I.M. Beck quote unquote

For various reasons not unconnected with inertia and ennui, we went nowhere last weekend, so those of you who only read the last bit of the column are going to be disappointed this week. You'll have to find your own ideas about where to shove food down your necks.

Precisely why these people only read the last bit of this erudite literary effort is not fully clear to me. When you get such well-crafted screeds of prose, peppered through and through with scintillating wit and wisdom, and then you don't bother to read it, you can only be called profligate.

There are those who might think that last Saturday's torpor was induced by feelings of prescient dread about the Fulham-Chelsea game that was upcoming on the Sunday, a game that the best team in England, and therefore the world, were destined to lose but this is a load of tosh, of course, since, in the first place, I am not blessed with the ability to forecast what should be foregone conclusions and, in the second place, losing to Fulham is no disgrace.

It's an act of neighbourly charity, rather, enabling the poorer relatives to reach out to a lifeline that will keep them in the Premiership.

So it was a night in front of the box to which I condemned myself and verily I do say unto you, don't emulate me.

And if you do, don't, at any cost watch the repeat of Mill-Mara ghall-Mara which is aired on Saturday night. It's a talk (and talk and talk) programme hosted by a legal gentleman who loves the medium of telly and the transient fame it affords, so I won't give him more by mentioning his name.

Why the programme, which is pretty dire, is called from the woman for the woman, escapes me, especially when, as last Saturday, the only guest was also male (not that he got much of a word in edgeways).

The point of other aspects of the show also escaped me.

I ask, without expecting to receive an answer, why, given the name of the programme, the set is adorned with three pictures of female nudes that are less artistic than they are erotic, not to say pornographic?

A second question relates to the subject matter: it was an important topic (speech difficulties) but was there a reason why it was being discussed in a programme that purports to be by women for women when there wasn't a woman to be seen (leaving aside the small point that there wasn't a woman to be seen apart from the models in the posters at the back of the set)?

Are we to assume that the programme maker believes that only women are interested in such subjects as the difficulties that afflict children? If so, shouldn't the NCPE (National Council for the Promotion of Equality) dedicate itself to dumping on him instead of wasting its time whining about chocolate bars?

Free to air

The debate about Melita Cable and the way they turn the tap off and on rumbles on.

The thing is, people are having a jolly good whine about how, when they switch their tellies (more precisely, their cable box) from some puerile discussion programme about phallic symbols or from a cynical tear-jerker of a vehicle for advertising to an Italian channel to watch a sporting event, they get the blue screen of death (to borrow an ominous phrase from Bill Gates) telling them that Melita aren't authorised to re-transmit the programme.

This inspires the more literate among the potential viewers of sport to take up their pen and slash at the company, generally pointing out that the Italian stations concerned are free to air.

The operative words, which seem to escape these folk, is that the stations are free to air but not, repeat not, free to re-transmit and Melita can only do what they are allowed to do.

One doesn't want to try to justify everything Melita does, naturally. The company wasn't all that concerned about the legality of their re-transmitting footy when they didn't have a nifty source of income in doing that little thing through a premium channel.

But Melita's past sins, venial or mortal as they may have been, and venal as their current attitude may be, do not help the whiners one iota, sadly for their aspiration to watch the World Cup and the Champions League and the Grands Prix for free.

For the thing is, folks, nothing in life is free: if you don't want to pay Melita for their service (and you're too cheap to sue them for a discount if you think there's been a breach of contract) you're quite free to stick your antenna back up and tune in that way. Just don't ask the government to declare war on Italy when they go fully digital next year or the year after, leading to your antenna picking up not much more than tele-shopping from Mister Bianco.

Or, on the other hand, you can invest in an illegal satellite system, if you fancy doing the re-coding tango every couple of days.

Pit bullery

A young (well, compared to me, anyway) columnist by the name of Claire Bonello described the government as a pit bull, savaging anyone and everyone who failed to bow down to its opinion of what the right opinion to have should be.

The context of this moderately hyperbolic characterisation was the debate that is raging on and on and on about the plans the government and some developer(s) or other have for the Tignè area of Sliema.

I haven't really followed the debate all that much, to be honest, and I've no doubt that if I were to venture the thought that Sliema is such a dump already, adding a few more shops to the mix won't be such a heinous crime, I would be derided as a running dog lackey of the dictatorial pit bull regime, so I won't.

I won't even hint at the initials N and I and M and B and Y, lest I have all manner of opprobrium poured over my hapless (and hairless) pate. I'll just limit myself to wondering aloud whether the people who are talking about pit bulls actually have a memory that stretches back more than a few years.

After all, most residents of Sliema are old enough to remember what a government that really did savage people was like and compared to that, being savaged by a pit bull was like being nuzzled by a particularly tame sheep.

A teaser

A quick little teaser for those of you with an historic bent to play around with.

Who was William Lassell, what did he do, when did he do it in Malta and with what, and where, and why don't we know anything about it here?

Answers by e-mail, please, and a mention in despatches for anyone whose answer pleases me.

On wash outs

There was a worrying lead story in The Times last Wednesday, all about how the tourism industry has not had a very good time of it of late and about how the prospects weren't all that brilliant. The rider to all this, as always, was a demand, vociferously made, that the government should do something about it.

The answer that came from official quarters was that the Malta Tourism Authority was going through a restructuring and that the fruits of this apparently Herculean task would be felt imminently. I'll be forgiven for wondering out loud whether this excuse hasn't worn thin by now - I seem to remember hearing it quite a bit.

I'll also be forgiven, I trust, if I augur that the restructuring that apparently promises so much will result in applications of liberal doses of public booty that are more likely to produce something useful than the Mediterranean Food Fair held a couple of weeks ago.

It might have been a sublime idea, had the fair been held somewhere in the world where tourists that might be interested in coming to Malta could be found but, as it was, the event was held in the middle of winter in the middle of Malta, which was a moderately peculiar way of trying to attract tourists here.

The thing is, of course, that the time might have come for the private sector to take things into its own hands. Perhaps instead of spending money on things like the Malta Tourism Authority, the jolly old government could concentrate on saving the money and passing on the saving to the private sector through cunningly devised tax breaks.

And before anyone starts mumbling about low-cost airlines being the saviour of the country, might I chuck into the mix a point about low-cost tourists not being exactly what we need?

Wait for it

You'll have noticed a whole slew of billboards put up by some commission or other that is promoting the perfectly right and proper notion that couples should wait until they have a ring on their fingers before indulging in what it is that couples, once married, get up to.

I can't help but wonder at the naïvety of the people who devise these campaigns. Quite apart from tempting cynical wags like yours truly to ask whether the people behind the campaign would be so kind as to tell us how far non-married couples can go while they're courting, which is a fertile field for all manner of prurient jokes, don't said people live in the real world?

Moral rectitude or not, it's a fact that abstinence and forbearance are not the watchwords of the youth of today and while it's not wrong in itself to try to persuade said youth to adopt said watchwords, might it not have been a better use of saintly money to promote, say, the condemnation of racism and racists?

Just wondering, don't you know?

bocca@waldonet.net.mt