Tuesday 25 August 2009

Hásta la Revolúcion Sempre!

A few months ago, there started popping up all over the place rather ugly hoardings advertising various achievements of the Câmara Municipal (local authority) of Lajes das Flores.


Reminding me a lot of ones we saw in Cuba with images of Che Guevara next to a tractor factory under the slogan Hásta la Revolúcion Sempre!, the hoarding pictured above brags of the re-surfacing of the side streets of Faja Grande (the main street, being a "regional road", falls within the bailliwick of the Azorean Regional Government).

The Câmara also publishes a monthly Boletim Municipal which is distributed free to every letterbox. The core of this is the minutes of the meetings of the Câmara (which I imagine to be not unlike meetings of the parish council in Vicar of Dibley) and I think distribution of such minutes is a statutory requirement in Portugal. However, Lajes' BM has expanded with the addition of a dozen or so extra pages of colour photos illustrating recent achievements of the Câmara. There's also always an editorial by the Presidente in which he talks about recent achievements of the Câmara and, in this month's edition, there's also the text of a recent speech by the Presidente in which he expatiates at length on, er, recent achievements of the Câmara: no fewer than 21 are enumerated, I kid you not.

Anyway, what caught my attention in the Boletim a month or two back was that, amongst the recent achievements of the Câmara pictured, was the putting up of hoardings advertising - you've got it - recent achievements of the Câmara.

How self serving is that? I'm surprised there wasn't an advert on the back for a Kitchen Gizmo (mit simplistico accion pumpo) - you have to be an afficionado of The Fast Show to get that gag.

3 comments:

Kathie said...

Such reports are not unique to the Conselho of Lajes (sigh) -- who may well, though, have raised the genre to a higher art form than has the suburban borough in which we reside (and this fails to take into consideration the frequent newsletters mailed out by our US Senator and Representative and state Senator and Representative, all using the governmental franking privilege paid for by us taxpayers -- always remarkable how there just happen to be a flurry of them in the weeks leading up to both primary and general elections!).

In a similar mindset, whenever I must compile a particularly long list (e.g., when packing for a trip to the Azores or California), I always write down as the first task, "Make list." That way I have something I can cross off as soon as I've finished making my list, as my reward!

But I digress...

Those of us residing in the Florentina diáspora can view recent Boletins Municipais online, at:
http://www.cmlajesflores.com (click on the Boletim button at top, if you can manage to avoid the nausea-inducing photo stream at the top, providing fish-eye distortions of the images at each end of the crawl). The latest online edition of the Lajes bulletin is for Junho de 2009.

Anonymous said...

scorchio!

Neil King said...

aren't kirchen gizmos brilliant?