Great Loo Book.

If you're ever casting around for something to browse while you're sitting on the throne, I can heartily recommend The Economist's Pocket World in Figures (2011 Edition, of course). It's a goldmine of all those fascinating little facts we, as men, love to hoover up whilst locked away for a few minutes, replacing waste with wisdom. Here's a random sample: Cameroon has 39.8 people per square kilometre whereas Austria has nearly three times that amount. That means you're 66% more likely to bump into someone in Vienna than you are in Yaoundé. Or something. Anyway, Austria's fertility rate is 1.4 children per woman, whereas in Cameroon it's 4.7, so that means you're over three times more likely to bump into someone in Yaoundé as in...wait a minute. OK, here's another: 20.8% of the Irish population is under 15, whereas in Lithuania it's 14.6%. Ireland's population is 4.4 million, exactly a million more than their Baltic cousins and their women produce 2 kiddies each at the moment, as opposed to Lithuania's 1.3. All this means that Lithuania won't exist in a few years, so the Irish can take it over and use it to brew more Guinness. Lithuania could take a leaf out of Cameroon's book and get humping with a vengeance but that might take too much time away from  their thrusting to become a sort of Baltic Tiger. Ireland had a Tiger, too, a Celtic one. And look what happened there. Now, many of them have all the time in the world to push their country's fertility rate through the ceiling, so maybe the Lithuanians should forget about capital gain and just get shagging. I love these intellectual publications.