You may be interested to note that tradition has it that the numbers who turn up on each side (red vs blue) gives an indication of the strength of the political parties. And to add to the comparison, during the year, there was a small number of prominent defections from the blues side to the reds side… these were elevated on a pedestal on the reds side… but for each defection from the blues side there were about 10 defections from the reds side who did not like the way they were being treated (as second class to those new arrivals)!! The marc in this video tells the story… kazin tal-imlaqtin… http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ieznIeEyFbc

…which reminds me of the partit tal-imlaqtin!

Just as I said, he doesn’t fit in with such hamallagni. He just looks at the crowd and tries to sing along so as to be seen as going along with all the rest.

That’s what I thought! He doesn’t seem to fit in.

.. and being whipped for this sacrifice.

[Daphne – Maltese men of a certain age are so very trying. You really have to learn how to talk to women without being condescending, flirtatious or making innuendos. Just pretend that we’re other men – that should do the trick.]

You’re wrong. I know tal-Pepe. Don’t let me add more.

[Daphne – Add away, though please not by mentioning the sort of grown men who used to get drunk at Sliema and Neptunes waterpolo match victory celebrations because I’ll only yawn.]

Fejn kien? Taht xi vara? Jew igerfex fl-iskip ta’ Muscat biex forsi isib l-iskart ta’ Ray Azzopardi to make Ronnie ‘jaliss’?

… and you’re special.

[Daphne – Obviously, because if I were not, there would be lots more people doing this job and I would be able to spend a couple of months on the beach in the Seychelles. As it is, I feel in duty bound to plug the gap in the market because nobody else appears inclined to do so, though at times I feel like the boy in the story with his thumb in the dyke. No, not that sort of dyke, but this kind http://www.pantheon.org/articles/l/little_dutch_boy.html%5D

You’ll be surprised.

[Daphne – No, I won’t. Tal-pepe people get into that kind of thing as outsiders who are consciously slumming it and who see it as a form of ‘look how cool I am’ rebellion. That means they are either very young or total losers who are still behaving at my sort of age and older the same way they behaved when we were 20. And there are very, very few of those. Their defining characteristic is not that they’re tal-pepe but that they never grew up. A bit like Allan Gatt, I suppose – not that he’s tal-pepe.]

At least for the first time this year in Malta the Blue party had the upper hand.

I am sure Cyrus had no idea what the Hamrun festa is all about but since the Feast of St Gaetan is a tradition for the One crew to attend in the Red Party, ( their first transmission was exactly done from Hamrun during the feast some 15years ago), he went along with his new friends.

By the way this also fits exactly into the picture since early this year, the red club made Joseph Muscat their Honorary President (I still have to figure out the reason yet, surely not from a musical point of view).