It's New Year's Eve: take cover!

A sad story from Italy appeared today, the first day of 2008, in La Repubblica. A guy was celebrating the New Year with his family on the 9th floor of an apartment block in Torre Annunziata, just south of Naples, when a stray bullet came through the window at 11:15pm on Capodanno (New Year's Eve). He was actually inside the apartment, sitting at the dining table, when he just collapsed on the table stone dead, struck by a celebratory bullet that some testa di cazzo (dickhead) had fired off in the street below. According to the report, gunshot and firework injuries are all too common at New Year's Eve, but the numbers are staggering: yesterday there were 473 wounded by fireworks and gunshots, some seriously, including a young child of 10 shot in the head and a woman of 41 shot in the torso, both of whom are in critical condition. And that astonishing number is actually a reduction on the previous year, when there were 526 casualties, and that was nearly half of the casualties in 2000 and 2001:

...ai Capodanni del 2000 e del 2001 quando si registrarono, rispettivamente, 3 morti e 952 feriti e 4 morti e oltre mille feriti. Negli anni successivi, fino al San Silvestro del 2006, non ci furono più vittime: 544 feriti nel 2002, 568 nel 2003, 584 nel 2004 e 550 nel 2005"

And we thought Hogmanay street parties had their fair share of casualties, but places like Edinburgh aren't in the same league as Italy, which surely is a dangerous place to be on Capodanno. You're not even safe indoors... :(

Proiettili vaganti, un morto. La Repubblica online, 1/1/08

Ryanair held up by a soft toy

This made me laugh. According to La Repubblica today [1], a Ryanair flight out of Rome's Ciampino airport was held up for 2 hours on account of a soft toy, to wit one massive soft crocodile, so large that it stretched out over 3 seats. Quite how the passenger got such a large toy on as 'hand luggage' is a mystery only Ciampino security could answer, but when she did and laid it out on seats in the passenger cabin, a flight attendant told her that she couldn't take such a monstrosity on board, and that it would have to be left on the ground. Quite why isn't clear from the report - plainly there were free seats to put the croc on, and even in the event of a crash an unsecured soft toy is unlikely to cause any damage to fellow passengers. Neither was it any kind of security threat. Unsurprisingly, the toy's 'mistress' ("padrona") protested vigorously and refused to budge either herself or the crocodile, which led to the aircraft's departure being delayed for some 2 hours whilst the plane crew, then customs officers, remonstrated with the passenger, as well as a faction of the other passengers who, not unnaturally, wanted to take off for Milan - amusingly, the report notes that the passengers divided into two factions, pro- and anti-soft toy (I know which side I'd have been on :o)).

The impasse was finally broken by a nun who calmly negotiated with the crew, cops and recalcitrant passenger, and eventually persuaded her to get off the plane with the offending soft toy, after which the aircraft took off.

[1] Ciampino, due ore di retardi per un peluche, La Repubblica online, 27/11/007

Dog saves plane

Here's a shaggy dog story from Italy, reported today on the La Repubblica website. A 737 of the Romanian airline Blue Air, due to fly from Fiumicino to Bucharest, was taxiing to the runway when passengers saw a dog racing alongside the aircraft. Surprising enough, but a real shock to one passenger, Stoica Ionut, whose dog it was. He (the man, not the dog) alerted the flight crew immediately, and the aircraft was stopped short of the runway. What appears to have happened is that the dog, a 2 year-old Pomeranian, had been placed in a crate sealed with gaffer tape in the baggage hold, because the airline doesn't allow animals in the passenger cabin. He'd managed to chew through the tape and escape the crate, then leapt from the baggage compartment onto the runway because some dimwit in the ground crew had left the compartment door open. Had the aircraft taken off with the door open, it wouldn't have been able to pressurise and could have been in serious trouble - an aircraft a few years back lost cabin pressure in flight, resulting in the crew and passengers falling unconscious, and ended up crashing into a mountainside killing all on board [2].

So it was only through the dog's escape that the crew found out that the baggage door was open, and what could have been a major tragedy was averted. The dog could well have saved the lives of everyone on the plane by escaping then loyally trying to catch up with its master rather than legging it to freedom. Eat your heart out, Lassie!

[1] Fiumicino, si sfiora la tragedia. La Repubblica online, 10/8/07

[2] Loss of air pressure key to Helios plane crash, New Scientist online, 16/8/05

No cowbells, please, we're tourists

From the tail wagging the dog department: a hotelier in the Italian Dolomites, an area of dramatic limestone peaks and pasture, has filed suit against a farmer claiming €56,000 in damages for loss of custom. How so? Because she reckons that the hundreds of cow bells on the farmer's herd are disturbing her clients peace and quiet and putting them off staying at her hotel. Even though herders in the Alps and Dolomites have been putting bells around cows necks for centuries in order to keep track of the beasts on open pastures, she says that her punters have been complaining about the noise disturbing their sleep.

