2023 was the year of floods and war in Israel, of Barbie and the death of Berlusconi, of the implosion of the Titan and the earthquake in Syria, Turkey, and Morocco, of the women’s protest in Iran and the Caivano decree, of the boom of Onlyfans and university students in tents. We have dealt with this and much more, but as medieval intelligence wants, here is an end-of-year quiz on completely different events that followed Tempi. That’s right, a quiz. The nineties. Crosses. With answers-review and final solution to answer the mother of all questions: what timing are you?
Do you understand? No? Then you’re in the right place and you just have to start: from the bear Jj4 to electric cars, from Sudan to Elkann’s books, from Schlein to the Caorle party, find out if you are a “freshman”, “zone”, “qua la manna” or “Samsa level”, that is, the top of the range, the dream of every newspaper and the envy of every communication agency (write to us, identify yourselves, be corsairs and we will thank you as Pavese teaches).
1) Who said, “If I am born vojo a wild boar is born in Rome”?
a) Carlo Calenda aping Giorgia Meloni after the victory of the center-right in Lombardy, when “the voters made a mistake in voting”b) Ilary Blasi in the Netflix docufilm Unica in response to Totti who treated her as a “mignonette and also a thief”
c) The bear Jj4 in a cartoon by our intellectual of reference, Federico Palmaroli aka Osho
d) The anopheles mosquito, carrier of the malaria plasmodium, to the Anglo-Italian team led by Andrea Crisanti who wants to exterminate it
2) In February, the European Parliament definitively approved a stop to the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2035. Which statement below is genuine?
a) “By banning combustion engines, Europe is demolishing an industry in which it is a leader and giving it to China. With the certainty of destroying jobs without any benefit to the environment. It can’t just be ignorance.”
“More than 300,000 Europeans die prematurely every year due to air pollution. We can choose to lead the industrial revolution in a socially compatible way, holding on to our values, or we can let it be carried forward by other parts of the world.” Frans Timmermans, architect of the European
directive c) “By saying goodbye to the internal combustion engine, the EU is committing civil, political and economic suicide.” Paolo Bricco, a correspondent for Il Sole 24 Ore
d) “When I think of electric cars, I think of certain Asian megalopolises full of cars, and I ask myself: how long will it take before the combustion engine disappears from circulation? Isn’t it better to work on less polluting combustion cars instead of insisting on a product that only the inhabitants of the ZTL can afford?” Chicco Testa, an energy expert with an endless curriculum
3) Who said, “Today women are very free not to have children, while we must promote their freedom to have them”?
a) Elon Musk in Atreju
b) Minister Eugenia Roccella at the Tempi conference “To be born is to begin”c) A columnist for Stampa, Repubblica, or Domani promoting “gestation for others”
d) Elly Schlein demonstrating for the transcription of the birth certificates of children of gay couples (and against the Constitution)
4) Alain Elkann always pulls them out of his brown leather briefcase to defend himself from the hordes of Landsknechts on the Rome-Foggia railway line:
a) Financial Times, New York Times, and Robinson. Plus the second volume of Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu and in particular the chapter “Sodom and Gomorrah”
b) Il Foglio, Domani and IL. Plus Manzoni’s The Betrothed and in particular chapter XVIII
c) The Nobility of the Lineage, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Semafor. Plus an Adelphi volume in particular with a very stunted
matt petrol green cover d) Repubblica, D di Repubblica, and il Venerdì di Repubblica. Plus the first edition of The Wonderful Travels of Giuseppina Giuliano, aka “The Commuter Janitor”, in particular when she explains that to get to Foggia you have to pass through Benevento
5) Who, paraphrasing an old joke by Gaber about Berlusconi, wrote after the murder of Giulia Cecchettin: “Every male should look inside himself and say: ‘I don’t fear Giambruno in himself, I fear Giambruno in me'”?
a) Francesco Piccolo in an article in La Repubblica, explains the murder with “a hook that unites our daily behaviors and extreme facts. And that hook is: how men are made»
b) Claudio Marchisio adds a selfie in the mirror with his foot in the foreground: «The problem is men. Not all, of course, but many, too many!”
