am i allowed to do images?
i guess not.
well that kinda sucks for this thread.

anyway... a few off the top of my head, in no particular order because i love so many...

Blur: Parklife
They had a thing at the time for carefully using stock photography, instead of original images... which (as a pop art fan) I find really super cool. Also, their logo designer said "we wanted something that kids could draw on their schoolbag" which has become my golden rule of logo design. The album is about ...life (the dog race analogy is good!) and dog racing is a traditional british thing, another theme of the album. It's like they deliberately set up that perfect shot just for the album cover.... but actually they picked it from a catalogue. Pop art rules.

Radiohead: Amnesiac
This is just soooooooooo Radiohead, so perfect for the music, such good typography, my favourite colours, everything is cool and makes me want to play it again.

The Beatles: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band
You don't seriously need me to write something here do you?

FSUK #1
Awesome compilation of breakbeaty things from the nineties, "Future Sound Of The United Kingdom #1" ...very nice artwork. "messy" is a very hard style to do right. Sorry this is a bad jpg but it's hard to find.

Short answer - Canadian universities are WAY younger than those in the States, so we adopted the 'classic' European terminology. I mean, U of T was founded in 1827 (yeah, guess where I graduated from), and there may be some older universities in Canada (I don't know which), but probably not as old as, say, Harvard.

>> ^Sarzy:
I've got a question which is semi-related to the topic at hand: what's the deal with the terms college and university being seemingly interchangeable in the states? In Canada, college and university are two different things (college is generally a one or two year program in which you learn a trade, whereas university is a three or four year deal in which you learn something a bit more abstract (ie. political science, english, physics, etc.). Is this not the case in the U.S.?


Yeah, American terminology like that bothers me - where's the UNIVERSITY GRAD option???

Anyway, enough people were annoyed by this like us to make a small essay on the topic - the Canadian system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#Canada

And here's the bit about Amerika
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#The_origin_of_the_U.S._usage

The founders of the first institutions of higher education in the United States were graduates of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. The small institutions they founded would not have seemed to them like universities — they were tiny and did not offer the higher degrees in medicine and theology. Furthermore, they were not composed of several small colleges. Instead, the new institutions felt like the Oxford and Cambridge colleges they were used to — small communities, housing and feeding their students, with instruction from residential tutors (as in the United Kingdom, described above). When the first students came to be graduated, these "colleges" assumed the right to confer degrees upon them, usually with authority -- for example, the College of William and Mary has a Royal Charter from the British monarchy allowing it to confer degrees while Dartmouth College has a charter permitting it to award degrees "as are usually granted in either of the universities, or any other college in our realm of Great Britain."

Contrast this with Europe, where only universities could grant degrees. The leaders of Harvard College (which granted America's first degrees in 1642) might have thought of their college as the first of many residential colleges which would grow up into a New Cambridge university. However, over time, few new colleges were founded there, and Harvard grew and added higher faculties. Eventually, it changed its title to university, but the term "college" had stuck and "colleges" have arisen across the United States.

Eventually, several prominent colleges/universities were started to train Christian ministers. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown all started to train preachers in the subjects of Bible and theology. However, now these universities teach theology as a more academic than ministerial discipline.

With the rise of Christian education, renowned seminaries and Bible colleges have continued the original purpose of these universities. Criswell College and Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas; Southern Seminary in Louisville; Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois; and Wheaton College and Graduate School in Wheaton, Illinois are just a few of the institutions that have influenced higher education in Theology in Philosophy to this day.

In U.S. usage, the word "college" embodies not only a particular type of school, but has historically been used to refer to the general concept of higher education when it is not necessary to specify a school, as in "going to college" or "college savings accounts" offered by banks. "University" is sometimes used in such contexts by Americans who wish to avoid ambiguity, for example in the context of Internet message boards where the reader hail from a different English speaking country.

Ex post facto laws, which this case seems to be based on, are prohibited by the Constitution of the United States. And also, the constitutions of:

Australia
Canada
Finland
France
Germany
India
Indonesia
Iran
Italy
Ireland
Japan
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
South Africa
Sweden
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States
The European Union

I guess if Swampy wants to move to Mexico, we can continue. Otherwise, I think the court has to be adjourned.

It's in Dollar amount. It's hard to compare the nations based on GDP when ours is so much more enormous than most other nations.
:: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/131-us-states-renamed-for-countries-with-similar-gdps/

Here's another that considers the entire EU as "one nation"
:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

The US economy is a big producer, but also expensive to function. Our foreign aid is about twice that of the nearest nation, Germany... so when I say most aid, I mean most aid in dollars by at least 2x. I consider aid to Iraq and Israel to be legitimate aid. I don't know if it was considered in the numbers I've seen however.
BTW, the report I'm referring to can be seen in the link above. Israel isn't even on the top 10. Iraq is on top.

I should also mention our investment in the U.N... take 2005 for example:
$5,327,276,000 - which looks like it increases by about $800,000,000 or so per year.

"The top seven contributors to the UN are the USA (25%); Japan (15.7%); Germany (9.1%); France (6.4%); the United Kingdom (5.3%); Italy (5.2%); and Russia (4.3%). Collectively, they account for more than 71% of the regular UN budget." -Un.org

It's also worth mentioning the CDC and other foreign medical assistance we provide, HIV/Malaria/etc. It's pretty extensive work.


