After weeks of painful struggling against all evidence, I think I will finally have to accept the fact that Italians actually approve their Prime Minister's behavior and libertine sex habits: the final proof be that they still voted for his lackeys at the last round of administrative elections. However, being a male in a male chauvinist country, I feel I am not very well represented by Berlusconi in this regard. Please consider:

• he is almost 73 years old;





• he is constantly afflicted by neck pain, which for sure must prevent him from anything but the most basic reproductory capabilities;





• he fought a prostate cancer, which certainly took a hit in his sexual performances;

Augusto Minzolini (right), director of the TG1 news program of Rai 1, the most followed public italian TV channel, is under siege in Italy, accused of hiding the news of the embarassing story of Berlusconi and the call girl Patrizia D'Addario and the surrounding affair, which continued to make headlines on World press, but was utterly absent from Rai 1 TV news for over a week.

If you live outside Italy, you read newspapers more often than Italians do. Thus, you probably are more informed about the recent scandal emerging on the private life of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's Prime Minister, than Italians. That is because the news of Berlusconi's private parties with scores of young women, paid or otherwise compensated to cheer up the leader, have never made it to italian television!

Stimulated by Michael White  (who just posted his Morning Science Quote,  "Light is the principal means by which we are able to transmit and receive information from objects around us and throughout the universe"), here is my answer, this week's Say of the Week :

"The reason why some people appear bright until you hear them speak is that light travels faster than sound".

After the Pandora vase of Berlusconi's private life got opened, there are news trickling out from it every day. In the last few days we learned that the parties thrown by the Italian premier in his billionaire villa in Sardinia, or at his residence in Rome, Palazzo Grazioli, included scores of young women that were not there by chance, but allegedly with the purpose of entertaining -offering sex- the male participants. There is, in fact, a judiciary action going on, which is trying to ascertain the declarations of a few women who participated to those parties, and who declare they were offered money.