Somehow, I missed the memo on Nunavut, and my globe ended up broken. However, there is a silver lining. We all get to learn some geography.
During April 2026, I completed an A-Z blog post challenge and in this post I would like to share the post links and tell the story of why I chose this theme. As a quick intro, let me note that the A-Z challenge, created in 2010 by J. Lenni Dorner and friends, encourages bloggers to write 26 posts using letters of the alphabet. People interpret this different ways, but my approach has been to pick a single theme, then write the posts daily during the month of April. The hard part is always Q, J, Z, and X. I cheated on X; I’ll warn you in advance.
I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge for this, my seventh year in a row. I learned a lot from previous years, and it kick-started a book-writing career for me: Olympics, Accounting, Silk Road, didn’t we have fun on Ancient Inventions in 2025? You can even peruse prior years in my top menu, under “Books & A to Z.” This year time was scarce; I was partly doing people’s taxes, writing a book, and then cruising around the Panama Canal. I decided, nevertheless, to take the plunge, pledged to shorten them, and keep them thematic: Small Countries.
Who could resist writing about Panama while going through Panama?
The A-Z list
(My opening post set the rules of the “game” by covering my own home town in the East Bay of Northern California.)
Special: How the Panama Canal was formed
How I Dropped the World and Wrote 26 Posts
Why did I choose this theme? In March 2026, we were catching up on back episodes of the Jeopardy Invitational, and we missed a geography question about Territories in Northern Canada. I did not remember parts of the Northwest Territory being renamed Nunavut. Canadians, I apologize; it was all the way back in 1999.
I realized that Geography has always been a trivial Achilles heel for me and KK. We were on a progressive trivia team once and came in second because we could not get the capital cities for Uganda and Belarus. Yes, Kampala and Minsk, I know that NOW.
Planning to look for Nunavut, I got my world globe off the mantelpiece, but, as I carried it over to the table, it slipped it out of my hands and bounced on the floor. The globe is fragile, people! It broke off its stand and went hurtling through space… thankfully, the gravitational force kept it…. Well, on the ground. Earth’s gravity saved Earth, hooray! Not exactly, though. It is not useful off the stand, which was plastic and broken.
But it was clearly a sign!
As I was thinking about Small Countries as a theme, I remembered once that a business colleague had described our administrator as: She just needs a small country to run. I know a few people like that. Do you?
The World Has Changed
I noticed also that the globe was old, and I started to think about all those changes. My globe was out of date, in so many ways. Flawed! I noticed that it didn’t even have South Sudan carved out, let alone Nunavut. Yet, I started to think, wouldn’t I have to buy a new globe every year or so to keep up? This one was still had Yugoslavia. (Yes, kids that was a giant country that is now divided: Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzo– well, lots of
In fact, the very idea of a stable map, a snapshot of the land at a moment in time, gives a false impression. Boundaries are not stable. You know, for instance, that streets in your town are regularly rerouted–two lanes made to three, three lanes to two with a bike lane, and so on. If they can repave and repaint the streets frequently Here, they can surely redraw the country divisions Over There.
Unless you’re teaching Geography, you can’t really afford to replace your globe every few years. In fact, I did an inventory of my fact-based stuff, and it turns out that I had three globes, two world maps, and a globe puzzle. (Plus, wow, maps of Europe, the Pacific Ocean, US Water systems…. I’m literally swimming in maps. But somehow still can’t remember the capital of Belarus. Minsk. Minsk.)
Check Your South Sudan
As I turned to the internet to replace my old globe, I wondered if there were any political biases behind the color scheme. It turns out probably not. The answer is no; however, there is a key theory called the Four-Color Map Theorem. You only need four colors to produce a map where all countries or regions which are adjacent can be separated by color. Adjacency is key.
In the meantime, if you want to see if a map or globe you have is current, check your South Sudan. Sudan split off about 15 years ago. A later split-off of Kosovo and Montenegro from Serbia happened in 2006/8, while East Timor or Timor-Leste was created in 2002. My black/pink globe doesn’t have South Sudan, but it does have Montenegro and East Timor, so it was created somewhere between 2006 and 2011. Boundaries are time-stamped.
Where in the World Do they Study Geography?
Americans don’t know much about Geography, neither our own fifty states or the other 195 countries. I know that I never had a specific class in it. We talked about other countries, but teachers didn’t really emphasize memorizing countries. Some Social Studies teachers worked through it. I, luckily, had a sixth grade teacher that made us memorize all the countries in Africa. They do keep changing, so my long-term memory is no longer current. But I made up a song… Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Spanish Sahara, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan. Works really well around the northern border countries, then I get lost in the middle. Yes, I know it’s not Spanish Sahara any more. But check out letter “W,” it’s a fascinating story! Morocco has mined around the border–anyway, you can read it. I never studied South America, though, or Europe, so I am somewhat vague on where Ecuador is, sorry to my friend from Ecuador. Hence, my desire to self-educate through this challenge.
Articles propose that the reasons Americans don’t teach much Geography include “curriculum overcrowding” and “stereotyped content.” As to the first, if you don’t know Where, you can’t really know What. You have to make time for dull things like 2+2 and where the Strait of Hormuz is. See why you want to learn Geography? Wouldn’t you like to really know RIGHT NOW where the Strait of Hormuz is, with a war going on there, and all?
As to the second reason, that has to do with biased comments by textbook makers about people who live elsewhere, but that’s a poor reason. Don’t study Geography because someone wrote racist things in a textbook? The answer is to fix the textbook or read more, not study less. Other countries do learn Geography, so it really just makes Americans look dumber. Geography can be boring, but it’s necessary. And I tried to make it not boring.
Andorra First…
So that’s why I took on Small Countries. Not all countries. There are 195 at last count, and that would take half a year. Besides, you know where Brazil is, don’t you? *checks globe, yep, right there* I picked 26 small countries because the big ones get too much limelight.
Even before “A,” I preempted myself, briefly. My game, my rules. I started with my little “country,” my town of Castro Valley because comparisons are fun. How big is Andorra, compared with my town? Who lives there? What do they do? And what’s interesting about it?
I bet you could guess “V” without looking back, if you watch Jeopardy.