What excellent news: the hunters broke the law, they had been warned of the consequences and, verily, the consequences came about. Spring hunting has been stopped, dead in its tracks.

Great stuff.

Enough already

Actually, the above should read "enough long ago". That to which I am referring is the Eurovision Song Thing, the finals of which are going to happen this evening, I think. I write "I think" because I give less than a tinker's cuss about the flipping thing, but I think I'm right because, for the last couple of weeks, I've been receiving e-mails and text messages telling me what to do to get updated about the darn thing and according to di-ve.com, the songstress who is representing Malta has been rehearsing her boots off in whatever country it is that is going to host the contest, which means that the event must be imminent.

Of course, I hope that Ms Lewis, if I recall her name correctly, does well - I'm writing this early because of travel arrangements (my esteemed editor's, this time, not mine) so I don't even know if she got through to the final round, but, hey, no doubt she wants to do well and I've no reason to want her to be disappointed.

But could the people who have been bombarding me with e-mails and text messages and the like please take note that, read my lips, "I don't really care" and, as a corollary, could they please ensure that they don't do it again next year?

If they do, I'll make a formal complaint to the MCA or whichever worthy organisation it is that oversees these things and then I'll sue them for compensation for wasting my valuable time.

Or something.

Sorry to disappoint

I have to apologise for disappointing everyone by not eating humble pie last weekend, after the best team in Europe inexplicably didn't manage to beat one of the less good teams.

It is, of course, Chelsea to whom I refer, who managed to fail to beat Liverpool on penalties, thereby getting eliminated from the Champions League, rapidly being followed by that motley crew from Manchester way, who succumbed to Milan. To make matters worse, said motley crew then filched the Premiership from the team that should, if there is any justice in the world, have won it for a third time on the trot.

Oh well, all's well that ends well, naturally, because Chelsea will now humiliate Man U on Wednesday (remember, I'm writing this on Tuesday, so you can now appreciate my prescience) and go on to win the FA Cup, meaning they will have won two competitions compared to Man U's miserable one.

And Liverpool will, no doubt, trounce Milan, proving beyond all reasonable doubt that English Club football is superior to the Italian version. Any league that lionises individuals like Gennaro Gattuso, after all, can't aspire to greatness now, can it?

Now, before everyone reaches for their phones and 'puters to start composing rude messages to me, can I just point out, for those of you whose sense of humour is mildly deficient, that I'm only kidding? It's only a flipping game, for Heaven's sake, and while I enjoy the excitement of the match and getting all worked up while watching, I don't really care who wins.

Seriously, it's fun to engage in a bit of give and take and try to work people up, but that's all it is.

Not so for certain people, though. Someone who uses the name "Ivan Attard" in his e-mail address sent me a mail that fairly dripped with hate and venom and he was, believe it or not, being serious.

Whoever it is that calls himself "Ivan Attard" is, on the evidence of the sentiments he expresses, nothing more than a poisonous racist, so I'm not surprised that he uses pure hate as a means of communication.

There are others of the same frame of mind, such as someone who uses "Camilleri" as a surname - I've no idea whether he is a real Camilleri or whatever, but he seriously needs to get a life. Just for the record, I responded to these folk with some braw Anglo-Saxon words of one syllable, to make sure they understood.

Togetherness

I was away last week, enjoying the multifarious delights of southern Italy (their roads in the suburbs and the suburbs themselves, incidentally, are as miserable as ours) so I have to rely on the papers for bits and bobs about which to try to be diverting.

No sooner did I board the plane in Reggio, though (and a good place to travel from it is too, queues don't exist) that I was regaled with the story of how an Italian singer by the name of Cutugno was booed by a crowd attending a Labour Party concert on May 1 because he dared to show some approval of Malta's joining the EU.

Can you imagine the poor guy's utter bemusement? In every civilised country in Europe, the lefties of the political spectrum are even more pro-EU than the most enthusiastic of Brussels Sprouts, and here the crowd was giving him the bird. He must have thought he'd stumbled into a National Front meeting or something.

Now, my political leanings are quite well defined - I incline away from the MLP, at least in its current incarnation, which is no different from its former incarnation - but even I can't but be astounded at the way they shoot themselves in the foot at every conceivable juncture.

I mean to say, just when the tide should be flowing in their favour, it being the later mid-term of the Nasty Nats' tenure, along come a bunch of diehards to remind us all just why it is that we can't really accept them to run this place.

And, talking about soccer, which we were up to just a few paragraphs ago, what is it with the guys from the Monti? I can understand, dimly, the fact that they are a bit miffed at being made to move from where they were cluttering up Merchants' Street, but are they trying to persuade us that the move has set them on the road to bankruptcy?

If they are, surely having a couple of days of kick-abouts is not quite the right way to go about it? From where I'm sitting, the fact that they can afford to have a couple of days off indicates a level of financial comfort that is quite a few leagues away from penury.

I wonder, where do these guys get off, making a noise about their rights? Shouldn't they respect other people's rights, to start with?

Oh well, as long as we can have conspiracy theories shovelled out by l-orizzont about all this being done because some bar-owner wants his façade cleaned up, that's all right then.

Conspire away

It's not only l-orizzont that enjoys conspiracy theorising, of course. Hand on heart, we all like a bit of a convolution, because the facts alone are never enough to make stories interesting.

Thus, it came to pass that it was reported, with shock-horror innuendoes, that the chairman of Malta Shipyards Ltd was, in his private life, an adviser of Doctor Alfred Sant's. Precisely what makes this newsworthy is, quite frankly, beyond me.

I know Mr Cassar White, coincidentally and, as far as I can see, he's making a darn good fist of a pretty thankless job - and it seems his political master agrees, because he told him what he could do with his resignation. Even if he is advising Doctor Alfred Sant, who cares? Surely no one, apart from the rabid conspiracy theorists, believes that the MLP wants the shipyards to fail and that by dint of the adviser-advisee relationship, some sort of influence is being exerted in this direction?

But then, this was the same newspaper that reported, with an equal dose of shock-horror, that Richard Cachia Caruana was advising the PM (also the leader of the Nationalist Party) on matters political.

In response to which one can only ask "and your point is?".

imbocca@gmail.com

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