There's an infamous Frank Zappa quote that has a particularly strange formula for defining what makes a "real country:"

Every major industrialized nation has a beer (you can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline — it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer).

According to a 2014 Quote Investigator article, that's from 1989's "The Real Frank Zappa Book," written by Zappa himself and co-writer Peter Occhiogrosso.

With that quote in mind, Reddit user u/WhoOwnsMyBeer went through and mapped which countries fit Zappa's requirements and recommendations to be considered "real."

Key Findings:

• The US, UK, France, India, Israel and Russia are the only countries that fit all four criteria.

• Pakistan, China and North Korea have everything except an American football team. If you included soccer, this map would be very different.

• Due to the beer requirement, some countries in the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean and Oceania don't count. Somehow, it doesn't seem likely that Yemen, Iran or Saudi Arabia put much stock into the Zappa method.

Click to enlarge image

Via u/WhoOwnsMyBeer.

From the Digg archives: Frank Zappa Warning Us In 1986 That The Biggest Threat To America Was The Government Imposing Its Beliefs On Others Was Quite Prophetic.