Take a generous helping of random opinions from diplomats around the world. To prepare this, send reasonably competent individuals to each country and marinate them in the local cultures for a few months. Be careful not to let them sit too long in the marinade or the local spices may overpower the flavor.
When I was a boy in the Iowa cornfields (actually we lived in a house), the making of fried chicken happened with blissful regularity. My sister and I would be whisked from kitchen to kitchen to consume fried chicken. I have a distinct recollection of telling Lula that her chicken tasted better than the Colonel's.
Immortality achieved.
With this as a background, I must admit that since those bucolic days of yesteryear until only very recently, I had not paid a single visit on Colonel Sanders (now a license rather than a name) or Kentucky Fried Chicken (as we once knew it, now a mere abbreviation, KFC). During these more than 30 intervening years, this purveyor of extra crispy and coleslaw was off my Fast Food Radar (which, by the way makes, the Hubble Space Telescope look like a Kinder egg sneak-a-scope).
And then the Colonel came to Serbia.
The Serbian prime minister told AmCham this last week, so it MUST be true. Maybe the post-crisis period started on that morning and I was just too sleepy to notice.
Up until recently, we had only been in the POST-TRANSITION. We would use the word post-transition because it would indicate that there is still a little clutter lying around in the corners from the transition period. In fact, until it is all clear up, we might say that we are actually still in the transition but we have been so many years in transit that post-transition feels better. Maybe this is the pre-post-transition. Likewise the crisis. Pre-post-pre-crisis.
In the fall, when we gain an hour moving back into normal time, most of us use it to sleep. Either that, or we get up artificially early and say to ourselves that we have a much longer day in which to be Productive! But the change usually happens on Sunday so the extra hour is generally used in idleness...
On the other Reusch-gloved hand, however, nothing unites us with our seemingly disinterested neighbors, distracted fellow Underground riders, and dyspeptic shopkeepers than being au fait on the latest World Cup babble.
Today, Mr. Caesar would be surrounded by a coterie of armed guards in dark glasses. He would probably not be walking around the forum unprotected and in a bed-sheet all by himself. He might not even talk to Messrs. Brutus, Casca, and Tillius directly, but rather have his people set up discussions (especially as the pretext was a petition which Tillius Cimber wanted to conference about on his exiled brother).
After all, once we elect a parliament and they choose a government, the entertainment values drop rather dramatically in a politically stable environment. During the pre-election period, it is exciting. We get promises, wild accusations, insults, mud-slinging, and the very best of the Human Condition under pressure. But then the votes are counted (and recounted and contested), the names are read out and after we have laughed and cried and jumped for joy and sunk into despair, and we just have to get back to work and hope RTS and B92 come up with something equally entertaining for us to watch.