My correspondence with His Majesty

This morning I had to go to a PITA class (that's Preparing International TAs) for the story I'm working on about foreign TAs who have trouble speaking English and the problems it creates. Emily pointed out the chief contradiction in my story when she heard about it: "If they can't speak English, how are you going to interview them?" Well, fortunately they do speak English, and pretty good, uh, English at that. But the class is obviously taught in very SLOOOOOOOOW and clear English so they can understand what their teacher is saying. I was waiting outside the door near the end of class, and since the teacher was speaking so loud I could hear everything was saying. Which was, basically warning them about me.

"A reeeeePORTER is going to be coming"
"You donnnnnnn't HAVE to TALK to him"
"He'll put what you SAAAAYY in the NEWSSSSPAPER"
"He might try to make you sound DUUUUUUUUMB"

Like, right. She even had me on the syllabus for the day. But two of them agreed to talk to me. One was really nice -- he went to college (in Beijing) about five minutes walking distance from my school. Purdy cool.

But the highlight of my day, by far, was my correspondence with the King of the great nation of Sealand. Never heard of it? Well, you can read the Wikipedia article if ya want. In fact, here's a picture of this momentous monument to Lady Liberty's labors:

So basically, yeah, it's some crazy guy who's had control of an old British military fortress for the past thirty years and declared himself King (or, sorry, Crown Prince). It's crazy shit. I mean, it's in the English Channel, but the British just let him be there -- apparently, when he "founded" it, it was in international waters. He fires at approaching ships, he's had a terrorist takeover and recapture that brought the German and Belgian governments to send diplomats, he issues stamps and coins and passports and whatnot, and has a pirate Internet Service Provider run off of it. Crazy stuff.

So I think His Majesty sounds like a cool enough guy, so I decided, hey, why not ingratiate myself with some royalty. So I sent him the following post card today:





So with any luck, within a month or so, I should be receiving a reply from my dear friend, His Majesty Prince Roy of Sealand. And THEN who'll be cool, huh?