celebrity/sealevelly lookeylikey of the day

A couple for you today, the first of which illustrates a similar sort of problem as I have with making jokes on Twitter, i.e. how much checking should you do into whether someone else has thought of the same thing already? Obviously with the lookeylikeys there isn't the time-critical element as there is with twitteryjokery, but one could still just Google the two names, or consult one of the other places that specialise in this sort of thing.

In this particular case a Google image search for pictures of the two people in question revealed a few places where the connection had already been made. Nonetheless here's former javelin world champion Fatima Whitbread and CBeebies presenter (usually of programmes involving him being chased by CGI dinosaurs) Andy Day.

There are two rules of children's TV presenters: one is that despite their youthful appearance and brightly-coloured trousers they're always older than you think. Andy Day, for instance, is 37. The other is that bored Mums and Dads forced to sit in front of CBeebies and similar channels for lengthy periods will start to have inappropriate sexual fantasies about the presenters. Most of the top 10s I've seen have been compiled by Mums and are therefore almost exclusively male presenters, and always feature cuddly Justin Fletcher disturbingly highly among the more obvious beefcake (Andy Day included). Lists compiled by Dads are less common but can still be found; all I'd say about this one (which features Topsy & Tim's Mum as previously featured here) is that - while I agree about Maddie Moate - any list of this nature that doesn't have the lovely Cat Sandion at the top of it is a worthless sham and a travesty.

Secondly, a non-human-related one: who's noticed that the Orkney island of Eday is basically just a short, fat, upside-down version of the Russian island of Sakhalin? I know, more like who hasn't noticed, right? Take a look:

Eday on the left, slimmed-down upside-down Eday in the middle, Sakhalin on the right. Stubby at the top, big hooky peninsula on the right about halfway down, narrow isthmus, and then fatter again at the bottom. Kind of like the brontosaurus, but different. Now I'll grant you there is a bit of a difference in scale, since Eday is a modest eight-and-a-half miles long and Sakhalin is a more generous 589 miles along its north-south axis.

Sakhalin has featured once before on this blog, as befits the 23rd largest island in the world; you can't get through the best part of twelve years of blogging without mentioning it at least once. It was mentioned here in connection with its former representation as being split (along an east-west line just above the hooky peninsula) between the Soviet Union and Japan. I have a (possibly wholly imaginary) recollection of seeing it represented like that in reasonably up-to-date atlases during my childhood, so there is a question of when that stopped being the default representation. The Soviet Union basically annexed the southern bit (formerly known as Karafuto Prefecture) in 1945, and gradually repatriated those living there to Japan, and Japan officially renounced its claim over its former territory in 1951. When western European and American mapmakers, whose countries were probably fairly hostile to Soviet expansionism, started to bow to the inevitable and just show it as part of the Soviet Union I couldn't say, but it could have been a bit later even than that.

An alternative map-dating guide can be found here.