kingginger

The Kitchen

A good production at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

A day in a very busy London restaurant kitchen. Having two thousand 'covers' to deal with in a day is eek on its own, even with a break between lunch and dinner sittings, before you get the tensions between the different characters. The note on the Central Tickets listing mentioned that this hasn't been seen much since its 1959 premiere. Apart from some of the content - the female parts are all noticeably smaller than almost all of the male ones, for example - one big reason for this is the cast size: twenty eight speaking parts. Only the 18 third year acting students got photos in the A4 programme! As well as that and their name, they just got their Spotlight reference number so you can look them up. The second year ones just got their names.

I could have saved £4 by just saying I'd booked via the site: there were no actual tickets or seat reservations.

Sophie's Surprise Party

Another Central Tickets find - it'd been at the paid Fringe this year and has probably had a few minutes and definitely, on early evening shows, an interval added. Based on the conceit that it's the thing in the title, it's actually a cabaret of uniformly excellent acrobatic / circus skills acts. Someone from the front row gets picked to be 'Sophie', but sadly it wasn't me. Towards the end Sophie gets to pick which of two cast members a third should 'go home' with. Sadly (again) this Sophie didn't say both of them :) and I suspect that if they did, they would be pushed to pick one: the loser then does something.

At the very end, they said something about tagging them in photos and videos: no-one had said you could take them! I would have shot much of it, except that most of the time I was too busy applauding. And wondering who deserves it more: the performer who falls straight down head first about 4m several times or the performer who catches them every time?

Highly recommended, particularly at the £15 I paid.

The Founding Meeting for the pan-Europe organisation Bi+ Europe saw almost everyone agree about almost everything. Yay! There's some legal work to do, but it should start up in April next year.

What were the main disagreements? There were five things that more than a couple of people voted against. Not in the order they were in the draft documents, they were...

Voting System ( Read more... )

Non-bi+ members of the board ( Read more... )

Extra vote ( Read more... )

Russia / Belarus ( Read more... )

Definition of bi+ ( Read more... )

Again, thanks to some very deft work during the entire process before and during the meeting, none of these led to shouting matches, and I don't think anyone went away going 'Well, that vote went the wrong way, I'm not going to take any further part...'

Thanks once again to Governance Leader Soudah, Governance Analyst Demet, and polishing sessions chair Darienne for that work.

1. I have done STV votes by hand in Student Union elections in the early 1980s. It is doable; you just don't want to have to do it, and it was the one reason I was glad that turnouts tended to be low in the elections in question.

2. In small elections, ties are rare in STV but can happen. In that case, it can make a difference how high you put someone even without the vote being 'transferred' because there are still people in the running above them. I once won a place on the Liberal Party's Federal Executive because I'd put the person I'd tied with third on my list of preferences, and they'd put me second.

3. Following the formation of a coalition government in the UK in 2010, there was a referendum on adopting AV. It's not a good way of electing a Parliament, but it's better than simple plurality, known in the UK as 'first past the post' even though the 'post' isn't fixed... It wasn't just most of the two largest parties campaigning against it that meant I knew it would lose, it was when the Electoral Commission published the booklet on it that went to everyone and managed to make 'put your choices in order and if your current preferred choice is last, we use your next one, until someone gets over 50% of the votes' so complicated that I could barely understand WTF they were saying.

Here, there was a tiny bit more detail on how STV works than I thought was strictly necessary, but I am not crying foul...

4. Note it doesn't matter what the second preference of the people who voted for 'one or two' is, or even if they had one or not: the outcome of 'none' vs 'minority' is not going to affect its two wins.

5. Five produced a (different) single clear winner and another produced a two-way tie. As well as simple plurality, AV, and Condorcet, there's the French Presidential style (if no-one gets a majority, the top two go into a runoff), Borda (you allot more points to people's first choices than their second etc and see who has the most overall), and approval voting, the one that produced the tie (you can vote for as many as you like, highest one wins). That last one was added by the later book, I think.

At some point, I'm absolutely going to put the table of votes and the various results on a t-shirt...

6. Well this one, anyway.

7. The only possible exception I can think of is Albania, whose horrific situation was more home-grown / China's. And we didn't have anyone saying they were from there.