Category: Argomenti vari

The declining strength of the fourth power.

A kiosk was for sale nearby our home.
The old man running it was probably tired and put a note asking for 45.000 euro.
I wondered about buying it and thus enter the alluring world of press.
Afterwards, I remarked that the following kiosk was also on the market as well as others around the town.
Probably the business is declining, notwithstanding the innumerable effects on sale with the papers nowadays.
One day this kiosk closed down and a new notice informed that the price was negotiable.
Last Wednesday I passed by and on the stall there was another note; the price is now 25.000, and a ghastly post-scriptum, by the owner, was informing: I am still alive!.

sliding doors

A Mr. Boubacar, French migrant living in Vitry-sur-Seine has been quoted in a paper as affirming he will have voted for Mr. Le Pen, as “ ..he will do what he say. It ought to integrate who’s here before other immigrants could come to this country”.
This reminded me about the blog ‘in and out’ (4 July 2004), and the thought on how ideas change according to one’s different position.
And also about Italian migrants in South Africa, most of them recently arrived in that country, but among the most racist towards ‘the others’.

Riferimenti: old blog

Subtraction

The real challenge of contemporary life is not to get more but rather less.

The emerging concern is to limit the invadence of things, of food, of noise.

For example: eating prefabricated cakes, the use of plastic cups, shopping during sales time or watching on TV meaningless programmes and over-loud advertisements.

The idea is to run this as a diet, taking note every day of the useless items avoided.

The day before yesterday I skipped a breakfast on an Iberia flight to Bruxelles (again?). It could also be possible to attribute points to each item (and that breakfast would have represent a very high score).

Zia Sitta

ziasitta
Zia Sitta passed away today.
I will not be home for the funeral.
She was a milestone for my growing up and my sense of family, and it is an odd coincidence that she dies while I am in Venezuela repeating the travel that our grandgrandparents did at the end of the nineteenth century to build our house in Picerno.
I found here a missing part of our family and I’ve lost while here a crucial part of my family in Italy.
Zia Sitta was and is a nice company for small talks next to the fireplace and a supporting person for any kind of enterprise. I miss her already.

You are what you own?

The other day I was trying to get my plane to Abidjan. There was a long queue at Barcelona airport and I tried to check in at the automatic counters (only one out of three were working, shame on Air France).

The machine could not recognize me and therefore asked for what other electronic devices ask nowadays to identify you: not the ID card number, the birth date or the name of your parents, but my credit card.

The force of my bank account is greater than the power of my official documents, of my word, of my own image.

The confidence in someone’s personality is based on his belongings more than on his history. How sad.

My vote saved my country

I’ve voted abroad. A piece of one of the six foreigner senators is mine. I have contributed to the healing of poor Italia. May not last long, but it is quite a satisfaction.

Why did we suppose remote Italians were right wing? They might be, but in Italy the problem is not to have the right in government, but to have thugs occupying the power for their own interest.

Welcome back, old, tired, confuse but yet decorous Italy.