That video educated the Christ out of me. (Chryst?)

Just when I thought I had a pretty good handle on the whole British thing; that one's getting bookmarked.

(Curious to see what bearing this has on the commentary, but it's informative nonetheless.)

If Hitler had his way, that diagram would be whole lot simpler. Just "Germany" from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Geography class would be a breeze.

They're part of the "British Commonwealth" I do believe... along with other bits and pieces of the former Empire.

Kinda related - but it bugs the hell out of me that whenever I join a web-group, or sign up to Amazon or other online shopping channel, they don't have England as an option on their pop-up country selection thingy, just United Kingdom. And don't even mention the widespread reluctance to flying the George Cross (flag of England  ) thru fear of being labelled an evil nazi person.

Stephen Fry makes the point that if you look at the United Nation's Human Development Index that ranks all countries based on their standard of living (literacy, longevity, income & gender equality, infant mortality, crime rates, income per capita, secularism, etc), then countries such as Norway and Sweden consistently dominate the top #5, and they're actually monarchies.
The idea of dynastic succession is absurd and against enlightened principles (and you'd never have it today if you were building a society from scratch), but it's curious that its no impediment to a modern enlightened functional society.

Regarding that video about the UK- I do laugh when people say UK or Britain/British when they actually mean English 

On the topic of vista vision there's a old story about how that format becoming a costly thing because of star wars and close encounters. I believe its was Richard Edlund who remembered seeing some of the old 1950s cameras at a particular camera shop as they were gearing up for episode one . When they went sure enough far in the back of the store were half a dozen units including one used as a coffee table! So he bought what at the time they could afford, two units which became the backbone of star wars effects. After all the hallaballoo over the movie gets to the point of knowing there going to make a sequel decides to buy a few more units goes back to the same shop, only now the vista visions are on velvet in the front window with each now costing double what it would have cost to have bought all of them before....ops.