Ad Personam Man

‘Ad Personam’ is an expression being bandied around frequently these days in Italy, often with reference to media mogul cum prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in connection with his propensity for making laws which appear to benefit him personally.

Well, Italy’s ad personam man has been at it again.  This time on the pretext of buoying up Italy’s shaky public finances.  He’s come up with a neat way of raising a little extra cash, whilst, surprise, surprise, denting one of Berlusconi’s media businesses’ main competitors.

Yes, with regard to Berlusco, the sky’s seems to be the limit with regard to protecting his own back, and lining his pockets.  What’s Italy’s mischievous prime minister been up to this time? Read on to find out. … Continue Reading

A Cat’s Chance in Hell

If you were unaware, which you may be if you are not from Italy, most of the public TV stations here are influenced by Italy’s rag tag bunch of political masters. This means that the news is presented in such a way as to support the ruling junta.

People are aware of this, especially Antonio Di Pietro‘s Italia dei Valori political party, which is about the only party which is attempting to represent the wishes of the Italian people. Trying to make the TV channels here a little more impartial is also one of Di Pietro’s aims. (The English version of Di Pietro’s web site is not working at the moment – I wonder why).

To achieve this purpose, Di Pietro, along with Italy’s Radical party got together to propose Leoluca Orlando for the position of president of the body which watches over Italy’s RAI state TV network. Only the candidature is being firmly blocked by Berlusconi’s boys, who obviously fear losing the ability to manipulate the way in which RAI is operated.

In protest, Italy’s Radicals have staged a sit-in at the premises of the watchdog which monitors RAI.

As a matter of interest, Leoluca Orlando is an ex-mayor of Palermo, and is strongly anti-mafia. This is something which may not endear him to all those politicians whose fingers are stuck in Italy’s pie, and who have ‘friends’ whose wishes must be respected.

Despite the support of Italy’s Radical party and their mini-protest, Mr Orlando has a cat’s chance in hell of winning the presidency, which will be handed to someone much more ‘friendly’. Just wait and see.

Zero Tolerance

I watched an interesting fly on the wall type documentary the other day entitled ‘Tolleranza Zero’ – ‘Zero Tolerance’ (Yes, at times Italian and English are extremely similar).

This program was shown on La7, one of Italy’s public TV channels, and was about, as you might expect, how the Italian police are dealing with crime in and around Milan in Italy.

What came across to me was the high level of professionalism exhibited by the sometimes maligned Italian ‘polizia’.  The ‘polizia’ is not the same as the para-military ‘carabinieri’, by the way, although the polizia does have a similar function. For more information on Italy’s many police type bodies, you might like my old post called ‘They Got Guns‘.

Certainly the Milanese polizia appear to be doing their job, and doing it rather well. Indeed, the recent proposals to put soldiers on the streets in Italy appear to be something of a slap in the face for this organisation, which is something of a shame.

Still, politicians who don’t interfere wouldn’t be good politicians, now would they?!

As an aside, the few documentaries which appear on Italian TV, usually far too late in the evening, are, for the most part, very well made.

The Italian Version of Mr Bean!

I know Mr Bean went down quite well in Italy. Indeed, they still show Mr Bean on TV here. However, what I did not know was that one crazy Italian is actually imitating him!

If you click around Arnaldo Mangini‘s site – this is a good a point as any to ‘click-off’, you’ll find out what I mean. To be fair, the guy does admit to taking off the original Rowan Atkinson character, but I’ve no idea whether the original Mr Bean knows about this impersonator.  Mangini does look like Mr Bean too!

Well, they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

It’s amazing what you dig up from the Web. And no, I was not looking for anything to do with Mr Bean. Honest.

Burnt Midnight Oil

A little while back I was asked to prepare a short two day workshop on how to write a press release in English for the Media Relations master at the business school where I often find myself.

After burning copious amounts of that old midnight oil, I came up with such a course.

The first time this course was held was quite a nerve racking experience and I remember feeling much like an actor appearing on his first night. I really had no idea as to how my course would go down. Even though I was fairly sure that I had covered almost everything, and come up with a method that was thorough but, at the same time, quite straight forward. I had even come up with a way, I hoped, of getting the most out of a large group of people with widely differing levels of knowledge of English.

At the end of the day though, I had never really done anything as extensive as this. So how did the course go? … Continue Reading

Berlusconi’s Advice

Mr Berlusconi, the man who would be Prime Minister of Italy (again), and one of Italy’s potentially top five sinners, dropped a slight clanger on prime time TV, yesterday, I think it was.

In an interview he told a young worried female ‘precarious’ worker that she would be able to solve her financial worries by simply marrying a millionaire. He even offered his son as a potential partner.

By the way, ‘Precarietà’ is an Italian word used to describe those who do not have a full time work contract.

Veltroni, Berlusconi’s number one election opponent was, understandably, quick to turn this off-hand comment into vote catching capital. Veltroni observed, quite reasonably, that in a country in which more and more youngsters are worrying about their futures and their finances, Berlusconi’s ‘advice’ showed just how out of touch the media magnate was with Italy’s populous and its problems.

Meanwhile, and unsurprisingly, Berlusco has been playing his ‘advice’ down as being ‘tongue in cheek’. Trouble is that many Italian youngsters may now be rather wary of voting such a joker in.

Still, if Berlusco does manage to get Italy’s top political spot for a third time, if nothing else, he will keep the Italian people amused.

Oh, the Italian electoral circus – pure entertainment.