Today I have a bit of geography trivia for you (and I do mean trivial). Graduates of Dr. V's geography mini-course, come to the white courtesy phone.
Five pairs of countries are highlighted on the map at left. What's special about these five pairs (and no other country pairs in the world)?
Bonus Question
And just to make everything about the U. S. (with apologies to my international reader(s)), which two pairs of U. S. states are like these pairs of countries?
Case in point: One day in June 2019, I was browsing a roundup of news stories from the East Bay Express (my local indie paper). Following a link to thetodaypress.com, I read a story about a humpback whale seen in the bay, but the story was full of weird passages like this:
“It’s not wanting good,” Invoice Keener, an affiliate researcher with the Marine Mammal Middle of Sausalito, stated Monday afternoon. “It’s not bettering. That’s for certain.”Here's the whole story.
[...]
The humpback was first noticed round Might 27 within the waters off what’s referred to as the Seaplane Lagoon, a spot the place U.S. Navy amphibious plane as soon as taxied out and in of the water. It’s at present a web site for a future ferry terminal.
So, my question for you today is... what the heck is going on here???
Hint
These movie listings from the same website might be a bit more revealing (check out the titles). Yes, the whole site is like this. Why, I don't know.
You can probably figure out which movies got transmogrified into "Lilo & Sew", "Loopy Wealthy Asians", "Candy Dwelling Alabama", and "Soiled Dancing" (this one makes me break down giggling, as does the concept of Mill Valley having a venue called Outdated Mill Park). Elsewhere on The Today Press, you can find references to Trump's Cupboard (i.e., Cabinet) members and the basketballer Draymond Inexperienced (i.e., Green).
So, why the heck does this site exist?! My best guess is that they make money from ads, and are trying to intercept readers by plagiarizing other sites, but they use the word changes to avoid getting caught. Yes, a human reader can see pretty quickly that something is up... but then again, that didn't stop an East Bay Express staffer from posting a link to them, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Today Press stopped updating in July 2019, but the site still sits there, inscrutably biding its time.
Solution
The Today Press apparently republishes content from legit news sites, but runs it through a thesaurus that randomly replaces some words with synonyms (without consideration of context). Thus, Bill Keener of the Marine Mammal Center becomes Invoice Keener of the Marine Mammal Middle, and May 27 becomes Might 27. Here's the original article about Allie the humpback whale.
Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Charlie, Yana, Inca, and Kate (and to those of you who said "the site translates news from another language to English", you were close; who'd have thought it translates English to English?). Thanks to everybody who made a guess!
Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.
Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to June 2020.