The subject I'm starting out with today is a bit on the old side but it was overshadowed by the revelation that Karmenu Vella either betrayed his party in 2003 or is telling a little porkie now, when he says he voted for Malta joining the EU.
It being his own, it's for him to reconcile himself with his conscience, but I find it a touch surprising that none of the assembled MEPs, not even his own daughter in law, found it worth mentioning the low standards that this relatively insignificant episode expose.
Oh well, it's from the little things that you get to know the man.
It was almost tempting to push today's story back a bit yet again in order to muse about the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party's expressed thought that prostitution should be legalised. On reflection, I opted not to fall for the temptation, because cracks about "is this how we're going to boost the economy, by prostitution?" have, actually, already been made, in the context of the pimping of our passports.
About which, incidentally, we haven't heard much of late, apart from the PM's butter-wouldn't-melt sally about it not being the punters' money we want but their talent. Yeah, sure, just like when a hooker says "I love you", before tucking the cash into her décolletage.
My inspiration comes from a report a couple of weeks ago, when the minister responsible for tourism saw fit to allow his PR people to let through a couple of pix about a visit he had made to, if memory serves, Cospicua and environs.
He said, at the time, that it was time for innovative and meaningful measures to be put in place in order to boost the tourism product. It might not have been said in so many words, or exactly like that, but it was the usual sort of blether that people with no ideas, or who have found most of their ideas taken by their predecessors, resort to, on the premise that it's better to say something than nothing, in direct contradiction of Gandhi's excellent exhortation about it being only worth saying something if thereby there is an addition to the fund of human knowledge.
Heaven forfend that any politician were to heed these words, the silence would be deafening.
But back to those jolly snaps, what was wrong with them, you might well ask.
Consider this.
One was team shot of the minister and his retinue, including amongst those who were deemed worthy of recording for all time some presumably local dignitary, who thought his less than sylph-like prepubescent daughter, bottle of soft drink dangling from her paw, was also meritorious of inclusion.
The other was of a bunch of folk-singers (ghannejja) who apart from harking back to the good old days of "Gensna" and "Malta Folklore Nights" of unlamented days gone by, were so uncaring of the image they projected that an upturned beer crate (acting as a footrest) was their main prop.
Is this the way the minister is going to boost our tourism product, with shoddy goods such as these?