Thursday 22 May 2014

The Rome Ticket Machine Scam

Women from the Roma camps on the outskirts of Roma – ah, well this is Roma as in gypsy and Roma as in capital city of Italy – have taken to standing by the self-service ticket machines in the metro and asking for a bunce as custodian of the machine. In this way they are collecting a lot of euros per day.
When the railway police try to move them on, the Roma girls kick them and scratch their faces, thus causing the security men to withdraw.
There does seem to be a policing problem in Rome. I think that part of it is that when the people behaving illegally are arrested, there isn’t much clue as to what to do with them. Britain has been much, much better at integration of people from other cultures than Italy has, and seems to get fewer problems as a result.

The Forces of Order – Rome-Style

The illegal street traders outside the Colosseum in Rome are becoming abusive, that’s what comes of calling them abusivi ambulante in Italian. People live up to their name, see.
The story concerns some off-duty policemen who tried to prevent a Bangladeshi trader from blocking the pavement and he told them to piss off. As it says so delicately in the article: ‘To make his point more convincing he lifted up a paving stone and tried lobbing it at the forces of order’. In this interaction one of the policemen was injured.
This is the ‘nth’ incident. To find another you have to go back just twenty-four hours ‘Just one day after the visit of Prince Harry’ Oh no! (I love reading the Italian press). In this incident two municipal policemen were attacked by illegal traders carrying metal bars and sticks, and would have come off very badly had the carabinieri not been on hand to intervene.
At the moment, it seems the illegal traders are winning this particular battle.

Monday 5 May 2014

Something Truly Precious Holds Its Beauty Forever

SOMETHING WEIRD ABOUT THIS PHOTO:
I scanned this in from the back page of The Economist, 19 April 2014. It’s part of an expensive full-page ad for Patek Philippe expensive designer watches.
Notice what’s odd? The two women have exactly identical teeth.
This sounds like it’ll make a Music Hall song about glamour models:
They went and Photoshopped me choppers,
Now I look even more like a freak,
. . .
At the foot of the ad it says, Something truly precious holds its beauty forever.
Which reminds me . . .
Your beautiful teeth they are most unkind,
Never bit me before but they bit me behind,
The full page from which the crop was taken: