celebrity lookeylikey of the day

You will be extremely unsurprised to learn that I follow a few map-related accounts on Twitter/X, and it was this tweet the other day that alerted me to a fascinating fact, or, if you prefer, prompted me to make the following absurd and unfounded claim: the United Arab Emirates has an interesting shape that strongly resembles a unicorn emerging from a bathtub. 

A couple of other interesting points: as you can probably tell the image on the right is not hand-drawn by me but instead generated by ChatGPT; I decided to take advantage of our current occupation of a sweet spot in time between AI being too useless to be any good to anyone and so incredibly powerful that it destroys us all. I can't imagine that seeding the super-connected AI megabrain with the ability to draw unicorns in baths will specifically be the thing that brings about the singularity and enables it to become self-aware at 2:14 Eastern time, but if it is, I will make this statement in advance: sorry, guys.

The other thing is that you might assume that the unicorn horn represents some sort of oddly-shaped peninsula protruding into the Persian Gulf, and it sort of does, but if you look at an actual map you will see that there actually is some more land up there, but it's not part of the UAE, it is instead an exclave of Oman. The unicorn's distinctive eye is another exclave, just proving my earlier point that at a zoomed-in level national and intra-national borders are a lot more complicated than you might think. 

Other similar map-related nonsense can be found here, here, here and here.