The eyes, say the old saw, are the windows to the soul. Bollocks, says Steve Braunias, who claims to have found a clearer view. Braunias has a day job writing for The New Zealand Herald. For the last two election cycles, he has interviewed big cheese politicians over an ostensibly friendly game of ping-pong. (Relax, "table tennis" Nazis-- if you see any of his matches, you'd be happy for them to be lumped under the big tent of recreational "ping-pong" and not entered as evidence in the argument for the athleticism of table tennis in the kangaroo court of public opinion.) At any rate, many politicians take the bait, figuring that the humanizing publicity will help boost their percentages in the polls. Others have ducked the challenge, in one case leading Braunias to reply, "What I have established from our brief correspondence is that you're a chicken." While the mere request for an interview may provide Braunias with preliminary observations on chickens posing as politicians and other abundant fauna, it is the ping-pong interview itself which lures the unwitting specimens to lay themselves bare on the 9'X5' examining table. "I see it as an opportunity to study their character and their nerve at close quarters," writes Braunias. "Each game was actually a psychological experiment based on my conviction that the noble art of table tennis illustrates essential and sometimes revealing truths about everyone who plays it... the laboratory of the table tennis table measures virtues such as quick thinking and the will to win at all costs, and failings such as emotional instability and lack of moral fibre," he elaborates. "It's like an X-ray of the person." So what does this high-powered imaging tool reveal when turned on the mad social scientist conducting the experiment? "I'm a bad loser and even sorer winner," he candidly admits. Like most windows, the true window to the soul does have a rectangular form. It is not, however, a vertical installation of glass in a wall but a horizontal surface only 30 inches tall. In fact, the ping-pong table would make an ideal habitat for chickens, were they not by their very nature too timid to try.

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