland was part of the German Empire*.

It’s not that Poland culturally didn’t exist but geographically speaking, it was practically at the crossroads between (or at the mercy of) its immediate neighbours. For awhile it was part of Russia, then Germany and now on its own. Admittedly that’s almost all I know about it, pardon if I’m wrong. Though I do know Poland was at some point or another subjected to Russian and German influences so.

*If it sounds odd, the infamous porn star Peter Berlin was born there.

Differences between Greece and Italy

Of course, differences are bound to exist between the two. I think the differences lie in not just geography (Italy’s got more alpine cities than Greece currently does*) but also history. I’d say that Italy’s much more influenced by its neighbours France, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Even moreso in the North where there’s even a German-speaking populace in Bolzano. Likewise there’s an Italian speaking populace in Switzerland.

Greece’s obviously more Eastern (as in Turkish). If I’m not mistaken, at least in fairly recent memory (the 19th century and to some extent, the early 20th century), Greece along with Armenia and Bulgaria used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. It’s even suspected that certain Muslim communities in Turkey have more in common with the Eastern Orthodox Church and to some extent, the Armenian Church than with mainstream Islam.

(Further helped by that some of the more prominent populations are either closer to Greece or Armenia.)

Another that I can think of’s that Italy’s historically and still is more prominent in the West at least in recent memory (from the late Middle Ages onwards) whereas Greece’s importance in the West (at least prior to Ottoman rule) lasted from ancient times to the early middle ages. Roughly going from pagan Greece to the Christian Byzantine Empire. Admittedly that’s all I know about the two.

*As Turkey used to be part of the Byzantine Empire and Greece in return part of the Ottoman Empire, it’s actually not uncommon to see Ancient Greek artefacts still existing in Turkey and vice versa. There’s even a Greek speaking populace in Turkey and some Turkish places used to be Greek. Likewise Cyprus used to be part of Greece proper and is caught between Greek and Turkish influences.

Adapting to the sands

Dune is one such franchise that many people, including Alejandro Jodoworsky, attempted to adapt. To put it this way, it starts out with the world overrun by robots that people are revolting against them and then leave to other worlds. Our dear protagonist Paul Atreides heads to the barren world of Arrakis/Dune, whose own life’s been micromanaged by an all-female organisation and leads the natives against his enemies.

I guess the first novel seems simple enough to not only pre-empt a failed film adaptation and another one that came to fruition (but failed) but also media like the Incals and Star Wars. There’s quite a wealth of media stating the similarities. To be honest, although Dune predated Star Wars the 1984 film felt like a ripoff. Especially if/when Star Wars actually got produced and filmed that it’s going to be challenging to make Dune stand out.

Ironically Jodoworsky’s take would’ve made it stand out more, especially given that it’s supposed to be trippy to people who don’t do LSD. Frank Herbert himself was reputed to use psychedelic mushrooms in addition to using his personal life as inspiration for the Dune stories. I actually think the highly psychedelic take would be enough to make Dune distinct from Star Wars.

Not to mention there’s a real world phenomenon of desert mirages, something that a Dune adaptation (especially in visual media like comics and film) should’ve taken advantage of. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, shouldn’t a Dune film bother to revel in desert mirages a lot more? I personally think the African Sahara’s enough to give an idea of what Arrakis would’ve been like because it actually exists.

As are the cultures in there (though I think the forthcoming film’s set in Jordan so). I guess the real issue in adapting Dune to visual media’s that if/when many of the stranger sequences in Dune seem to be inspired by psychedelic trips, the 1984 film shouldn’t be that full of narration (something a fan edit rectified and left those out).

If/when things like the weirding way seems too hard to imagine, either that has to be left out or if nobody wants it to be changed into a sci-fi technology thing Dune should’ve been really trippy all the way. Right down to the repeated use of desert mirages.

