Election Day for Monster Raving Loonies

It's Election Day here in Britain. And quite the fascinating election it has proved to be.  The nation's first televised debates.  The Lib Dems mount a spirited (and serious!) third-party challenge to Labour and the Tories for the first time in decades.  Their leader, Nick Clegg, says that his favorite author is Samuel Beckett, winning from me affection and a vague sense of unease.  (How could you not respect the intellectual complexity of that choice?  How could you not be troubled by the idea of a leader who is inspired by these lines from Worstward Ho!: "Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter. Try again. Fail again.  Fail better"?  Or maybe that statement is the essence of realistic liberalism. I say this as a progressive, you understand.)

Watching the election coverage the other night, D and I are struck by a candidate running under the aegis of the "Official Monster Raving Loony Party."  It had to be investigated.  And indeed, investigation only deepens the party's allure.

Then, yesterday, overheard in the Reform Club:

"Might go into the wee hours tomorrow."
"Yes."
[Pause.]
"I'm voting Monster Raving Loony, you know."
"Ha ha! Well, that's quite a surprise!"
"Well, its just another way of saying 'none of the above.'  Besides, our candidate is rather sensible.  He was a prison governor; now he coaches the British Rifle team."
"Ah well, that's all right then."

Watching Duke in China

Those of you who have been reading Sycorax Pine for some time, or who know me personally, or who have (ahem) taken any one of my classes during basketball season, must know by now how I feel about Duke. 

I am sure it is a very fine institution in many ways, but it is the arch-rival of my beloved alma mater, the University of North Carolina (go Tar Heels!).  Thus I can't help but characterize it as the embodiment of all that is wicked in this world.  And there is nothing that makes me happier than watching one of the two annual Carolina-Duke games with my Blue Devil friends. 

One of these friends, the estimable Prof. JG, sent me this tremendously entertaining article by a Duke alum about the experience of watching the NCAA Championship in a sports bar in Beijing, where the regulars are great devotees of the sport of basketball, but not yet fully literate in the political and social nuances of college basketball fandom:

With six minutes left in the first, Jon Scheyer hits a three-pointer to put Duke up by four. The Duke fans let out some Cameron-Indoor-style enthusiasm. The Butler fans redouble their efforts to win converts. “You have to hate Duke,” exclaims one. “Coach K looks like a rat.” This critique is difficult to understand since the word for “mouse” and “rat” are the same in Chinese. Additionally, it is the mouse/rat’s cunning that allowed it to become the first animal in the Chinese zodiac. “Yes,” one of Zhang’s companions agrees, “the Team USA coach is very clever and excellent.”

Fans of each side appeal to the widespread Chinese respect for academic achievement, with Duke coming out a bit ahead because of their higher rankings across a variety of fields.  As the game (sigh) winds down to a (grr) Duke victory, the author turns to the man sitting next to him:

     “What did you think of the game?” I ask Zhang, who has been silent and transfixed for the past 20 minutes.
     “It was very interesting. I think the Duke University shall be my favorite team alongside Yao Ming’s Houston Rockets.”
     “Wonderful,” I reply.
     “I know that Michael Jordan is also from the state of North Carolina. Was he a student-athlete at the Duke University?”
     “No, he went to UNC. The University of North Carolina.”
     “I see.”
     Zhang pauses. “Duke will be my second favorite team.”

The Hairy Seed Cathedral

D turned to me this morning and said, "Here's a sentence you don't hear everyday: 'As we expect buildings neither to be hairy nor in motion, these qualities give it a certain charm.'"

As it turns out, he was reading a Guardian article on the British Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, a building which most closely resembles an extremely frightened hedgehog. (If this highly literal description has peaked your interest, click on the link to the article for a picture.) 

Despite the author's virulent skepticism of expositions in general ("All of these journalists are even grumpier than me.  They hate everything" - D.), which he expresses as a wish that "expos and world fairs would lie down and die," his description of the pavilion itself is unabashedly affectionate.  Let me leave you with this:

The hairy thing sits on an uneven plane something like crumpled paper, to symbolise, in the gushy rhetoric of expos, a just-unwrapped gift from Britain to China. [...]

A tour around the site takes visitors past a series of installations themed on the role of nature in British society, culminating in the interior of the hairy cube/dandelion/hedgehog.  Here the other ends of the wands form a glowing fuzz, and the end of each wand entraps rare seeds, 217,300 in all, from Kew Garden's Millennium Seed Bank project which aims to preserve the world's most endandered seeds.  Heatherwick [the pavilion's designer] calls this space the "seed cathedral" [...]