To resolve the dispute, the farmer has proposed a solution based on a sort-of-similar case, where a parish priest in a nearby Alpine valley was ordered to stop sounding his church bell between 10pm and 7am during the tourist season. In the cowbell case, the farmer has declared himself willing to remove all the bells at sunset and re-attach them at dawn, which really is quite funny when you envisage it, and hasn't impressed the hotelier who's spurned the somewhat surreal compromise.

It's difficult to know what to say about a story like this, other than to shake your head sadly at the crass ignorance and stupidity of some people when they go abroad and expect the locals to bow and scrape to their every tourist whim. I've been to the Alps and Dolomites a good few times, and the sound of cows clanking away is as integral to the area as flower-festooned pastures (created and maintained by millennia of animal grazing), dramatic heart-stopping peaks, and cosy mountain rifugi. It can grate at first (do cows get tinnitus, I wonder?) but you very soon get used to it. If homo turisticus gets the hump, the only reasonable thing to say is that this is how people have lived in the area for centuries, and if it gets on your tits then go somewhere else.

Dolomiti, guerra a mucche e campanacci. La Repubblica Online, 3/8/06.

Terrorism in the Lebanon

Here's a short commentary from the Misteri d'Italia newsletter, written by left-wing Italian journalists, that sums up my feelings on the destruction and death being wrought by the Israeli military on the long-suffering Lebanese people. The last line has it exactly: between the terrorism of Palestinian extremists and that of the Israeli military there is no difference at all.

As for why Israel is doing such smiting, the only thing for sure is that the reasons it's given up to now for its actions are pretexts [2] that are literally incredible, and one can only suspect that the whole thing was cooked up with the Yanks long before the taking prisoner (soldiers don't get "kidnapped") of the two Israeli soldiers in a Hizbollah cross-border raid. This whole thing has the dark dabs of the Yank neocons all over it, no doubt part of yet another grand plan for a "new Middle East" ^TM hatched in the febrile minds of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al - it's simply not credible that Israel would have launched such a major operation without explicit approval, if not direction, from the US. Whatever the Machiavellian rationales behind the action, the reality is lots and lots of dead people - that is the reality of realpolitik, for which none of its authors are ever held accountable.

Una tragedia di dimensioni spaventose con centinaia di vittime innocenti, soprattutto civili e soprattutto donne, vecchi e bambini. Ogni giorno in Libano le bombe israeliane si comportano come i kamikaze palestinesi quando esplodono tra la folla. Ma se i secondi sono considerati a tutti gli effetti dei terroristi, le bombe con la stella di David hanno un che di neutro, di fatale, di predestinato, quasi di necessario.

E invece quello di Israele nel Libano, dove gli Hezbollah sono solo un parte minoritaria della popolazione, è vero e proprio terrorismo di Stato. Identico l’effetto delle bombe israeliane sui civili libanesi a quello cui mirano gli uomini bomba palestinesi quando colpiscono i civili israeliani. Identica anche la finalità ultima dei due gesti: terrorizzare per piegare, domare, isolare l’avversario.

Eppure, agli occhi del mondo, il kamikaze palestinese è un terrorista. La bomba israeliana che sfregia, strappa, macella e maciulla no: quello è un atto di guerra necessario, anzi di autodifesa.

Anche se le parole sanno distinguere, le bombe umane o no uccidono allo stesso modo.

Due pesi e due misure servono solo a perpetuare i massacri.

Se finalmente si dicesse la verità a qualcosa servirebbe.

Noi lo diciamo: tra il terrorismo dell’estremismo palestinese e quello dell’esercito israeliano non c’è alcuna differenza. [1]

[1] Misteri d'Italia Newsletter 112, 30/7/06
[2] How can 'terrorism' be condemned while war crimes go without rebuke? Guardian, 31/7/06.

Remember to zip up your rucksack...

