Serbia

I've only ever known one person from Serbia, a landlocked country in centralish-southeasterny Europe. He was the professor of a college course I took entitled "War, Technology and Society." Based on my experience with him, I'd say that Serbians are a grumpy, diminutive people who all talk gleefully and knowledgeably about medieval war implements and spout adorable bits of folk wisdom like "Never rub a man's face in defeat. Just kick him until he stops moving." That's probably a safe generalization, isn't it? Serbian people dislike Albanians and Chelsea Handler.

Most Serbs.

Senegal

Senegal is a West African nation wrapped around the Gambia, a small strip of land which the aforementioned Senegal never had the gumption or the inclination to conquer for itself and feast on its riches. The other nearby areas which Senegal has failed to annex and subjugate include Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania and the vast unclaimed depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite having a diverse array indigenous languages, the national language of Senegal is French, which I personally think was taking the easy way out. I've recently decided to start calling Senegal "The Disappointment of West Africa" based on its chronic underachievement in categories like size by area (88th in the world), size by population (72nd!) and GDP (111th, behind Iceland. Iceland, you guys!). Come on Senegal. Why can't you be more like your brother?

Senegal's capital, Dakar, is tiny compared to the world's largest city, Shanghai. What a letdown.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is a country in the Middle East where everybody is constantly at least kind of mad because it's hot all the time, sand gets into all of your shit and no one is ever allowed to have any fun doing anything. It's kind of like Utah, if you've ever been there before. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic absolute monarchy, which I think basically means that if you live there, you shouldn't fuck around. Saudi Arabia is also located on top of the world's largest oil reserves, which means that despite continued criticism over human rights issues such as equality between men and women and the perennial question of whether or not cutting off the hands and feet of minor offenders is the best method of criminal rehabilitation, the king (currently Abdullah bin [more names]) still gets to have lots of weird sleepovers with powerful foreign heads of state. Saudi royalty aren't really all that different from the kid you knew in the fourth grade who was kind of a shitty person, but you hung out with him anyway because he had a Sega Dreamcast and Crazy Taxi was a really fun game.

The Burj al-Mamlaka, Saudi Arabia's tallest building, was built in 2002, in case someone ever needs to open a really huge bottle.

São Tomé and Príncipe

São Tomé and Príncipe is the smallest country in the world, aside from some other countries that are smaller. An island nation located some amount of miles off the coast of west Africa, São Tomé and Príncipe was uninhabited before the year 1470, when the islands were discovered by Portuguese explorers conducting an experiment to see if they could find São Tomé and Príncipe. As it turned out, they could. In 1975, São Tomé and Príncipe gained its independence from Portugal as part of an experiment to see if they could do a better job on their own. I haven't managed (nor have I tried) to find any statistics on whether or not that worked out, so I'm gonna assume that it did. One thing I like about São Tomé and Príncipe is that São Tomé has a tilde in it. I think that's pretty cool.

São Tomé and Príncipe's president is Fradique de Menezes, seen here wearing a dumb-looking bowtie.

San Marino

San Marino (also known as The Most Serene Republic of San Marino [Really, San Marino? "Most serene?" There's a claim to fame. (Sarcasm!!!)]) is one of the European microstates, which is a nice way of saying that it has a soccer team that has never, ever won. San Marino is located in the Apennine Mountains, totally surrounded by Italy like a Vatican City with no popes in it. San Marino is the oldest sovereign state currently in existence, probably because it's really not all that difficult to maintain sovereignty over a tennis court-sized area in a mountainous region. Congratulations, I guess. Originally founded in the fourth century as a haven for Christians who were sick of the Roman Empire calling them mean, but not very clever names like "Christhole" and "Jesus balls." The nation's capital is the city of San Marino, located in the shadow of the country's highest peak, Mount Titano (Italian for "Mount Tittaaaays").

San Marino is named after its founder, Saint Marinus, shown here building some sort of thing.

