| Australia Now An Island, Greenland Miffed |
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - Officials at the International Continental Redefinition Conference has declared that Australia is now formally an island, replacing Greenland as the
world's largest land body that currently fits the island criteria. Greenlanders contacted by The Daily Redundancy, although quite cold, were rather hot over the ruling.
"It's an outrage!" says Lars Løønihüm, resident and
impromptu mayor of Külusük. "It's not like a big portion of our island just fell into the sea!" Australians professed similar criticism: "I'll be stuffed." said Bruce Bruceheart, Perth resident. "Bunch of dills up there, eh?"
Conference attendees insist that the ruling was necessary to avoid renaming most of the world. "It's not that Australia isn't a continent," explained Heinrich Hummusmuncher,
Conference Chairaman and Executive Director of the World Land Mass Sequencing Project, "it's that the other continents aren't continents at all." Apparently, when the definition of a continent being a 'contiguous' land mass is applied, the seven continents are reduced to four.
Bickering over the new names of the remaining continents quickly intensified.
"The first problem we tried to tackle was what to do about combining North and South America. To simply call it America would mean that the world would suddenly have 1 billion Americans -
and nobody wanted that." Similar problems arose with merging Europe, Asia and Africa. "Nothing really rolled off the tongue." said Hummusmuncher. "Not Eurafricasia, nor Africaseope, and certainly not
Asafricope. And who would want to be called African-Eurasian?"
Faced with the possibility of accomplishing nothing, Conference members voted that Australia, the only continent to meet the criteria of being a continent, become an island. "We got a lot done." said
Hummusmuncher. "People in Australia my feel alienated, but let's face it - there's not a whole lot of people down there anyway. We managed to leave most of the world intact."
© 2007 - The Daily Redundancy
