Spam and West Ham

Again, I have fallen behind on my blogging. So here's a smattering of events from the past few weeks.

Apryll and I finally made it over to Speakers Corner, an area of Hyde Park where people are encouraged to speak their mind. The Speakers (mostly crazies with strange, and often religious, agendas) bring their own soapboxes (or ladders, whatever they can stand on) and sermonize the crowds. The spectators roam from speaker to speaker, jeering and contradicting. Some of the spectators and speakers are even drunk, which makes things a little more interesting. When we were there the speakers included: a short, drunk misogynist; two elderly members of the British Socialist Party, an atheist who took spiritual cues from his four-month-old son; a Jewish guy who stood on an eight-foot ladder and sang loudly; a woman in a pretty pink dress who urged foreigners to go back to their home countries for religious reasons; a guy with frazzled hair and a signboard that read "I know everything."

On Wednesday I went to a lecture by Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who oversaw the Stanford Prison Experiment. He was promoting his new book, "The Lucifer Effect," which deals with why good people do evil things. The focus of the lecture was on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Zimbardo was an expert witness for one of the accused soldiers who was eventually convicted and sentenced to something like 10 years for his role. Zimbardo had some interesting arguments that didn't entirely convince me. He definitely placed more emphasis on how the environment and situations affect people's actions than the people themselves.

That night was perhaps the best of my semester. For my birthday, I got tickets to the West Ham United v. Chelsea football game. I'm sure you all keep up with English football, so you'll remember that Chelsea is the defending premier league champion and had secured a spot in this season's championship game. They're also the Yankees of English soccer -- they have so much money they can buy whoever they want, resulting in an incredibly impressive roster. If you look at their starting line-up for a given game, you'll see all the stars from last year's World Cup. West Ham, on the other hand, is not faring so well this season. They're in danger of being relegated to the lower league (the three teams that finish in the bottom of the premier league each year get bumped down). Normally, I wouldn't consider myself necessarily a supporter of either team, but for the night I was a West Ham fan (because they game was at their stadium). I wore their colors and a scarf to show my support, because I didn't know any of the terrace songs. The fans sing throughout the entire game and most of the songs have little to do with football. Most cheers are also very rude. West Ham's main chant, which is sometimes considered the best terrace song in the league, is below:

I'm forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high,
Nearly reach the sky,
And like my dreams,
They fade and die,
Fortunes always hiding,
I looked everywhere,
I'm forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.

But despite the incredible atmosphere and hilarious fans (one of my favorite aspects was seeing how much West Ham fans hate Lampard, one of Chelsea's players), West Ham lost the game, 1-4. As a hammer support, I was outwardly disappointed. But inwardly, I was overjoyed at seeing Didier Drogba score a goal and just seeing the rest of the team on the field.

On Saturday I went with the school to Brighton, which is on the southern coast of England. The weather was beautiful and we spent most of our time there laying on the beach. Other than that, we checked out the eastern-inspired Brighton Pavilion, which was once a royal residence. Also, we walked along the pier and visited a very funky market street.

Today was St. George's Day, England's national holiday. You know how English people are a little nutty.... They decided to celebrate by showing British comedy on a huge screen in Trafalgar Square all day and top it off with a world record attempt. I went down to the square tonight after my history class, where London was trying to beat the record for the largest coconut orchestra, inspired by Monty Python's Spamalot. Over 4,000 people registered and were given coconut halves, which we were given detailed instructions how to play. After thirty minutes of rehearsal with the cast of the musical and Monty Python's own Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, the crowd coconutted along to "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" and broke the record. It had been previously set by New Yorkers, with a paltry 2,000 participants. After the record-breaking, they showed Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the unedited version, they promised) on the big screen.

After classes end this week, I'll be taking a day trip to Warwick castle and a brief trip to Cardiff, Wales the next day.