[edit]: Sorry Octo, I'm addicted to the "edit" button.

/\ Do you mean pissant homogenous populations like in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and France? They are not all that homogenous and ranked higher. Australia is now more ethnically diverse than the U.S.A.

Post World War 2 the Japanese were forced to undergo a massive force reduction under Article 9, to be reconstituted as the JSDF. From Wiki:

Japan's Basic Policy for National Defense stipulates the following policies:

1. Maintaining an exclusive defense oriented policy.
2. To avoid becoming a major military power that might pose a threat to the world.
3. Refraining from the development of nuclear weapons, and to refuse to allow nuclear weapons inside Japanese territory.
4. Ensuring civilian control of the military.
5. Maintaining security arrangements with the United States.
6. Building up defensive capabilities within moderate limits.

Japan's USD $44.3 billion/year budget makes it the fifth largest military spender in the world, after the United States, Germany, United Kingdom and France. About 50% of that is spent on the personnel and the rest is split on supplies, new weapons, upgrades, etc. [7] Reflecting a tension concerning the Forces' legal status, the Japanese term 軍 (pronunciation: gun), referring to a military or armed force, and the English terms "military", "army", "navy", and "air force" are never used in official references to the JSDF.

Article 9

In theory, Japan's rearmament is thoroughly prohibited by Article 9 of the Japanese constitution which not only states, "The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes", but also declares, "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." In practice, however, the Diet (or Parliament) which Article 41 of the Constitution defines as "the highest organ of the state power", established the Self-Defense Forces in 1954. Due to such a constitutional tension concerning the Forces' status, any attempt at enhancing the Forces' capabilities and budget tends to be politically controversial. Thus the JSDF has very limited capabilities to operate overseas, lacks long range offensive capabilities such as long-range surface-to-surface missiles, air-refueling (as of 2004), marines, amphibious units, or large caches of ammunitions. The Rules of Engagement are strictly defined by the Self-Defence Forces Act 1954.

>> ^moodonia:
The Thrills are not British


agreed, and indeed. British is for "Citizen of the British empire (which we dont have anymore) and being part of Great Britain. Ireland isn't part of that. Irish, are Irish. Northern Ireland is complicated.

whilst, as the wiki puts it, "There are two sovereign states located on the islands: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Ireland (also described as the Republic of Ireland in cases of ambiguity)."

British is not for the islands and archipelago, but the citizenship of one of thoes two soverign thingys.

bite me

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Johnny. Don't fuck with my channels again. Got it?

In reply to this comment by jonny:
from your link DFT:

The term British Isles is controversial in relation to Ireland where its use is objected to by many people[3] and by the government of the Republic of Ireland.[4] Its use is also avoided in relations between the governments of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, who generally employ the term these islands[5][6].

from your link DFT:

The term British Isles is controversial in relation to Ireland where its use is objected to by many people[3] and by the government of the Republic of Ireland.[4] Its use is also avoided in relations between the governments of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, who generally employ the term these islands[5][6].

Even though Ireland is part of the British Isles I don't think it should be part of the British channel. The channel is for things relating to the United Kingdom and since Ireland isn't a part of the UK I'll have to remove it. Great song though

and there you have it all twisted up, which ilustraights the point

UK= United Kingdom :> "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the U.K., or Britain)

Or Great Britain or GB.

England, is a part of the UK.
So is Wales.
So is Scotland.
England, in no way, and never has, included scotland as part of it.

It would be like reclasifying Californian authors as Texan authors because the people needing to look up the Californian authors had never heard of California and had assumed they were all Texans.

Or doing it the other way around, because so few Texans were literate that the number of authors was tiny and didnt warrant its own category.

This any clearer? Need your own map?

Maybe Miss South Carolina was working at the "Library of Congress" at the time, or perhaps their classification system was so bad, they couldn't find their own maps. Or maybe their maps were burnt, as being heretical, for claiming there existed places outside th borders of the USA.

if the creator of this video can't even properly identify the United Kingdom/Britain, i wonder what else he's wrong about.

I believe it would be around this area, according to the video.
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=Charlton+On+Otmoor,+Oddington,+United+Kingdom&ie=UTF8&cd=5&geocode=0,51.834948,-1.203195&ll=51.837687,-1.184292&sp
n=0.092704,0.215607&z=13&iwloc=addr&om=1

That can at the end was Special Brew, which has a reputation over here for being cheap and high alcohol. From the wiki:

At 9% alcohol Special Brew is one of the strongest lagers freely available in the United Kingdom, without going to a specialist shop. Some people will say that Special Brew should more properly be described as a Barley Wine, rather than a lager.

In the UK Special Brew is occasionally available in bottles in pubs, but it is almost never served draft. Most pubs refuse to sell it because its high alcohol content leads to excessive drunkenness and unwarranted behaviour among customers. However it is widely sold in off licences and supermarkets nationwide. Special Brew is extremely popular among the homeless and travelling community, and off licence owners will often say it is their best selling item. Its reasonably low price and high alcohol content allow users to become extremely drunk quickly at a low cost should they desire to do so.

QM, that's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of free and democratic countries where most people don't believe in god, such as Japan, Sweeden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Belief without any evidence is foolish.