It restores my faith in search engines when I get an interesting comment on a years-old blog post.  Karen scolded me for allegedly mixing up Croatia and Yugoslavia in my June 2008 post about Grgic wines.  I think Karen simply missed the tense of the story I was telling, with some events happening during the time when Yugoslavia was a place that included what’s now Croatia.

For those keeping track, there was something called Yugoslavia for most of the period 1929-2003, although modern Croatia came into being in 1991  It’s interesting how sometimes modern people and states like to locate past events in their territories even when they were something else at the time.

Tomorrow, it seems likely that Sudan will split into two new nations, but that won’t change the past identification of the whole area (at least since 1956) as Sudan.

All of which brings me back to globes.  My globe, bought sometime between 2003 and 2006, is out of date already by at least one nation (Do you know which? It’s not East Timor, answer later in the post), and with the Sudanese split would be even less accurate and complete.   A globe is a much bigger investment than a flat map, and unless I want to use it as a historical globe, I’ve got to figure out how to update it.

As it turns out, I do not have to break out the fine point sharpie.  Replogle, the fine makers of my fine globe, have something they call the Updatable Globe Program, under which, you can get one update of your globe ball for 50% of the regular price.  One can only imagine the run on this program in 1991 as over a dozen post-soviet states popped into existence.  I just hope I can find the documentation so my globe can include Montenegro and maybe Southern Sudan soon.

Plus, I’m happy to report that 2006 Grgich Hills Cellars Fumé Blanc is still on the list at Casablanca restaurant in Harvard Square.