Samoa

Samoa is an island nation in the south Pacific Ocean, the land mass of which is made up entirely of coconuts that have agglomerated in a massive pile due to a peculiar vortexy tidal situation. (Author's Note: Is that a racist thing to say? It feels like it was kind of racist. Or at least cruel and minimizing. I apologize to any and all of my Samoan readers.) The two largest islands in Samoa are Upolu and Savai'i, but even these so-called "main islands" are tiny as hell. The Samoan economy is based largely on tourism and agriculture, with its primary export being vaguely ethnic professional wrestlers - though Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka turns out to have been Fijian (Author's Note: Glad I looked that up, or I would have looked even more racist just now), prominent stars of Samoan extraction have included a guy named Rikishi, whose gimmick was "The Samoan Man with the Giant Fat Ass," as well as esteemed dramatic actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The capital, Apia, is nothing to write home about.

Sometimes Samoan people get weird tattoos.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

In the cosmic sense, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has no significance whatsoever.

I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia is an island nation in the Caribbean. It achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1979. The capital is Castries. Who has time for such things when one day all of us will die?

Saint Lucia's flag is brightly colored to distract its citizens from the inevitability of death.

Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Kitts and Nevis is the first of way too many inconsequential island nations whose names all start with the letter 'S', and will thus be afforded even less attention than most of the island nations I've already done. Located in the Leeward Island chain of the east Caribbean, Saint Kitts and Nevis consists of two islands: Saint Kitts, and another one whose name I was unable to dig up in my research. With a population of just over 50,000, Saint Kitts and Nevis is the smallest country in the Americas (in case you care [You don't though, so why did I bother? (Why do I do anything? What's the point? Does my life have any meaning at all?)]).

A view from Saint Kitts of the other island, whatever it's called. The blue part is the ocean.

Rwanda

Rwanda is a small African country that most people have only heard of because of all the terrible things that have happened there. I should probably be more specific, huh? This particular bowl of sad history (part of this complete breakfast!) is located in central Africa, just south of the Equator. Rwanda was a Germany colony from 1884 until World War I, when it was claimed by the Belgians, whose prowess at destroying the lives of dark-skinned people once nearly matched their waffle-making chops. The Belgians ruled through the Rwandan monarchy, favoring the Tutsi tribe over their main rivals, the Hutu, building up massive resentment between the two, which, in an event that was completely without precedent in African colonial history, led to civil war and ethnic cleansing. Up to a million people were killed by Hutu rebels during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, and that number could easily have been higher without the heroic actions of people like Don Cheadle. Rwanda is currently a major exporter of coffee beans, good for late nights awake in bed thinking about how humankind is a pitiable, hopeless race, cursed from the beginning of time to forever repeat the blunders of history.

Rwandan coffee farmers sorting the beans for Starbucks' new blend: ultra-dark, with hints of chocolate and regret.

Russia

Russia is the world's biggest country, a monolithic chunk of Eurasia that has fewer interesting things per square mile than any other nation on the planet. That's probably not entirely fair, as the western half of Russia has produced plenty of culture (mostly a lot of sad authors), whereas the eastern half is so desolate and miserable that one time a meteor exploded directly above part of it, leveling miles of forest and creating an explosion so large that it lit up the night sky all over the world, and almost nobody noticed. I think that's the part where famous dead person Yul Brynner was from. Siberia, one of the most famously shitty areas in the entire world, used to be where infamous dictator/mustache champion Josef Stalin sent people who he didn't like. Can you imagine that? What if an American president forced people to live in camps in the worst parts of the country for reasons other than because they were Japanese? Wouldn't that be crazy? Russia was ruled by a series of tsars from 1547 to 1918, when Nicholas II was doing such a lousy job that communism actually started to look like a more viable system of government. The October Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin, whose crazy dream lasted for most of the 20th century before the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1991. During this time, the Soviet Union not only managed to make most of eastern Europe economically retarded; they also accomplished the previously unthinkable feat of launching a dog into space. This was, and remains, the most expensive way that anyone has ever killed a dog.

