The headline that greeted us on Thursday morning had nothing to do with Brazil's humiliation at the hands of Germany or Argentina's boring win over boring Holland. Why is the game even going to be played on Sunday, why not just declare Germany the winners and Brazil the runners up, for Heaven's sake? Come on Blatter, do your job and rig the Cup, it's not like that's not an option.
These issues of great pith and moment were usurped, however, by the information, blared out in big black letters, that a bridge to Gozo was technically feasible.
Did we really need our Prime Minister to jet off to Beijing, big grin on his face and young family in tow, to find this out? When the Mafia, the Ndrangheta and the Camorra get their act together, there will be a bridge between Sicily and Italy. There already is a bridge between Denmark and Sweden, where the weather is perhaps a touch more challenging.
It's not whether a bridge is technically feasible that we need to know. Only the terminally infatuated (with Joseph Muscat, I mean) would see this breathless Governmental statement of the bleedin' obvious as anything but the usual puffery that accompanies the signature of bits of paper on tables bedecked with flags.
There is something we need to know, but won't, because on a par with Mrs Dr Konrad Mizzi's contract, the price of the boss of the Tombola Regulatory Society's company car and the real reason why the now-fired Commissioner of Police needed to fly to Italy in a private jet, it is no doubt a matter of national security.
What we need to know is the price our country is going to pay for the Chinese being so kind as to allow the Government to tell us that a bridge is technically feasible.
What, pray tell, is the quid for that quo?
It should be the sum total of zilch, because we've known that a bridge is technically feasible, duh, for many years.
And why, if I might make so bold as to ask, hoping that I will not be fobbed off with a "not in the people's interest" Mhux fl-Interess tal-Poplu excuse, are we suddenly talking about a bridge, when the chit-chat was more about a tunnel of late? A bridge, and I write this as someone who actually enjoys looking at bridges, would be such an alteration of the landscape that I would expect the tree-huggers and badger-cuddlers to go ballistic at the mere thought of one.
Cynically, then, is talk of a bridge, in the full knowledge that it is an environmental non-starter, simply a dose of smoke and mirrors, a little prestidigitation, chucked in to divert the Great Unwashed's attention from what really went down in Beijing?