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THEY CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
date: 05 February 2012 at 19:40:51 - 0 comments
The Italian television has been invaded.
By aliens, I think.
They don’t have horns, they aren’t green, blue or translucent pink, but they are definitely a new species and certainly from a very different planet.
They look like people we have known and been bored by for years and years, but suddenly they are different. Energised or revitalised, so to speak. Suddenly awake. Questing and questioning…
In the past, Italian tv was the final resting-place for clever minds and nimble tongues that had given up the fight and settled for comfort, a tasty salary, a cute bit of junior bum from RAI 1/2/3, or one of the other national television companies, and somebody smart who was writing the script.
They called themselves journalists, but they were – for the most part – mouthpieces, unofficial spokesmen and arbiters for all of the major political parties.
On the right-wing we had Bruno Vespa (The Big Brown Wasp in one of our recent blogs), the biggest toady of Berlusconi and all the jesters of the Emperor’s team. Got a new book coming out? “Dragons I have Slain or Thwarted Recently With My Own Bare Hands,” the autobiography of Angelino (Little Angel) Alfano, or the latest treatise by Giulio Tremonti (the lithping ex-Minithter of the Economy)? Bruno would give you an hour and a half on late-night tv and help you sell it. In exchange, when Bruno’s yearly book came out – a cavalcade of harmless political titbits and playful fawning jokes which endeared him to many – Silvio Berlusconi would regularly appear at the book presentation with Giulio, Alfanino and the rest of the clique, helping to push it at hundreds of thousands of hypnotised tv-watchers.
It’s on the TELLY, it MUST be good! The PM was there…
On the left, we had Lilli Gruber, a sexless sex-machine (no sex, please, we’re lefties!) who purses her lips (the ones directly below her nose) and flashes her inch-long eyelashes, and tells us the news the way it ought to be, according to the succession of wimpy left-wing parties going back to the Margherita (the treasurer stole €13 million from the kitty last week), or further back to the PDS (whose leader conned cheap luxury accommodation out of a pension-scheme fund for years and years, and bought himself a 30-foot yacht from the savings – a true-blue Communist, by the way), and all the way back to the old PCI, the Partito Comunista Italiano (this is twenty years ago) who had been funded secretly since the Second World war by Stalin, Kruschev and the good old USS of R…
Lilli, Bruno, Fabio Fazio and all the rest were in need of a shock.
Well, it happened.
The Aliens arrived…
Boss-alien Mister Monti came along, and mentioned that Italian party politics was in a sad state…
Suddenly, there was no script left, no political memoirs to sell, and no-one left to buy them. It was enough to make the warts sprout a-new on Bruno’s carefully powdered face, enough to deflate lips which have been bursting with silicone since the day the stuff went public.
What the hell are we going to do now?
You see it all the time on tv nowadays.
They’ve started asking questions. Real questions.
Where were you while Silvio was bunging his bunga? Where did you get that hat, where did you get that fabulous snazzy, immensely expensive hat? And the boat, and the house, and the amazing salary?
These alien journalists are damned good – green and pink, rather than red and blue.
Much better than the tired old bodies that they have chosen to inhabit for some inexplicable reason…
THE MADE-IN-ITALY CHINESE-BOX
date: 02 February 2012 at 10:28:09 - 0 comments
“The other big scandal yesterday…”
That’s what I heard on the radio. Not one big scandal yesterday, but two…
The truth is that once you start to dig a bit, it’s like a Chinese box: you know, you open the first box, and there’s a smaller one inside, and another, and another, and the boxes get progressively smaller.
Instead, by means of that strange magic which is Italy politics, you open a BIG box and there’s a BIGGER one inside, then a BIGGER one inside that one, and they keep on getting BIGGER and BIGGER and BIGGER…
NEWS FROM EREWHON (i.e. Bologna)
date: 31 January 2012 at 16:18:48 - 0 comments
Yesterday the newspapers were full of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro.
He had just died, aged ninety-three, and the Italian news columns dutifully – very dutifully! – recorded his career as a politician and as the ninth President of the Italian Republic. Unending encomiums, with only one exception made notably by its silent vehemence.
The trouble is this: how do your sum up the lifetime career of a man who entered politics in 1946, i.e., immediately after the fall of the Fascist regime, and served in any number of unimpressive governments and parliaments, before becoming the ninth president of his country in 1992?
Politicians tends to play dumb on these occasions.
Simulating grief, or simmering with rage?
THE BRIDGE THAT BUÑUEL BUILT – ROGER MORRIS
date: 30 January 2012 at 10:13:23 - 0 comments
Building bridges – real, or not real – is what it’s all about.
Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director, knew that. His works are full of imaginary ‘bridges’ between things that never seem to connect in real life (nuns and sex, for example). Indeed, the surrealistic spanning of an invisible river may be more important than mere engineering, Buñuel and Roger Morris seem to hint.
All this is by way of saying that Roger has written a book and he has edited and published it himself as an Amazon e-book.
Like Buñuel, he has built a ‘bridge’ of his own…
.jpg&newxsize=100&newysize=150 "INSIDE ITALY")
STRAIGHT IN AT NUMBER 8 (Books > Humour > Political)
date: 26 January 2012 at 18:22:12 - 0 comments
Yesterday we published “INSIDE ITALY – All the stuff you need to know” as our first kindle e-book.
Today it is number 8 in the political humour Top 100.
What a surprise!
What a lark!
If you’d like to see/buy/read, please check out the following link:
We also got a wonderful tweet from Roger Morris: "What's Italian for a large, dried-out, horse-shoe shaped turd? Find out in INSIDE ITALY by Michael Gregorio:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/INSIDE-ITALY-ebook/dp/B0071IENZC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327580128&sr=8-1