c) Adriano Celentano on Instagram where he rewrote the Ave Maria: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us murderous men”d) Massimo Giannini invites them to show Cortellesi’s film “to the boys so that they understand the sins of their fathers and grandfathers”
6) Giorgia Meloni’s ally of the year:
a) New York Times and cronies who write about the right-wing Italian government using all the clichés of the left-wing Italian press (which it then translates and relaunches and remains illegible)b) the Roman caciaronismo that still waits for the cavalry from Brussels to get rid of an unwelcome government
c)
Joe Biden, despite the intellectual somersaults of the left on the international level, Meloni has not made a mistake: good relations with the European Union, great activism in North Africa on migrants, the solution of reception in Albania. And alignment with the White House on Ukraine, Israel, containment of Chinese
hegemonism d) Elly Schlein. Lost local elections, lost regional elections, evanescent party secretariat, a political line based on fascism alarm, civil rights, radical environmentalism, and welcoming migrants. Practically the ideal cocktail for the centre-right to win
7) Who said “It’s impossible to be a woman” at the head of one of the most viral speeches of 2023?
a) Chiara Francini, in the role of host of the fourth evening of Sanremo, in her monologue against motherhood as a social
obligation b) John Cleese of Monty Python, who was asked to censor Loretta from the theatrical adaptation of Brian of Nazareth (remember Stan deciding «I want to be Loretta. It is my right as a man to be a woman”?) so as not to offend transgender
people c) America Ferrera, in the role of Gloria, to whom Barbie director Greta Gerwig entrusts the most cherished twist in Hollywood: the feminist gunman
d) British feminists when the Cambridge Dictionary updated its definition of a woman: “an adult human being of the female sex”, but also “an adult who lives and identifies as female even though she may have had another sex at birth”
8) The war in Sudan continues, with the specter of a repeat of the genocide of twenty years ago in Darfur: which ethnic groups were affected by the massacre of the Janjaweed?
a) rezigat, messiria, beni halba, taisha, habbaniya, ziyaddiya, fulbé, ja’aliyin, djawama, meidob habania, beni hussein, ateefat, humur, khuzam, khawabeer, beni jarrar, batahin, mahameed e ma’aliyah
b) fur, masalit, zaghawa, bideyat, tama, mima, berti, bargo, kanein, birgid, dajo, tunjur, berti, kuraan, erenga, kanein, barno, mararit, fellata, jebel, sambat, hadahid e gimir
c) Arapaho, bannock, Shoshone, flathead, nasi format, piedi neri, Dakota, Nakota e Lakota, corvi, gros ventre, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, and, Arikara
d) isconahua, matsigenka, matsés, mashco-Piro, mastanahua, murunahua (o chitonahua), nanti, sapanawa, nahua
9) Who won the Luigi Amicone Award 2023?
a) Susanna Tamaro and Liao Yiwu
b) Monica Ricci Sargentini and Matteo Matzuzzi
c) Antonia Arslan and Giuliano Ferrara
d) Tatevik Zakaryan and Sergio Belardinelli
10) Who is “the Marie Antoinette of the Vertical Forest throwing brioche from the top floor” of an editorial by Mario Sechi?
a) Gaia Trussardi
b) Selvaggia Lucarelli
c) Diletta Leotta
d) Chiara Ferragni
11) Also this year Tempi has published unique reports. In particular, where did we send our Leone Grotti?
(a) Nigeria and Taiwan
b) Central Africa and Iraq
(c) Bosnia and Syria
(d) United Arab Emirates and Lebanon
12) What color is Pope Francis’ down jacket that caused a furor last winter?
a) white as snow
b) yellow as the papal flag
c) rainbow like the flags of those who always pull him by the cassock
d) the Pope does not wear tamari down jackets
ANSWERS
1) Answer c. The sad story of the bear Jj4 in Trentino is just the latest in a long series of “Fantastic Beasts and how (not) to save them”: from the Hawaiian wolf snail to the Siberian woolly mammoth, up to the mosquito that Crisanti swears to exterminate, find out here how many projects created to recreate lost biodiversity have ended in tragic failures. And if you can’t read it there, it means you have to subscribe here or gift Times to a friend here.
