Frate Indovino: October Oracle

Cartoon: "Getting by, Italian art"

From this, we arrive at the timely theme, "Mi Rifuto" o "Mi Riciclo" ["I Refuse" or "I Recycle"]—

Remember the joke about the child who ran into the house: "Papa, Papa, the man with the garbage is here!"
- "Tell him we don't want any more, we already have plenty!" And we're filling up with more and more. The Tuscans say: "Pork fat was never clean," but it's true that waste from consumption has become so cumbersome and unwieldy that no one wants it, though, thanks to the Italian art of getting by, there is always someone who can profit from it. How hard it is to be like the sun, shining on the manure pit without getting dirty! Now the watchword is to recycle. Italy is starting to, but many are still upset and like Hamlet in our common dilemma: "To refuse or to recycle?" Others are playing the blame game so that many landfills are like the conscience: "clean, because unused." I come back to the bitter prophecy of Chief Seathl [Sealth; Seattle], of the Duwamish Indian tribe, contained in a letter written to the president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, in 1855: "You will die buried under your waste." We don't know whether the wise Seathl, were he living today, would refer only to landfills, or to other kinds of garbage, such as television, print media, politics, etc... but his words continue to hang over our heads like a sword of Damocles, as the sun continues to shine "on the human tragedies"

Now there's some food for thought... even if the writing style for this department is always a run-on bunch of "on the one hand/on the other hand" points, interspersed with quotes.

In one of the many small sidebar items, we find this piece of wisdom attributed to a later (naturalized) American—

L'alcool è un liquido prezioso; conserva tutto...tranne i segreti
- C. Grant

Alcohol is a precious liquid: it preserves everything... and keeps secrets