Some further differences

I don’t know much about Scandinavia to make a good comparison with America but if differences do exist, they ought to as well as between Scandinavian countries. I guess Scandinavia and actually anywhere else seem interchangeable to outsiders and vice versa. To start off, Scandinavia’s best characterised by a series of peninsulas and a few archipelagos. Finland borders Russia and Estonia, Sweden’s in the centre, Iceland and Norway are adjacent to the British Isles and Denmark sits on top of Germany.

America by contrast encompasses a lot of land in North America. (Though similar things can be said of Brazil in South America.) Iceland and the Faroes are rather isolated for a long time whilst Norway, Sweden and Finland are home to the Sami people, a long-standing ethnic minority. America, like Russia, China, India and Brazil, encompasses a wide variety of climates given their territory size. Sweden technically has a larger population than Denmark.

But it’s got similar geographical and climate problems like Norway, Finland, Iceland and Russia to a lesser degree in that only a few areas are habitable enough to sustain a substantial population. (There’s a reason why Russia’s more densely populated to the West and South.) Thus leaving out Denmark as the most densely populated both due to smaller size and greater habitability.

Lastly but not the least (and most amusing), Sweden’s home to IKEA and H&M. Denmark’s got Lego, Finland’s got Nokia and Norway and Iceland don’t seem to have any at least on this scale to my knowledge. America’s got a lot more brands, thus logically more globally known brands too. (As in YouTube, WordPress, Typepad, Blogspot, Kelloggs, Hershey, National Geographic and Disney.)

That’s what I know of.

Spain and Portugal…and the world

Two countries sharing a border on the same peninsula and both having recovered so well from the economic slowdown (same for Ireland though who knows if Greece and Italy are ever going to catch up). Admittedly I know little about these two. So to speak, the only things I can say about these two’s that Galicia used to be part of Portugal (there’s even a movement intended to reunify these two or at least their respective languages), Portugal’s got smaller land area and Portugal had Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Macao (now part of China) and Brazil.

Spain’s got Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, the Philippines and most of South and Central America. Logically France had much of Africa, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Italy had Eritrea, Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia, which’s also shared with Turkey (which also claimed Egypt with/before Britain). Admittedly my knowledge of these countries aren’t that good to bear in mind. Though I do know that Turkey’s influenced by Arabic, Turkic and Greek civilisations (enough to nurture syncretic Christian-Muslim communities like Alevis).

That Spain’s also a former Arabic territory with Andalusia being part of that territory and like Italy and Germany, it had colonies in Africa (though France and Britain ended up getting most of it).

Spain and Italy

There’s a tendency to make them interchangeable, at least to outsiders and sometimes it does show. At other times, as with France, they have enough differences to tell apart. Italy’s mostly mountainous and is considerably more influenced by the Holy Roman and Austrian Empires if because many of its provinces belonged to either of them (and also the French empire).

It also helps that it’s that close to those three (four if you include Switzerland) and that there are long-standing German speaking communities in Italy. Especially in the Southern Tirol area and why the musician Modo (who comes from Montefalcone) apparently prefers to speak in German. Spain (and by extent, France) have Basque speakers, whose language is unique so to speak.

Both Spain and France have many overseas colonies, Italy and Germany only have a few if any. Italy claims Eritrea, Libya and Ethiopia (also shared with Turkey and retroactively so). Germany’s got Namibia and had Cameroon, Togo and Ghana (which eventually became French and British territories).

Also Spain recovered faster than Italy did so.

Far East, far beyond cliches

Something that I myself am guilty of but I suspect that at least in the European context, Asian (and sometimes African) cultures are often treated as interchangeable. There are some similarities but also profound differences. Consider the cultural differences between China, Mongolia, Japan and South Korea. As far as I know about them in the Sinosphere, the latter three were Chinese colonies (Japan even had Chinese aristocratic families at some point). At this point, China’s got Inner Mongolia (separate from Mongolia proper).

