I take my hat off, without reserve and sincerely, to Peppi Azzopardi, Lou Bondì and their colleagues for breaking the million liri mark and collecting all that lovely dosh for the very needy causes they espoused. It is to their credit that they did this and they deserve every plaudit.

It is much less to the credit of Catholic Malta that, in order for this to be achieved, the whole thing had to be nothing more and nothing less than a lottery. The entertainment provided was, to be fair, mediocre at best and served only to fill in the gaps between the lotteries. It is my belief that if there hadn't been the lotteries, not even a 10th of the money would have been collected, and while the fact that all that money was collected goes to the credit side of Peppi and Co's ledger when the balance is brought to account, it is to our collective debit that this had to happen because we were tempted by the prizes.

In the UK, many, many millions of pounds are collected for kids in need by people doing silly things and making total fools of themselves without a penny being gambled for and without prizes being up for grabs. Here, not one of the prize winners (and the prizes were excellent) even thought it might be a good wheeze, after they won, to put their hands into their pockets and hand over a substantial cheque in return for getting their hands on a shiny new motor car or bathroom or kitchen or whatever.

I hope Where's Everybody? do it again next year and make even more money for their causes - the end justifies the means and then some. I wish, but I am realistic enough to know that it will not be the case, that they would be able to do it without riding on the avariciousness and - to put it bluntly - selfishness, of the Maltese.

I suppose that in a country where 20,000 dead in Iran don't even get a mention in the bidding prayers at the Mass I was attending in Sliema last Sunday, this is not surprising.

And while on the subject

Segueing (horrid word but it seems to exist according to my spell-check) from my crack on religion brings me to a point I really feel I have to make.

On Monday evening (after a good nosh with mates at Bousuki (forgive the spelling), where I am glad to say that high standards are kept even in this season of rook-the-customer-for-food), I was having a little channel surf before nodding off and I came across a story about how the Israelis were slicing Palestine in half in the interests of security and how this was causing all manner of hardship to the Palestinians. This prompted me to having to write this, I believe on behalf of the civilised world, to the bigots, religious and otherwise, who infest this planet.

What I want to say is this: would you please keep your petty religious/territorial strife to yourselves? I don't care that the Israelis want to protect themselves from the Palestinians and I don't care that the Palestinians want somewhere to live. I don't care that the Muslims feel put down and I don't care that the Jews feel threatened. Equally, I don't care that the Catholics in Northern Ireland feel that they are entitled to kill people or that the Protestants want to do the same. On the same basis, I don't give a toss that the Pakistanis and the Indians have some sort of beef between themselves about some god-forsaken chunk of mountain passes.

I could go on and on about the places and disputes that I don't give a cotton-picking darn about any more.

I do, however, care that my own personal safety is threatened by all these factions and sects that think that their flipping piece of sand or jungle or mountain is more important than anything else in the world. If the Jews and the Arabs and the Micks and the Prods and the Afghans and the Pakistanis and the Indians and the Blacks and the Whites and the Browns and whoever else can't live together, then can they please do me a favour and wipe themselves off the face of the earth once and for all, without inconveniencing or threatening me any more?

Read my lips: I don't care. I don't care about your religion, I don't care about your colour and I don't care about your politics. You and your neighbour have as much right to be here as I do and if you don't recognise that, then that's your problem, not mine.

Beagle bungles

What a blinking waste of money. That Martian probe, I mean, the one that seems to have been put together by a loony English inventor using a squeezy bottle and a couple of strips of plasticene.

OK, fine, before things work there are times when they don't, but was it really necessary to waste so many millions of pounds chucking something at Mars that seems to have been doomed to failure from the outset?

Wouldn't the money have been better employed, on a basis of priorities, keeping the fundamentalists of all hues from each other's throats (see above) and then getting on with going into space when we've sorted ourselves out down here?

Just asking.

Parmalater

You will have read about the collapse of the Parmalat empire in Italy, where it seems that some nasty capitalist has seen fit to divert to his own benefit some millions of euros.

These things seem to happen from time to time.

What also seems to happen is that people give in to the temptation to grab a free ride on stories such as this. My old friend John Attard Montalto, who isn't usually one to grab a cheap ride, succumbed this week, I can only hope out of a surfeit of holiday cheer.

According to the dear fellow, when he was a minister during Doctor Alfred Sant's blip, the government at the time declined to allow Parmalat into Malta. Precisely why was not made clear in Dr AM's statement, though cynics such as I will be forgiven for feeling that he was trying to give us the impression that the Labour government of the time was prescient enough to see that Parmalat was a rotten apple.

All I can say to this, if my impression is correct, is "Pull the other one, John". Back in 1996/97, if things were that clearly rotten, then people would have noticed - this is seven years later, for Heaven's sake, so please don't try to make us think you were such a prophet.

And while on the subject of Parmalat, I am informed that there are no offshore companies registered in Malta that are connected with them and that there is no evidence that connects the companies that do exist in Malta (and are connected with Parmalat) with any financial shenanigans.

Not that this is important, but it says much for the so-called stories that Joe Mifsud and his investigative colleagues down Super One way came up with last week.

What's in store

We are on the cusp of the New Year (if a cusp is what you can be on for a new year) and one has to wonder what's in store for us.

Joining the EU is one thing that's definitely looming, as are the elections for the European parliament.

This promises to be some fun, though I reiterate the point I made some weeks ago that it might be a good idea if the parties were to eschew the temptation to turn this into the usual "We are the only good guys, the others are all crooks" farce that we face whenever we are called to the polls.

Whatever, I hope you have a good one.

As a service to football

As a service to football, I am reproducing hereunder a web-site for the delectation of the masses...

http://www.bigbadboss.co.uk/blatter.htm

Enjoy it