After the pumpkins are grown and weighed at one of the over 100 Great Pumpkin Commonwealth sanctioned contests all over the world, they are usually used as displays outside stores to attract customers, says Wolf.
Meanwhile, protest strengthened on several fronts: a movement for Barotse separatism gained support in the Western province; the Roman Catholic Church (of which the president was a devoted member) had published in January a pastoral letter that called for the repeal of the Public Order Act; and opposition leaders called on the Commonwealth to sanction their government for human rights abuses.
Outsiders, notably Australia, New Zealand and the wider Commonwealth, should use sanctions to pressure the Fijians to reach a democratic solution.
The independent South Australian senator Nick Xenophon said Australia should lead a coalition of Commonwealth countries in imposing sanctions on Malaysia.
"People tend to fall into giant pumpkin growing," Andy Wolf, president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that sanctions weigh-ins and supports growers, says over the phone.
He invoked a transcendent morality to sanction a constitutional commonwealth, but he detested abstract political theories in whose name society is likely to be vivisected.
Bruce calculated that the states would not give up their powers, and thus the move was one designed to sanction the end of Commonwealth arbitration.
Such a commonwealth has no intrinsic supernatural or moral sanction: it derives its original authority from the people and can command loyalty only so long as it succeeds in keeping the peace.
Nigeria was expelled from the Commonwealth the next day, and limp sanctions were imposed on it.Abacha persecuted many of Nigeria's most famous offspring.
He was socially conservative and eager to give a new philosophical sanction to a hierarchical, if businesslike, commonwealth in which family authority was most important.
