Unforeseen Excitement Threatens Regional Cucumber Harvest

If you haven't heard, cucumber season has officially arrived in Hungary. Despite the name, cucumber season - or uborkaszezon as it is locally known - isn't really about cucumbers. It's actually about nothing, as in so little news that even serious newspapers are reduced to writing stories about how the cucumbers are coming along. Yet while at this time of summer cucumber season usually spreads to the entire region, for some reason it has been an utter failure in most of the countries surrounding Hungary, where all kinds of interesting, un-cucumbery things are taking place.

We start in the Czech Republic, where uborkaszezon is called okurková sézona, and a strange, almost American-style failed election has left many Bohemians and Moravians wondering who is supposed to be in control of the country. We're not talking one of those Hungarian-style situations where the losing party bitches about how the winning side's posters were unfairly convincing. Instead, due to the country's system of proportional representation, the June 2-3 election actually produced a genuine deadlock, with both of the major political groupings getting 100 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and President Václav Klaus being accused of unseemly meddling. Parliament has twice been unable to elect a chairman (the next vote is this Friday) and many are talking darkly of a protracted stand-off. It's almost enough to make you think that whoever gets the most votes in an election should be declared the winner. But that's just crazy talk.

Retro madness grips Slovakia: New Slovak PM Fico (bottom) and 80s icon Suggs. Oh, wait...

Meanwhile, over in Slovakia, what had been Central Europe's most admired reform government has just been replaced by an anti-market nationalist cabinet relying on support from a party led by a guy who has called Hungarians as "lumpen elements" and "murderers of the Slovaks," and who once not-so-obliquely threatened to have Budapest razed to the ground. And while many are saying they expect the country to return to the dark days of the mid-1990s, I think we may witness a reversion back to the even darker days of the 1980s. Because as reader D.H. pointed out to me, new Prime Minister Robert Fico not only bears an uncanny resemblance to Suggs, the former frontman of 80-era Ska-pop sensation Madness, but dresses just like him, right down to the overly-snug suit. So while we are worrying about the plight of our brethren up across the border, we'll be unable to get "Our House" out of our heads for the first time since 1985.

Speaking of murderers of Slovaks, a bizarre conflict recently broke out in Romania over a video game called Romanii In Spatiu ("Romanians In Space"). In the game, Romanians have taken control of the galaxy but are confronted by remnants of the former Hungary, who players have to blow away. Last week the game's developers announced that they had removed the zap-the-Magyar element of the game. While the media credited the intervention of human rights group with the decision, I reckon they just realized that once the game was officially released Hungary's armies of programming geeks would figure out a way to make the Romanian imperial cruisers fire into their own Dacian Death Star.

In other non-cucumber news, Austria got its first same-sex marriage under circumstances that make your normal same-sex marriage seem Victorian by comparison. As far as I can tell, what happened was that some guy married a girl and then had a sex change. Because the country has relatively liberal laws about transgendering, a judge allowed the husband/wife to change his/her official identity, while not dissolving the existing marriage. Strangest of all, the government is holding firm on its opposition to normal same-sex marriage, even though it might lead some lovelorn singles having not one but two sex changes just to be able to marry and divorce the person of their choice.

I agree...nothing strange going on here. Nooooo sir.

Finally, last Friday President Lech Kaczynski of Poland swore in his identical twin brother Jaroslaw as prime minister of Central Europe's largest country, leading to what is probably the first case in history of a nation with a head of state and a head of government both sharing exactly the same DNA. Despite its inevitable awkwardness, the unusual arrangement - which you might call "two heads are better than one, especially if they are the same" - is expected to lead to a greater coherence in government policy. Which is exactly what the country's agriculture-dependent economy needs, even if it leads to their worst sezon ogórkowy on record.