...before you get on your motorbike. That's the moral of the story which appeared in La Repubblica's online edition today, which told of a major traffic hold-up on a motorway near Taranto, in the heel of Italy, caused not by a traffic accident but by "manna piovuta dal cielo" - manna raining from heaven. The rucksack of a motorcyclist had come undone, and from it fell some €20,000 of cash, to the astonishment and delight of motorists. Naturally, despite it being a busy motorway, drivers screeched to a halt and helped themselves to as much of this "manna" as they could before legging it. By the time the cops reached the scene, where the motorcyclist had realised his balls-up and was frantically scrabbling to recover as much of the cash as possible despite the strong wind, only €7,000 could be recovered. The biker himself was removed to the local copshop where he unconvincingly, to the cops anyhow, maintained that he was on his way to buy a car from a local dealer and that the wodge of notes (some £14,000 at today's exchange rate) was because he had to pay in cash. A bit like the money from heaven scene in the old screwball movie "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World".

Motociclista perde lo zainetto volano banconote, strada nel caos. La Repubblica online, 29/5/06

Zombies fight back!

I don't play computer games these days, not because I turn my nose up at them, or think that they're not a patch on the games I used to play in the 80s (Galaxian, Centipede, Donkey Kong, and the wonderful Escher-esque Marble Madness), but simply because I just don't have the time. Games these days seem to be 'life experiences' that you have to spend every waking leisure hour at in order to get to grips with them. Worse, you have to take them seriously. Sim City, so I'm told, is the bee's knees, the dog's bollocks, the kipper's knickers, but I just can't face the prospect of spending hours every night learning how to play it, then nurturing my little Sims with loving care.

Not to mention the networked multi-player games. Even back in the super-nerdy days of the early 80s when bearded speccy code jockeys would play dungeons & dragons (the original concept, not the Dungeons & Dragons ^TM © franchise) text games from midnight to 6am on mainframes, multi-user games have been 'life-encompassing', not to be played by anyone with any sort of social life or who just likes a drink down the pub. Now they really are 'whole life experiences' which take over the player - a friend and colleague, a closet computer nerd herself, was recently made a Xbox widow by her new hubbie who would spend all his spare time wandering around the house wearing a headset and playing with gamers from all over the world. He quite literally had no time for her.

No, the last game I played with any seriousness was the magnificently-quirky, yet bloody hard, Lemmings, which was a big hit in the late 80s. I loved the fun, and the seriously weird and sadistic landscapes the lemmings were released into, and from which you had to rescue them. The nice thing about the game was that you could just play it for as long or short a time as you wanted, so it didn't take over your life, and you could get down the pub for closing time. What appealed to me the most, though, was the sheer sense of fun and the wicked imagination of it, in marked contrast to the rote, and increasingly bloody and reactionary, shoot-'em-ups that dominated games at that time. For that same reason, my previous favourite game was Marble Madness, for its sheer imaginative innovation, and for making me laugh.

Now, over 20 years since I last played any game other than Minesweeper (thanks a feckin' bundle for that mindwashing drudgefest, Microshite), I'm finally tempted to splash out on a game and a graphics card to play it, having read about Stubbs the Zombie (or "Rebel without a pulse"). Have you always thought that zombies got a hard time? Have you felt sympathy for them as the arrogant gun-toting toerags in Night of the Living Dead and its sequels mowed them down, then rejoiced in grim satisfaction when those same toerags were undone by their own cleverness and complacency and become brainfood? Have you ever thought, "hey, those zombies were real people with real lives, so give them some respect"? If you have, then Stubbs the Zombie is for you. Instead of playing the part of yet another gun-toting toerag wasting the undead (sorry, "life-challenged"), you are the zombie. Your mission in (un)life? Snacking on brains, and boosting the numbers of your brethren. As a review in Personal Computer World put it:

Stubbs the Zombie has an unashamedly silly premise. You play a semi-decomposed, re-animated corpse let loose in a city with one single-minded aim; to eat as many human brains as possible and thus propagate yourself into a swelling zombie horde.
[...]

As a zombie, there are several ways to dispatch your victims. You can simply grab them and tuck into their brains there and then.

Alternatively, you can use a number of repellent 'weapons' such as a deadly form of flatulence or a kind of grenade that involves dipping into your own innards and hurling a putrid organ at your foes.

When the joke starts to wear thin you can always tear off an arm and send it creeping over to a human, whereupon you can possess your victim and control him, making him shoot all his human counterparts with a range of more traditional firearms.

There's even a bit of anti-corporate satire as the city of Punchbowl, the zombie feeding ground, is just the sort of neo-fascist gated enclave that has sprung up all over the US of A, in which the moneyed elite try to keep out the great unwashed riff-raff. It's such a simple table-turning idea that it's a wonder no-one's ever thought of it before. If the game's half as funny as the idea then it's got to be worth a pony of anyone's money. Hell, it even has it's own soundtrack album with The Dandy Warhols, Raveonettes and other, like, 'happening' bands, man - that's one up on the Sims, I know.

Now, time to find a half-decent graphics card...