Following his death, Lenin's body was mummified and remains on display at his mausoleum in Moscow for the benefit of those who think he didn't look quite creepy enough when he was still alive.

Romania

Romania is a country in eastern Europe that is going to be difficult to talk about in an original way because I already used up all of my (admittedly pretty mediocre) scary accent material on Bulgaria. I am a lazy person though, so that's not gonna stop me from making hay out of the fact that Transylvania, located in Romania, was where vampires used to live before the crash in the housing market forced all of them to move to a sad, redneck town in the Pacific Northwest. Modern-day Romania was once home to Vlad the Impaler, a major asshole whose 15th-century reign of terror inspired characters like Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Count from Sesame Street. So at least his tens of thousands of victims can take solace in the fact that their brutal executions eventually resulted in an excellent means of teaching basic arithmetic to children. Plus, it's not like they wouldn't all be dead by now anyway (I'm a glass-half-full guy). The capital of Romania is Bucharest, which apparently has such a major overpopulation of stray dogs that the problem warranted a subheading on its Wikipedia page.

Bran Castle in central Romania. Forks, Washington is a pretty big step down in my book.

Qatar

Qatar is a Middle Eastern country whose national motto is "The letter 'u' is for pussies." Qatar is located on the Qatar Peninsula (sort of an Arabian answer to Michigan) bordering Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf in an area which is unarguably where Qatar is located. Qatar is an absolute monarchy in which all of the power belongs to an Emir who probably doesn't force his subjects to dance for his amusement nearly as much as I would, were I in his position. The current Emir is Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, and every other position of power is occupied by someone in his family who has those same names in a different sequence, meaning every government session eventually devolves into a really unfunny Abbott and Costello routine. Owing to its vast oil resources, Qatar had the highest GDP in the world last year, but remains pretty iffy on some human rights issues, proving that there's some truth in the old Beatles lyric: "I don't care too much for money / Money can't buy me fair treatment of Asian migrant laborers." The capital, Doha, is home to the Al Jazeera news network. Seriously, I swear to God it is. Why would I make that up? Fine, don't believe me? Look it up. See? It says so right there on Wikipedia. Honestly, I don't know why you wouldn't just trust me on that one.

Qatar is slated to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup for reasons that completely elude everyone.

Portugal

Portugal is a country located in southwestern Europe on the part of the Iberian Peninsula that Spain didn't want. For many years, the area which we now know as Portugal was just a place that a bunch of conquering tribes with dumb haircuts and funny languages had stomped over so that they could look at the ocean without having to be in France at the same time. At some point in what most people would probably consider to be history, the area which is now Portugal was conquered by the Moors. The Moors were pretty Muslimy, which didn't sit well with the more Catholicky crowd of dudes that eventually founded the first Portugal™ in 868 after a certain amount of unpleasantness. Over time, Portugal grew to become one of the most powerful countries in the world. That fell off pretty sharply, like, 300 years ago, but some Portuguese people are probably still proud of it, and I think that's adorable. On the upside, Portugal did manage to spread the language of Portuguese to Brazil, ultimately making South America more confusing than it really needed to be. The capital is Lisbon, if you catch my drift. I don't know what I meant by that.

Soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo is Portugal's most famous douchebag, but most likely not its biggest.

Poland

Poland is a country in central Europe. Due to its location between Russia and Germany, two countries that have never had a great deal of impulse control, Poland has historically had a really difficult time not being a part of Germany or Russia. The Polish people, who you're apparently not supposed to call Polacks (but whenever possible, I do anyway) are the subject of a series of jokes that nobody thinks are funny anymore, the punchlines of which are about how Polacks (Yeah, I said it. What?) are stupid. One example of a stupid Polack (I said it again!) is Nicolaus Copernicus, who knew stuff about space that no one had ever known before, but only because he was born in the 15th century and nobody knew anything about space then. Even I know more about space than that guy, and I'm technically not even a scientist (Author's Note: Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" is available on Netflix Instant). The Polish language is notable for sounding more like the noise a person makes when he or she vomits than any other language except for maybe Hungarian, but does really Hungarian count anyway? It probably does.

