Two pieces in Wednesday's print edition of this media house's output, and some later news, inspired my title.

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The first piece was Martin Scicluna's full-pager about Sliema and Mrieħel's "newly permitted" carbuncles and how this merits a boycott of the Gasan/Fenech empires along with the exclusion of the responsible architects from Din l-Art Helwa's competition for architectural excellence.   

True to form, presumably because he just can't bring himself to admit that by asking us "to vote for Joseph" he helped us get Premier Joseph, Scicluna took a swipe at the Nationalists at the same time, for all the world as if it isn't ultra-clear, except to those who do not want to see it, that they are opposed to these projects and much else.

Just what Scicluna proposes to achieve by bellowing about boycotts is not entirely clear: it would seem that he's woken up to the fact that something needs to be done, this is something, so let's do it. 

Just what Scicluna proposes to achieve by bellowing about boycotts is not entirely clear.

That something needs to be done about Premier Joseph's style of governance has been clear to anyone with two brain-cells to rub together for quite some time now, but an 80s style civil unrest scenario is - well - so 80s.

And I rather doubt that eminent architects of Demicoli and Xuereb's stripe would find themselves particularly perturbed by being excluded from a Din l-Art Ħelwa competition, their fish are fried completely differently in this day and age.  

Incidentally, if I were these gents, and I don't hold any brief on their behalf, I'd be ever so slightly miffed at Scicluna's description of their oeuvres as "stubby" or whatever he called them, they are certainly more qualified than he (or I) to define architectural excellence. 

It's not so much what they are that is annoying people, rather where they will be, and from what I can make out, at least as far as the Slimizi in the mass are concerned, it's the messy process of construction rather than anything else that's worrying them. 

The second piece was the back-pager by Desmond Zammit Marmara.  Here we have someone who - in his defence - has been consistent in nailing his colours to Labour's mast over the years, and it is entirely understandable that he would take a few pot-shots at the Nationalists.  

What is more telling is the fact that even a consistently Labour exponent (I'm told, for instance, that he denied, in some scholarly work or other, that on Labour's accession to power in the 1970s, the education went into almost terminal decay) has been moved to worry out loud that Premier Joseph's manner of lording it over us is not doing Labour's cause much good, at all. 

And if that wasn't enough to ruin Premier Joseph's summer break, we then were regaled with a call to arms by his Whip's partner, who wants a coalition (of the willing?) to take Malta back from the "Putinesque" clique that has wrested the country away from us.  

The Hon. Marlene Farrugia has a point, but only up to a point: how she expects the Alternattiva, whose leader seems to have a single "Plague on Both Your Houses" slogan to bank on, to get into any sort of coalition with the Nationalists is not an aspect of the matter that she dwelled on. 

Things have come to a pretty pass, indeed, and, by the way, shouldn't our esteemed Minister for Culture and Justice and whatever else be telling us why Elaine Malia, apparently a Henley & Whosit Big Wheel,  has been given just shy of €120,000 for services rendered?  If there's a good explanation, let's be having it, young Owen, but the thing is, your Direct Order was exposed more than 24 hours ago, as I write this, and we haven't heard a peep out of you.