More cheese

Some Czech-related news. Czechs in the news in fact. Not just the country, which seems to have become the location for all manner of conferences (it was in Prague that they decided a couple of months ago that Pluto was no longer a planet). The new Miss. World has been crowned, and she (for it is still a she) is a Czech student by the name of Tat'ana Kucharova. Apparently she likes sports, her pets and "listening to music with a nice melody". It seems her favorite food is chicken, rather than the traditional Czech dish of fried cheese with tartar sauce and some potatoes. Which probably helped her no end in her quest for world beauty domination.

Interestingly, last month Warsaw's conservative administration altered a poster advertising the contest with a discreet white scarf after deciding it was too racy since it depicted a mermaid with an artistic "wardrobe malfunction". Fortunately, Ms. Kucharova and her fellow candidates appear to have avoided that hazard. No one ended up in Narnia or anything.

In another beauty competition mercifully unlikely to feature a "wardrobe malfunction" but still featuring persons of Czech origin, posters are up everywhere for elections to the senate. Now I only have the foggiest idea of Czech electoral procedures, so I'm not going to dwell on these here. In brief, things are a bit iffy, constitution-wise. But frankly, looking at these characters' faces on the way to work doesn't give me huge faith in the imminent future.

None of them really look as if they like animals very much at all, even the one chap who resembles an aerodynamic stoat with a little grey moustache. There's another truly terrifying woman who greets me with a manic grin and hugely-shadowed eyes from the lamp-post by the metro entrance. And then there are also a couple of other likely lads who look as if they enjoy regular tasty snacks of fried cheese with extra sauce much more than Ms. Kucharova.

Of course, many would argue that elections are fought on policies, not potato consumption. But funnily enough there aren't many actual words on these posters.