Here is a buffalo-type thing that apparently lives in Poland.

Philippines

The Philippines (named for famed murderer/record producer Phil Spector) is an island nation located in the western Pacific Ocean. The country is comprised of 7107 separate islands, but remember you guys, it's quality, not quantity. If you want to see a whole lot of Filipinos hanging out in one place, your best bet is Luzon, the archipelago's largest, populous-est and [another superlative] island, located 250 kilometers from Taiwan across the Luzon Strait (which Wikipedia describes as "an important strait," but frankly I don't see it). Luzon is the location of Manila, the capital of the Philippines and the center of the 11th-largest metropolitan area in the world ("Bigger than Kolkata!" "What's Kolkata?" "It's in India!"). Filipinos speak way too many different languages, but the most popular is Tagalog, which I haven't researched, but I think is kind of like when you imitate Spanish by just speaking English while doing a really terrible, vaguely racist Spanish accent. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can just speak any language and Filipinos will be able to understand you as long as you're doing your best Antonio Banderas impression. At the very least, they might think it's funny.

These particular Filipinos will probably not be amused by your Antonio Banderas impression (unless it's really good).

Peru

Peru is an outrageous place in South America where people used to live in stone cities on top of mountains because they hated it when anything was convenient. The Inca civilization, as seen in the film "The Emperor's New Groove" (that was Inca, right?), was having what I would characterize based on my research as a pretty marvelous time up until the early 16th century, when they were conquistadored pretty heavily by Francisco Pizarro, a Spanish guy with a weird hat and a creepy beard. Peru achieved independence in 1821 and I think that's terrific. I've always liked Peru because people from there are called "Peruvians" and I like to call them "Pe-groove-ians" (Author's Note: This is merely an obnoxious nickname and not in any way a slur of the Peruvian people. Some of my best friends are Peruvians. Five of them are. I have five Peruvian best friends.). Lima, the capital, is home to over seven million residents. Wow! That's more than Peoria, Buffalo and Sacramento combined!

Nice to look at, but I wouldn't wanna live there.

Paraguay

Paraguay (Author's Note: I am furious with myself for using that "Pa-'poo'-a" joke on the last entry because now I can't make a joke about "Para-GAY" which would be even more hilarious) is a landlocked South American nation which has, due to its central position within the continent, been nicknamed "The Heart of America." Anatomically speaking, I think "The Appendix of America" would be more accurate, but that of course carries all sorts of other connotations, and I would prefer not to recommend a Paraguectomy until all the facts are in. Wow. I've already filled pretty much all the space I wanted to without ever actually saying anything about the country in question. The capital is Asunción. There. Now you've learned something.

Asunción, seen here in what appears to be a screenshot from some obscure Paraguayan "Cloverfield" spinoff.

Papua New Guinea

Papua (more like Pa-"poo"-a, am I right? Ladies?) New Guinea is a country occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, which is located in Oceania and, oddly, nowhere near regular Guinea. New Guinea is thought to be one of the first landmasses on which humans lived after Africa and Eurasia, with archaeologists having discovered the remains of people who were trundling about the island more than 50,000 years ago (but don't do much trundling anymore [because they're dead]). Papua New Guinea is a very poor country, with most of its population making way less money than my dad does. 82% of the Papua New Guinean population lives outside of its urban centers and gets by on whatever Papua New Guinean crops they can coax out of the Papua New Guinean soil. Papua New Guinea is located right on the edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire (insert unfunny pun about buttholes) and is frequently hit by earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as being made almost entirely out of volcanoes; crippling poverty and near-constant natural disasters go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Mount Tarvurvur: Jelly, for the purposes of this simile.