I.M. Beck quote unquote

It is a given that the Vatican is - was - a cradle of diplomatic expertise and political savvy.

It is a given that certain people who profess - more accurately misprofess - the Islamic Faith are more properly described as Mad Mullahs and that their misguided exhortations spur those of their followers prone to violence and extremism to ever greater excesses.

It is a given that the latter - the fundamentalists - are itching, trigger-finger and all, to seize any opportunity to rouse the rabble and start violence.

Given all of the above, what was the Pope thinking when he gave that speech a few days ago? I've read the excerpt and, frankly, it's not exactly snappy reading and you really have to be a pretty paranoid mullah to extract any insult whatsoever from it. It certainly wasn't the "this is where you get off" tirade that the fundamentalists on the other side ("our side") are triumphantly trumpeting, with a smirk on their glistening white faces, saying that it was about time "someone told the Muslims that we're sick of them all".

No, the speech was part of a pretty dry academic sortie, because all His Holiness was doing was making a harmless point, from what I could make out.

The thing is, the Pope wasn't an academic talking among academics: he was, and always is, a world leader who has to measure every single word he says in public (pretty much, he has to measure every single word he says in private too, nowadays) and he is, to boot, the leader of a religion that the incendiary elements of Islam see as one of their main enemies.  

So, with all due respect, I have to ask again: what was he thinking when he made that speech? What was he trying to achieve? Fundamentalists on both sides of the sickening divide are now standing there, blowing their noses over each other (honourable mention to the first one to tell me where that particularly un-appealing image comes from) while the rest of us, the ones who aren't particularly worried when a set of religious or pseudo-religious beliefs is challenged, sit here, wondering whether any of us is going to get caught in the cross-fire of their posturing.

Thanks, guys, that's all the world needs: another flash point.

Bank on it

If you were to believe the advertising, all you have to do with your cash in this day of electronic wizardry is entrust to the Bank of Hong, Lom and AP and it's there for you, residing in the ether, waiting for the snap of your fingers or the push of a button to fly swiftly to wherever it is you want it to fly.

Buzz - wrong answer.  

The son and heir was in France recently, when a combination of events led to his VISA card being munched up by the hole in the wall into which he had inserted it in order to get someone of his (yes, his, not mine or the bank's) dough out of the Great Big Money Box.

These things do happen, so he had to make such arrangements as he could to have some readies with which to purchase the essentials of life, such as food and transport to the airport to wing his way back to the bosom of the family. He only had the one credit card, you see, not being a bloated plutocrat.

The arrangements, as he said to his doting dad at the time, were pretty simple: access to the World Wide Interweb meant that he could spirit up his account onto the screen and move some of his fortune from one side of the globe to the other. Well, from Malta to France, anyway, but you see what I mean. In mere micro-seconds, a friend would be in funds and life could proceed apace.

Buzz: wrong answer, again.

You see, if you give instructions to your bank, say, on Thursday afternoon, to pour a few dribbles of liri into another account, said instructions will be carried out instantly, but only up to the point where your money leaves your account. At this point, of course, your money will cease earning interest in your favour and, presumably, be under the all-seeing, all-knowing control of the bank.

The thing is, the same alacrity is not shown when it comes to the bank concerned letting go of the cash that is now under its control and depositing it into the account wherein you instructed it (your money, let it not be forgotten) to be deposited. It won't get into the account on Friday, it won't get into the account on Saturday and it won't get into the account on Sunday. It won't even get there on Monday, Tuesday being the day of joy when your dosh becomes available to you.

Now, considering that in the case under reference, the s&h needed his (his, not the bank's, not a loan, his) money pretty darn quick, and considering that he was coming back home on Sunday, having the stuff land in the account from which he could get his paws on it on the following Tuesday was, not to put too fine a point on it, rather a waste of time.

To add insult to injury, to use the time-honoured cliché, when I called the jolly old bank on Saturday to see if I could do anything, I was told, by the genuinely helpful young lady at the call centre, that I could have an emergency card issued. The small catch was that it would cost two hundred quid.

The bottom-line, the line so beloved of the bean counters that run our lives, was that in order to get his hands on something like a couple of hundred quid of his own money, the young lad (or his dad) would have to pay the bank something like a couple of hundred quid of his own money, which seemed to be a bit of a pointless exercise.

Of course, the bank's PR people will point out that the s&h could possibly have gone into the bank whereat his card was eaten in the first place and made enquiries there and it's not the Malta bank's fault that French banks don't work Saturdays. 

The answer to this is a) ATMs don't only reside in the walls of banks b) banks are not usually that helpful even if you can speak the language c) you have internet banking precisely not to need to do this and d) that is not the point of this rant.

The point is that in this day of electronic jiggery-pokery, you don't, actually, need human intervention to transfer money and it should be done at the speed of light (quite literally).

Should Ben ask for compensation: perhaps a bank PR functionary could answer this one?

With honour

Last week's competition, with the great prize of an hon. mensh. for the first person to tell me what "SPQR" stands for was won by one Tonio Farrugia, a gentleman of substantial talents, who confirmed that these Romans are quite the porcine bunch.  

There were others, such as B. Hollomby Esq., JGPB, a Mizzi, Pierre of that ilk, and Damien (but not one with 666 on his brow) who came up with diverting interpretations, and some were even the one I had in mind, but they all landed in my Inbox late.

I even got a text message in perfect Latin from a like-minded (not to mention like-shaped) colleague from up North, but he wasn't first.

Be correct

I wonder if, like me, you get irritated by the patronising addenda that are slapped onto all manner of advertising in this, the Granny State Era.

It all started with health warnings on ciggies, which was fair enough, I suppose, since the darn things do actually cause harm (and before the union of health fascists falls off its collective high horse, I never said they don't) but now you get them on virtually every type of advert.

So, when you are told that you can use your mobile phone to - shock horror - make calls, you're also told that certain conditions apply. When you are enticed to invest in some money making scheme or other, it is made known to you, sometimes at an incredibly high rate of knots, that the prices can rise as well as fall and that past experiences is not necessarily a guide to the future and that the investment vehicle is regulated by the Malta Fun-preventions Authority and that Chapter 395.693,68 of the laws of Outer Mongolia applies, to which you grunt "doh".

The most sublimely ridiculous, or should that be ridiculously sublime, tag-line I heard of late, though, wafted to my shell-likes through the computer, while listening to Rock101 from Vancouver, a station that transmits the very best of rock for my generation (and yes, that's the generation that used caves to produce reverb sounds).

There's a competition running in Vancouver BC, you see, that involves you being able to win back the purchase price of whatever it is you've just bought, provided you bought it using your VISA Card. Nothing wrong with that, I hear you mumble, and you're perfectly correct, except that according to the officious bumpkin-like voice that is tagged on to the end of the ad, "no purchase is necessary" to take part in this competition.

A competition, mark you, that involves the chance of your winning back the price of - you guessed it - your purchase.

Next we'll be having health warnings on health warnings, warning you that reading and taking seriously too many health warnings will induce the feeling that you have fallen into one of Kafka's oeuvres.

Spooning

Don't you just love the plethora of opinions that you can access simply by turning the pages of your newspaper of choice, always assuming you can do that without being smothered by the sections and inserts that fall out of the thing all the time?

Mona, a lady who says what she thinks, was unmoved by it, but I, on the other hand, rather enjoyed a meal we had at Spoons, in Valletta, up near Hastings Gardens. The service, as Mona also found, is good, the portions are substantial (don't order the full duck if there's only four of you and you intend to go for mains too) and the cooking is pretty OK, too.

imbocca@gmail.com