Top 10 Reasons MTI's English-language Service Should Take a Holiday Break

As regular readers may have noticed, some of the more "serious" members of our little gang of websites publish stories from the English-language feed of MTI, Hungary's state-owned news wire. And by and large, it's a darn good feed, featuring at least a half-dozen interesting or useful - and usually well-translated - stories every weekday. Or at least it is until around Dec. 20th of every year, when the sudden halt in newsworthy events is unmatched by a similar halt in news production. While a newswire, like a police force, can never truly go on vacation, a look at some of the stories reported an then laboriously translated into English by our esteemed colleagues stuck in the office on Naphegy tér over the break suggests that maybe they should just plan on taking a few weeks off next time:

#1. Hungary's oldest vacuum cleaner earns award (Dec. 20)
The encroaching black hole of newslessness was nicely foretold the Saturday prior to Christmas with a piece about an 83-year-old "yet still operational" vacuum cleaner winning the gold medal in a competition organized by a local appliance maker to "raise awareness about energy waste and climate change." Incredibly, the person who presented the ancient porszívó brought along the original invoice dating to 1925. More incredibly, the piece is much more interesting and stimulating than much of what would come in the following days.

#2. PM Gyurcsany speaks more times, fewer hours in Parliament in 2008 (Dec. 28)
While Politics.hu posted somewhat similar pieces about the President's busy year and the cabinet member who blabbed the most in Parliament in 2008, not even they could care enough to publish a story about how Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány addressed Parliament 31 times in 2008, up from 29 times in '07, while his total yakking time of six hours and 50 minutes was around two hours less than the previous year.

#3. Hungarian becomes acting president of European fencing confederation (Jan. 2)
Along with water polo, fencing is a sport that Hungarians are pretty good at. Still, does the world really need to know right away that European Fencing Confederation first vice president Jenő Kamuti - "once a top fencer himself" - will temporarily step in as the boss of the EFC "for about half a year"? Not really!

# 4. Hungary wiener market grows 3pc to HUF 25bn (Dec. 30)
We - and certainly our friends at Chew.hu - are interested enough about wieners to welcome most wiener-related stories. Yet frankly, even the most fervent frankfurter-fan will find it hard to stomach a story detailing how Hungary's hunger for wieners is only growing by low single digits. Even if it reveals that sales of cheap wieners grew by 6% while "sales of pricier wieners stagnated."

#5. Police arrest Slovak car thieves in N Hungary (Dec. 29)
When we first saw this headline we had pretty high hopes, thinking it was a story about the bust of a major Slovak car-stealing ring. But no! It's just a few pathetic Slovs collared up near Salgótarján after they tried to tried to outrun the local cops in a jacked set of Hungo wheels and instead ran into a ditch. They might as well have published a story about how there was a one-hour wait to get across the Slovak border.

#6. Waiting time one hour at Serbian border (Jan. 3)
Okay, it sucks to have to wait in traffic, and "service" stories like this can be useful. But given that the article says that most of the vehicles waiting at the border for an hour contained Serbian guest workers returning to Austria and Germany, what are the odds than someone - anyone - would have seen the piece and found it helpful? They might as well have published a story about how the ice on Lake Balaton wasn't yet thick enough to safely skate on.

#7. Lake Balaton - skaters advised to wait (Jan. 3)
Because the story mentions that the police were patrolling the lakeshore to warn people off the ice, and that the number of English-only readers likely to be wandering out onto the half-frozen Balaton is probably about the same as the number of English-speaking Hungarians planning to wander into the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, this seems as pointless as a story in English about the Hungarian Foreign Ministry warning Hungarians away from Gaza.

#8. Hungarian Foreign Ministry warns against travel to Gaza Strip region (Dec. 29)
Well, at least they didn't do a story about how long you have to wait to get into one of those weapons-smuggling tunnels at the Egyptian border.

#9. Hungary PM calls for war and misunderstanding in Christmas message (Dec. 23)
Just kidding - he called for peace and understanding! Which is why this item is about as compelling as a story reporting that Christian churches around the country were celebrating Christmas on Christmas Day.

#10. Christian churches celebrate Christmas (Dec. 25)