2) Answers a, b, but also c and d. We have been writing it in all sorts of ways since 2021: as Bricco points out, the sudden, unilateral, and mandatory transition that Europe imposes on itself for environmental reasons is suicide and here you will find all the reasons together with the interview with Bonometti. In September, with Chicco Testa, Tempi began to repair the summer of eco-anxiety and the tears of Minister Pichetto Fratin, gathering voices for a “realistic agenda”. To face climate change without the latest generation crows and alarmists à la “Mr Green Deal” Timmermans – aka the Attila in reverse (where he passes only the grass grows) who left the EC to run for office in Holland -, subscribe to Tempi here or give Tempi to a friend here.
3) Answer b. During the conference in Rome, Roccella returned to some issues also touched on in the issue of Tempi’s “Women and children first” and if you want to know who was in Rome, what he is doing against the “mam maorecession” and what the billionaire Musk has to do with the crazy fixation of colonizing Mars with the obsession with the birth rate, you have to watch the conference again and participate in the next initiatives of Tempi (updates by subscribing here or by subscribing a friend there).
4) Answer to. And if you have to go to Foggia to the readings of Alain Elkann (former Mothballs Prize of the Pagellone di Tempi because more than those of Zaki, Zerocalcare, Vannacci, and Saviano his editorial utterances in the family newspaper could do so) prefer those of Tempi or suggested by Tempi in 2023, among others What is hope made of, Rice in the churchyard or A Radical Family. You have one year to make up for it and subscribe here, but only until January 31 to gift Times to a friend there.
5) Answer d, but they could have been all of them because at every latitude the despair for the murder of a girl has been reduced to gossip, trading, and selling one’s ego. A postal market of good feelings demonstrates what Vittoria Maioli Sanese explained well to Tempi when she said that the murderer of Giulia Cecchettin “is not the son of patriarchy, but, like many, the son of narcissism.” Spoiler: Tempi has dedicated the first issue of 2024 to the serious case of affectivity and violence explained to children, but to read it you must subscribe here or give it to a friend here.
6) Answer d. The leadership without a head or tail of the secretary of the Democratic Party is an advantage for the center-right, but also for Grillini, and her famous “they didn’t see me coming” is turning from a joke of pride into a malicious observation (because “after arriving, she disappeared”). But fans of the end-of-year report card of the leaders of the major Italian parties and Lodovico Festa’s “Morning Prayer” already knew this. Others just have to subscribe to Tempi here, give Tempi to a friend here, and enjoy all the Tempi newsletters: in addition to Festa, “Casca il mondo” by Annalisa Teggi, and “Cinema Fortunato” by Simone Fortunato.
7) Answer c. But as anyone who has subscribed to Times here, or received it as a gift from a friend there, knows, reality has long since surpassed fiction when it comes to answering the very banal question “What is a woman?” that hovers unresolved from Hollywood to the United Kingdom, so much so that it has become the absolute emblem of absurd contortions and lexical censorship (and arrests).
8) Answer b. Reziagat, Messina, goods, etc., were precisely the Arab tribes that organized themselves into armed bands on horseback to carry out the massacre, and if you didn’t know, or you confused the African ethnic groups of Darfur with the Indian or Amazonian tribes, it means that you have not read here or that you have to subscribe here or give Tempi to a friend here.
9) Response to, as all those who attended our party in Caorle last June and attended the award ceremony of the Italian writer and the Chinese dissident know. Journalists Ricci Sargentini and Matzuzzi are the 2022 awardees, Arslan and Ferrara are part of the Committee that awards the Luigi Amicone Award; by Tatevik Zakaryan, lawyer and director of the Antonia Arslan school in Stepanakert, now a refugee in Armenia like almost all Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, you can read the Te Deum in the December issue of Tempi, where you can also find a formidable contribution by sociologist Sergio Belardinelli on political correctness degenerated into cancel culture (taken from the Lysander substack, subscribe here, but don’t forget to subscribe to Times here or give it to a friend here).
