Just to make it clear where I’m coming from, Jeremy Clarkson is my hero and my idea of a good time is to play with machines that use fossil fuel as their means of propulsion. Generally, that’s a car or a bike, with more fun being had on the latter except when twerps on four wheels try to kill me, but I wouldn’t say no to a good blast on a speedboat. Or a buzz around on a plane or chopper, for that matter.

And, to boot, I think that car-free days should only be promoted in order to get cars off the road to make biking less dangerous, while bicycling is a pursuit that should be left to younger and fitter chaps such as the leader of the Opposition, who contrasts nicely with his oppo, whose preferred mode of transport is his own (paid by us) Alfa with outriders and macho men in sunglasses glaring at anyone who comes within spitting distance.

Therefore, when the government makes noises about setting up some sort of racetrack, my knee doesn’t jerk to get all tree-huggy and nimbyish to cry doom and gloom and suchlike.

The sad thing is that Premier Joseph Muscat’s merry men aren’t really in this for the greater good, that much has become very clear by now. When the government makes noises as aforesaid, it’s patently obvious that all it’s doing is going further and further down the road of appeasement and sucking up to the assorted vested interests from whom when he was only a wannabe-Premier, Premier Muscat had hoovered up every available vote.

Credit to the man, his strategy worked, but all his various chickens are coming home to roost now, so now he has to put our money where his mouth was.

Now Joseph Muscat has to put our money where his mouth was

Getting back to the racetrack, it has to be asked: come on, seriously? From what I’ve read, it needs something in the region of 70 hectares to accommodate even a pretty basic track and that’s not including the bits and bobs you need to make the thing even half-way decent, such as parking for the petrol-heads and their admirers.

Seventy hectares, my reliable friend Google tells me, is about equivalent to 70-odd football pitches. Multiply the national stadium by 70, or the whole complex by 35, if you want to make the sums needlessly complex, and you’re looking at an area that’s ever so slightly larger, and then some, than all of Ta’ Qali, even if you evict the Yanks from their bunker.

Now, everyone, where exactly are we going to find this sort of land area that is not already built up and populated to the point of saturation?

Let me give you a hint: it’s not in the middle of Valletta. Nor is it in Sliema. Or in Cottonera. Or in any developed area.

So, there you have it, give the man a cigar, it’s in outside development zone, also known as ODZ, the very same three initials that annoyed everyone and his brother when Premier Muscat proposed (and still intends) to allow a chunk of buildings to be built there to house an ‘American’ (not) ‘University’ (not) of ‘Malta’ (not, it’s going to be Lebanese).

This will, no doubt, turn into another of those ‘don’t be so negative, be progressive’ debates, on the lines of the IVF storm in a teacup that Premier Joe - in between scooting off to gaze admiringly into the general direction of some A-List celebs while his daughters play hooky from school - cooks up in order to give us, the great unwashed, something with which to amuse ourselves and distract us from what’s really going on around us.

Motor sports enthusiasts need somewhere to have their fun, that’s very clear, but we need to get our feet back onto the ground. This is a country that is not many kilometres long by even less kilometres wide, so dreams of having Jenson Zipfastener and Hamilton Buttons and their dream machines visiting our shores can be put on the back-burner.

Likewise, incidentally, that rather ingenious map of a proposed public transport system on the lines of London’s Tube that is doing the rounds of Facebook needs to be defined as a pipe dream and not a real possibility, as some people seem to have started to define it. These people need to take on board a couple of stark realities, such as the fact that this sort of thing takes more money than even Premier Muscat’s passports-for-cash-scheme can raise.

There’s also the small point that building a Tube network will create even more havoc than a bendy bus breaking down.

I know that most people don’t think that whatever is on Facebook is a version of the eternal truth and that many of the comments are made very much with virtual tongues implanted firmly into virtual cheeks but there are enough people who clearly take everything at face(book) value for it to be worrying.

But that’s Facebook for you, a forum where the wooly-minded are free to exasperate the rest of us.

More worrying is the fact that even the mainstream media is prone to be the dumping ground for opinions that are, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous to the nth degree. And I’m not talking about the orchestrated efforts of sundry lil’elves, either, they’re just breathless admirers of Premier Muscat whose thought process are crystal clear.

In fact, and I know I’ve said this before, it really is high time for a review of the exercise of freedom of expression that is embodied in the comments boards to be undertaken. No sooner does a story about the trials and tribulations of everyday life hit the screen than you have an outpouring of idiocy and weirdness that has to be read to be believed.

Take, for instance, any story about some alleged indecent assault or something on those lines. Every Tom, Dick or Harriet will find themselves impelled to give us the benefit of their erudition and appreciation of the human condition, making it clear that they would know, just know, that the perpetrator is guilty, or innocent, simply from their reading of a few lines of newspaper report.

The police, for whom I hold no brief, always find themselves in the firing line. If the alleged perpetrator is found not guilty, the great and the good will start sounding off about how the cops should be more careful and how the poor innocent former accused needs to be compensated and generally beatified. If, on the other hand, the boys and girls in blue don’t take action, and the suspected criminal is not someone for whom the GandG have any sympathy, the cops will find themselves on the receiving end, again, because clearly it is their fault.

Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Then, to add insult to injury, you get headlines screeching about officers being disciplined for making a mistake, which smacks of the powers that be kowtowing to popular, and misguided, sentiment.

Just as I was wrapping up this week’s effort to annoy everyone, I came across a news report on a “competing” portal, which let it be known that Malta was to be hit by torrential, even cyclonic, rain over Thursday and Friday. The catch is, the source they were using was meteoweb.it, which has about as much credibility as Fox News.

When even the mainstream media becomes so undiscerning, is it so surprising that Joe Public can’t be trusted to sift the wheat from the chaff?

imbocca@gmail.com

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