Dedaland

Stranded on an Island called TV!

I am stranded - away from home - and will be for at least one more week. I have been here since last January 7th and being a guest in my great-auntie's home I cannot force my habit on others. So while she watches TV at night, I work in front of my computer and get to listen to what she watches.

I don't know how it is in other Countries but you have to pay an annual tax of 109,00 euros in Italy for the right to own a TV and watch National Television. The ads say it's the lowest rate in Europe so I wonder how's the quality of TV shows out there.

Here it's crap!

The news

Only partially say what's going on and it's channel has its party to support so... you hear on one side that "this is happening" and on the other one "it's the exact opposite"! Journalists aren't even well prepared... one of them at the last Venice Film Festival interviewed George Clooney's friends ( Matt Damon, I can't remember - and Brad Pitt) and they both joked saying: yeah, he is gay! - his English wasn't good enough to understand they were joking!
So George Clooney was gay for a while and Italian journalists were a laughing stock on American TV for a while - they deserved it. Except at this press conference there was a guy from our Saturday Night Life who went and stripped himself and aske Clooney in marriage - and it was a prank - and this time around the Americans didn't realize it was a joke (and Italian Television was laughing about the Letterman show making fun of the fact afterwards).
Then a couple of days ago another journalist interviews Bertolaso and almost creates a diplomatic incident with the U.S.

What are you competences... how did you get your jobs, dear journalists? Why is it that the search for scoops almost creates more accidents than information?

TV SHOWS

Dancing with the Stars... I reccomend you... and now The Best Italian Ever! --- which works like a talent show but the talents you compare are the one of Saint Francis vs. Leonardo da Vinci. Not even in the same cathegory these two fellas... allow me. Put musician with musician, artist with artist, historical figure with historical figure... then you choose.
Come on! You put Battisti against Puccini! You folks out there, do you even know who Lucio Battisti is? How about Puccini?
As much as Italy loves Battisti... he cannot represent Italy as the best Italian ever... the best Italian of all times is someone who should be known in the whole wide world and make a whole Country proud.
Let's face it: it's Leonardo da Vinci. LOL
DOn't let me mention the others... Italians seem to have discovered Musicals and vowed their lives to its destructions! What a pity!

FICTIONS
My auntie only watched National Television because the others belong to someone she doesn't like... besides what goes on on National TV is still decent, what goes on that's decent in other channels... is an ill translated and ugly dubbed American tv show. (that's why you should get satelite)
So there's a sort of ER - except since we have socialized health care the doctor find out what the problem is faster and without killing the patient all the time (like House does XDD)... and so there's more room for the personal stories... except my great auntie is 86 and there's too much sex in these things and she starts going: aaah! aaaaah! (all displeased, hahahahha)
Plus she comments on everything like a supporter does to a soccer game! Which makes the show much more fun to watch!
We go to our investigative shows... like Don Matteo (where the priest and the Carabinieri find the solution together and in different ways, plus there's the God-loves-you speech in the end--- which is not too sappy though! Thumbs up for Don Matteo). Now Don Matteo is kinda like Murder, she wrote... and you begin to think that he either kills them all or brings very bad luck... or Gubbio - his home town - is a city of murderers and you should never set foot there.
Anyways the only problem with Don Matteo is that when he quotes someone, the quote is right... the source is not. So you'd find Edison quoted as Einstein XDD.

Then last night we were watching this thing called Gli ultimi del Paradiso (the last ones of Paradise)... aside from the fact you could totally see they had decided the name first and the story next (because the way the motivated the title in the story was lame). The fiction had a serious theme: people who dies while working, because safety was not respected.
There was this group of truck drivers, all friends, who are exploited by their employer and, one day, one of the drivers has an accident while unloading a truck and he ends up in hospital. He will not walk anymore and the drivers decide to take to court their case and they get a money refund. Of course while they take legal action they all loose their jobs and the story talks about how difficult it is to get new jobs, pay loans, deal with family and so on.
It would have been nice if the whole thing stopped there.

But no.

Once they get the money, they open a gas station to get more money and since they are in need for money, one of them starts an illicit and unsafe job cleaning tank trucks for his ex-employer (the one the sued). In the end all he talks about is: money money money, cannot afford to do this the right way, money money, nothing will happen to us.
This will cost the life of 3 people: his own, his friend's and a immigrant.

What was the need to turn the victim into an executioner? Was it really needed to see that sometimes people who need money cannot afford to do things safely? Isn't this like saying that employers who don't do things right have their own echonomical and personal reasons? Then what of the people who gets killed because of you?
I didn't like the second part at all. It was not the right message. We say, in Italy, it's like "hitting the barrel and its hoop" (that means you are trying to please everyone and make both sides happy without making either of them really happy).

Should I justify the fact that Freebooks didn't pay me for 2 years because they have echonomical issues? What about my problems? What about the fact that precarious jobs are not protected in any ways and you could spend 20 years going from contract to contract, with no assistance and no chance of getting an old age pension... with no raise and no promotion no matter what you do... for 800 euros per month?

No, it's more important to fight over silly things and get youth out of their homes... and leave them with nothing for the rest of their lives because there's very little room out there and old people doesn't want to leave their jobs... because pensions suck! Then you say you want to cut pensions to help out youth? Then NOBODY will ever leave the work place again... I think there's something faulty in this kind of thinking... it's shortsighted.