Cynics never fail to remind us that when a lot is said and done, a lot more is said than done. Election Day has come and gone; the number-crunchers have been at it con gusto. This leaves the rest of us free to concentrate on other, totally different things... albeit somehow yet tainted with politics.
Not many people would know who Ashley Youmans was; yet the name Ashley Alexandra Dupre would ring a bell with anyone who has been following the case in which ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer became embroiled simply because he decided he could get away with living a lie.
As a woman, I could not help weeping for his wife Silda, standing by him as he said he wanted to "to regain the trust of my family". Undoubtedly, she recalled how he had won his post on a promise to clean up state politics... which, in a way, he did... although even how he did this is now open to conjecture.
Ms Wall Spitzer joins the ranks of those women who have been publicly humiliated, whether or not they had a personal agenda for doing so... Hillary Clinton is the most famous one of them.
What struck me was the way in which each medium sought to handle the story; some women's groups said that it is a mother's (note - not a "wife's") duty to protect her family (read children, not husband), and that's why there ought to be at least a show of solidarity.
Others said that a woman who had been treated like a squeezed lemon would have gained more respect had she left her partner to face the music alone - since she had obviously been extraneous when he forsook her.
Then of course there were the religious and legal points of view, as well as the pragmatic and the "look who supports Hillary" groups.
The Free Media Movement (FMM) has expressed concern about how, in Sri Lanka, journalists are continuously intimated by the state authorities. This involves being left incommunicado for hours, after being arrested without a valid accusation by the Terrorist Investigations Department.
Basic rights about having a lawyer present at all times during interrogation, the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and the right for their families and friends to know of their whereabouts, are also ignored.
Journalists and writers who have so far been arrested without valid cause include N. Jasiharan and his partner Valarmathi of the E-Kwality printing press, Udayanan, a visual editor with a Website, and, perhaps inevitably, S. Sivakumar (alias Balasubramanium Wasanthan), the spokesman of the FMM and editor of the bi-monthly Tamil language Sarinihar magazine.
After 26 years of debate, all 83 (some sources say 85) episodes of the BBC sitcom 'Allo 'Allo are to be broadcast on German television, on the private television channel Prosieben Sat 1. This decision appears to be somewhat ironical, since it presents the Germans in a ridiculous light.
Has this been done to prove to the rest of the world that Germans have a sense of humour, after all?
Listen carefully; I will say this only once. Those who follow the series would know that it is set in Nazi-occupied France. It sends up the Nazis, the French Resistance, and also the British, with a mixture of farcical situations and droll dialogue.
Gordon Kaye, as French café owner René Artois, in between his job and extracurricular activities, pretends to join in the hunt for a particular work of art as a running gag, which he has hidden inside a garlic sausage.
In a television interview, Kaye said that as far back as the 1980s, five or six German stations had been showing an interest in the series, yet although they laughed hysterically at the antics of the cast, which includes Helga, Edith, Herr Flick, Captain Bertorelli, Gruber and Colonel Van Strohm, they knew they couldn't buy it because they'd be sacked.
It is amusing to note how one of the latest additions to the PBS newsroom, Fiorella Pace, pronounces her surname using only one syllable. Everyone else, including those who are introducing her in a news bulletin, uses two.
Magic Radio seems to have obtained a cache of new records - a good number of which are Easy Listening ones. However, I note that the person(s) who programmes the computer inserts these only irregularly in between the ones that, had they been made of vinyl, would have worn wafer-thin by now.
television@timesofmalta.com