Unrelated, but does anyone have an idea why all of the countries appear in alphabetical order but then suddenly Spain jumps up in the middle of all the E-s? The UK follows soon after. All I could think of was Spain=Espana, but England definitely isn't the same as the UK..
This is the order they are defined in the source data (Natural Earth - Admin 0 countries), and it appears to be sorted by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code. Spain is ESP, United Kingdom is GB1.