10) Answer d, it’s Chiara Ferragni, even if she doesn’t live at the Vertical Forest but at CityLife and if you know you have the wrong newspaper, so you have to subscribe here or give Tempi to a friend here, but if you really can’t do without influencers and partisans with the sponsor here you will find a very cultured phenomenology of the Fedez case.
11) Answer, you can find here the cover story dedicated to the journey into the bloody heart of Nigeria, the martyrs’ factory, and the one from the tiny technological superpower, the object of increasingly threatening claims of the Chinese regime. Central Africa, Iraq, Bosnia, Syria, Ireland, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates have been the destinations supported in recent years, as have the 2023 trips (let’s not forget Rodolfo Casadei’s trip to Poland to tell the elections and the history of Ulm) thanks to your donations to the Più Tempi Fund. So keep donating, reading, and supporting us by subscribing here or giving Tempi to a friend here!
12) Answer d. The photo of the Pope with the down jacket as well as the interview with Schumacher, the song by Drake and The Weekend, the photos of the reportage from Ukraine at war by photographer Barbara Zanon, and other viral news were generated by artificial intelligence. 2023 was the year that forced us to ask ourselves (even in Caorle): are we really at the dawn of the era in which artificial brains will deceive us, steal our jobs, and make us fall in love? Here are all the answers (obviously only for those who subscribed here or gave Tempi to a friend there).
DIAGNOSIS
From 0 to 3 answers spot-on: Freshman timing. Yes, we know, following Tempi is difficult (houses, schools, books, cars, sheets of newspaper, etc.) but you read in one, a hundred, a thousand and you don’t take the seasonal variant, it’s small, it doesn’t dirty, it doesn’t pollute, it doesn’t make you fat, it protects the immune system from woke, it strengthens the mind and critical thinking, it counteracts free radicals but also those that bring you to Switzerland, it deals with tall and minute things, with God and industrial lubricants, you can take it on planes and electric scooters, in universities and churches, in parliament and prison, you roll it up and kill mosquitoes, it is made ethically by an inclusive and unprejudiced editorial staff (there is also a Juventus player): could it be that you haven’t subscribed yet?
Up to 6 good answers: Zone Timing. Maybe you only read online or maybe you only read paper, but to put it as Luigi Amicone put it, paraphrasing a liverish Robert von Ranke Graves, “being attached to this newspaper today is a bit like going back to the strange Christmas of 1914. When, between one massacre and another, enemies sniped each other from half a kilometer away or disemboweled each other in hand-to-hand combat, one fine day the soldiers of both sides came out of the holes infested with rats, shit, and blood. And they fraternized together. In the name of what?” Yes, in the name of what? Reply to the captain, read on.
7 to 11 apt answers: Timing “Qua la manona”. You are a friendly reader, you go in and out of the Tempi stand at the Meeting (or from the Rosetum Theater in Milan, or from Piazza Vescovado in Caorle or the Tempi. it portal) as if you were at home, you know what the red hand is, you are a black belt from Artsakh and Pakistan, the Holy Land and Myanmar, McCarthy, and Péguy, bioethics and the Bridge over the Strait, private schools and sport washing, not solo trips but always in company. And if this time we were the ones who didn’t get one right, it’s time to start: new year, new stand at the Meeting, new meetings at the Rosetum, new conferences in Rome, third edition of our party “Calling things by their name – Luigi Amicone Award” in Caorle. Keep following us and browsing us here.
12 out of 12 answers: Corsair timing Samsa level. Don’t be afraid of the force of the waves, typos, and delays of the Post Office, the flamboyant and labyrinthine period of Amicone then, and the “Crux of the Matter” section of 15 thousand characters now. You love routes against the wind, you assault every potential reader from behind, and your incitement to subscribe has a tenacity that no advertising agency and media center possesses. You know that there is no more fitting description to define the community (“Tempi is not just a newspaper, but a community”, copy Alfredo Mantovano) of journalists and readers that since 1995 has given life to Tempi than the one founded by Cesare Pavese in The Profession of Living: “They are all capable of falling in love with a job that you know how much it yields, It’s hard to fall in love for free.” Of course, you don’t understand what the hell Pavese has to do with the anopheles mosquito but you knew from the moment the bear Jj4 came out that you would have won a purely glorious and symbolic victory.