Both the Japanese and Chinese use Chinese characters, Mongolia uses Cyrillic (same with Turkmenistan and both were part of the Soviet Union) and Korea uses Hanggul (though they did use Chinese characters before as did Vietnam which switched to Roman characters*). China’s been influenced by its Central Asian neighbours, not just Mongolia (which a part of it exists in China) but also by Manchurians which came to dominate China right down to influencing its fashion sense.

The ethnic composition of China overlaps a lot with Mongolia and Russia. Especially when it comes to ethnic Chinese in Mongolia and ethnic Mongolians in China (inner Mongolia) as well as Buryats and Kazakhs being found in all three in addition to their own country (Kazakhstan which also belonged to the Soviet Union).

If I’m not mistaken, Uyghurs (a Turkic community) are found in China, Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan which again suggests China geographically, ethnically and culturally overlaps with Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia. There are even Chinese and Turks in Russia. Not that Japan and Korea lacked any long-standing ethnic minorities. But I only know of Japan having the Ainu and Okinawa folks.

Not that South Korea never had ethnic minorities but most of them are recent immigrants. Not to mention both China and South Korea have considerable Christian populations though it’s around 2% in the former. However when counted with Muslims, the number of monotheists in China’s up to 2.98 or nearly 3% (constant intrusion).

In South Korea, it’s up to 27.8 (though the Muslim population’s small). It’s even more miniscule in Japan and I frankly know little about Mongolia (though it might have enough peculiarities to justify its differences from China). Not to mention parts of China (most notably Macau and Hong Kong), Mongolia, Vietnam and South Korea are considerably more Westernised.

China’s partly influenced by German, British and Portuguese colonisation. Vietnam used to be a French colony, Mongolia’s part of the Soviet Union** and South Koreans swore allegiance to America. Not that Japan’s any less Westernised but that the former three were Westernised to any degree due to most colonisation and geographic proximity.

When there are differences, they’re bound to occur.

*Same for Turkey and possibly both Indonesia and Malaysia

**Currently around 17% of Mongolians and 12% of Turkmeni use Russian whilst Russia’s the official language in Kazakhstan.

The Mesopotamia

Practically set in Iraq and to some extent other territories like Syria and Israel (though I could be really wrong about it), its mythology is more or less the precursor to Judaism (or at least some Jewish beliefs) and Jewish demonology. It does show up a lot in Biblical archaeology and studies (the academic sort) to my knowledge. Now as for monotheism, it certainly evolved independently several times and some European missionaries observed certain some Pygmy communities being monotheistic (and might be onto something along with monogamy).

It seems parsimonious to assume the most popular form of monotheism emerged in the Middle East, sometimes interacting with other forms of monotheism to produce syncretic sects and communities like say the Alevis (a Muslim sect commonly assumed to be Crypto-Christian and more rarely, Crypto-Jewish). These kinds of sects as well as Judaism spread but through intermarriage and migration (these two go hand in hand along with trade and neighbourly negotiations).

Islam and Christianity practically spread through prosleytising (for better or worse) now that the former’s spread to Europe (through both immigration and conversion). Though the latter spread from the Mediterranean via the Roman Empire and its descendants. (A correlation sadly not brought up often ironically by others.) Still Mesopotamia does deserve recognition for being the birthplace of the more popular versions of monotheism around today.

Sort of makes sense

Like I said before, I pretty much softened my stance on the Coppingers somewhat in the sense of realising the other reasons why pets stray. It’s not only complicated by ecological, economic and geographical factors that thwart their efforts in keeping pets from straying but also cultural beliefs and customs like not bothering to train dogs much (sometimes said training actually consists of starving and drugging said pet, same for cats) and cats and dogs being dirty as to justify keeping them out to literally not always deal with their crap.

It can be due to owner carelessness and pets’ tendencies but also complicated by where such straying incidents take place (near forests, farms and within compounds to whatever degree for better or worse), economic factors (being too poor to afford what’s needed) and geographical ones like vets and stores being that hard to find. We’re dealing with other factors that unwittingly work against pet owners’ wishes at times though there are currently efforts to mitigate or minimise it (something like Trump sterilising all cats).