Platform games

It had to happen. Intelligent dinosaurs, as featured in the trailers of Jurassic Park 3, tell us that the whole rigmarole is "not just a walk in the Park".

No wonder that the film Dogma, which had been promoted with the slogan Get touched by an angel, had CBS complaining that it suggested a link with their series because of the similarity with its name.

Another coincidental similarity in terminology, of course, occurred in The Two Towers episode of The Lord of the Rings. Indeed this was featured as a news item in several foreign bulletins; perhaps it was thought unpropitious to do so locally. Some of those interviewed had neither read the book nor seen the film so they assumed the two edifices stood side by side.

And the intrepid adventurer and his son, returning from an 80-day tour in a hot air balloon, return home bang on time, the wife and daughter have prepared... a teatime treat of their favourite biscuits. Not a bag of dirty laundry in sight; not even a whiff of a bubbling pot on the cooker.

The line between fiction and reality fades as fast as grammar and language lessons do from the brains of the people who are actually paid to educate and entertain us.

This week we had a football match with a rizultat fatali. Those of us who work in schools were wished well for our konfront mar-rutina normali. Listeners in general were told that since its inception, on a particular station, there has been muzika sabiha gejja n-naha taghkom. A head-on collision between two vehicles was described as being ras imb'ras.

And the news divisions of several stations persist in (i) using nicknames to give folk hero status to criminals and (ii) showing clips of plainclothes policemen going about their duties.

One of those obscure Sicilian stations that only occasionally provide other things besides inconsequentialities showed a feature - more likely an advertorial - about the left-handed Thomas Kincaid, the so-called Painter of Light, the most collected artist ever and the only one quoted on the American Stock Exchange.

His trademark glow-in-the-dark technique earns him over $150 million annually from the all-American paintings he sells, Roberto-style.

The cameramen, accidentally-on-purpose, caught Nicole Kidman raising her arms in glee, eyes wide open, as she sauntered down the street, having just left the offices of her lawyer after her divorce from Tom Cruise.

Zoom to her duet, appropriately named Something Stupid, in which Robbie Williams might also have been trying to prove something.

Then came the article in National Enquirer, dated December 10, which described the Cruise-Cruz wedding plans, and stated, inter alia, that the do was to be held "at the Bay Point Resort... overlooking Saint George's Bay..." placing it "near the historic capital of Valletta." Incidentally, the article also featured Ms Kidman's "children with Tom - Isabella and Connor".

Then Ms Kidman let slip in an interview some exquisitely chosen words, and the vanilla sky horizon immediately clouded over.

At least one section of the local media translated another article nearly verbatim, unto the allusion to the mythical Penelope's virtue.

It irks me that that certain reporters, presenters, and others who give their tongues and pens free rein in the local media (this includes those who are interviewed in vox-pops), think that they have the only copy of the only daily newspaper rolling off the only press on earth, and that they can fob us off with plagiarisms, exaggerations (not to say lies), and conjecture presented as fact.

In my other life, I came across a similar bit of reportage, at least three years out of date but given as current, actual fact, in a recent edition of L-Akwedott, wherein, also, a photograph was used without any consultation with the family concerned, let alone their permission.

Sometimes people stop me in the street and ask me questions that leave me stumped, for I would not have realised how many misconceptions about sundry things exist.

I was asked, this week, why I give coverage, on this page but not in this column, to certain programmes but not others; the answer is simple; those pieces are not mine.

I was also asked why Super One television has aborted Is-Salib tal-Fidda; but I do not know the answer to that one. I did leave my name and number with a young lady who said she was "fairly new", and another with a slightly foreign accent, but no one called back.

The (un)Digestive Biscuit Award this week is shared by two people. There was that opinionated chap in one of those interminable discussions who said something on the lines of "...if the majority of our youth is leaving school illiterate now, just imagine what it will be like once we become members of the European Union..." and the interviewee who at one point glanced upon his (non-winning) career in festivals, and said "...but then you know what festivals are like..."