Short sited

In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle wrote De Artibus Animalium. Inter alia, he asserted that the eyes of flies were made up of a hard substance, and they were continuously passing their front legs over them in order to clear away any obstructions to their already poor eyesight.

Humans do tend to be myopic too, sometimes, and not only when they are searching for spectacles perched atop their heads like Alice bands.

Some time ago, Charles Xuereb wrote to this paper purportedly to answer my query as to why Is-Salib tal-Fidda was no longer being broadcast on Super One TV.

Actually, what he gave was merely information to the effect that the rest of the episodes were being canned 'as planned', and that Super One intended to repeat the first series come summer. This did not answer my original question at all. Indeed, for quite some time afterwards, Teletext insisted that the series was still a part of the schedule.

Nobody answered, either, my question about what had happened to the prizes for which no doubt thousands of viewers had snipped coupons from l-Antenna and Gwida, that were to be given from Max+.

This is yet another facet of the attitude some people in the media adopt when addressing the Great Unwashed. Only the other day, a female newspaper commentator doing her best to copy Dolores Cristina, but dismally failing, told us that the press had given us an 'overdose' of EU - and promptly went on to do her bit in this over-saturation scenario.

And then, of course, there is the Hon. Evarist Bartolo, whom the bus driver, last Wednesday morning, no doubt impressed with the photograph appearing on the front page of this newspaper's sister paper dated Friday 7th, decided was the sine qua non to start the darg. He found it somewhat amusing that the selfsame people who signed a petition for Carnival to become, as it were, a movable feast (a picnic?) were also signatories of an appeal to have it remain wedged in between relevant parts of the liturgical calendar.

I wonder what he would have said if the We are the world, we are for Europe (oops, wrong title, correct scenario and motif though) chorale were to have appeared in the All Together Now, No, Nein, Le version.

The other day my lettuce came wrapped in a few pages from Bella magazine dated September 26, l992. One of the features mentioned an engineer from Bournemouth called Tony Emery, and went on to tell us about his idea of an excellent night in with a television. Not for him the mundane ogling at the occupants of a goldfish bowl.

Excellent viewing, to him, consisted of staring at a test card - something that young people born to the advent of round-the-clock television may not even be aware once existed. At the time, Mr Emery was 42, and he stated that this fascination, which he had had since age four, was partly due to the fact that a test card was "a work of art, brilliantly designed to enable technicians to adjust television sets to perfection." He further described them as "wonderfully relaxing".

When teletext pages replaced the test cards, the man was not fazed; he had taped them, possibly for viewing at the annual convention that at the time was attended by around 70 like-minded aficionados.

Come to think of it, with all the pro- and anti-European Union faces making the rounds of the local stations, the whole rigmarole does tend to look like a test card possessed of static, with the background music reduced to disturbance in the ether.

I'd walk a mile for a []; More doctors smoke [] than any other brand of cigarettes; the box is gold, the pleasure's priceless; it's the ten-minute smoke for intelligent folk.

All these slogans were parts of the advertising 'package' of cigarettes when I was a child. For 30 years now, the Beeb has forbidden cigarette advertising ion television, and as from last Friday, the ban has widened to include other sections of the media too.

Even slick advertisements that get the messages across without even mentioning the name of the product (how about the idiom "it's not over until the fat lady sings" where said buxom woman has a tear in her purple velvet gown?) will now not be allowed to appear in the printed media.

So far, we get "cigarettes suck the life put of you" infomercials on local television; how well will the administrations of certain publications take to a similar campaign, locally, especially when the revenue from the tobacco industry is always there, and they have to go out and beg crumbs of the advertising cake because of the competition?

And apparently, this ban will help us decide not to smoke, just as the aforementioned rackets will tell us where to tick come the Referendum, and possibly the Elections (my capitals).

It's not that long ago that Martina Navratilova wore her brand-name tennis outfit on the courts, and that cigarette manufacturers were sponsoring sports events that would surely have been seen buy millions of television viewers besides those actually present.

The chances are that foreign (made in Malta?) magazines will find a niche in the British market, and that more actors in more films will be paid to smoke, possibly particular brands. It is also envisaged that cigarettes will appear oh-so-casually in advertisements for other products, such as the one that had married beer and ice cream some years ago.

We can also expect more merchandising items to be given out as freebies during television programmes, either for attendance as audience in shows, or as prizes for competitions; in this way people will not 'forget the name' of a product.

It was one of those mindless Saturday morning conversations at the supermarket checkout counter. The electricity supply was cut off [in parts of St Venera]when she started to sing. I know her grandfather; he was a goldsmith in Valletta when I was a kid. She was at the very top of the Xarabank newspaper montage of singers...

Quote of the week comes from Susan Sarandon, made in connection with the possibly impending war on Iraq: This is not Nintendo.