Category Archives: Media

Food, Media, Movie Reviews, Popular Culture, Society, TV

The Boomtown Rap Awards For 2009

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Here they are again. Random, disorganised, informed by personal prejudice…just how you like it. Yes you do. YES, you DO!

Right, now that that’s established, are you all sitting comftybold two square on your botties? Then I’ll begin…

2009 Boomtown Rap Free-to-air TV Awards: The BR Bogeys

Pet Semetary Award: Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Whose idea was it to dig this rotting cadaver up, give it mouth-to-mouth and send it lurching back to TV land? I never could understand the popularity of Hey Hey even back in its halcyon days, but what do I know – exhuming it was a ratings winner. Daryl Somers proved there is plenty to eat in the afterlife. Other than that, what to say except thank God for the blackface ‘Red Faces’ skit – anything that riles Harry Connick Jnr gets my tick of approval.

Family Show of the Year: John Safran’s Race Relations. This is confessional comedy taken to its limits (until the next Safran outing). Continue reading The Boomtown Rap Awards For 2009 →

Media, Perth

Shark! Croc! Chimp!

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Journos are sensitive souls. They can sense the slightest shift in the public mood. Their livelihood depends on it. Some time early this week, their radar stopped lighting up with punters checking for hourly updates to the Victorian bushfire death toll. And after Black Saturday… well, sorry you folks up in Queensland, but floods don’t quite cut it.

Elemental disaster makes fine copy, but nothing good lasts forever, and devoid of bona fide local catastrophe, it was back to the drawing board. Thank the lawd for the tried and true. Time to haul out that old faithful – rrraaaaarrrrggghhh! – sharks! And what a sharky old week it was.

Perth’s Sunday Times online presence, perthnow.com.au, led off on Tuesday with the headline “Surgery for shark victim Nari”. Turns out Nari is a dolphin. Oh well, in the absence of any current maulings of us mob you gotta settle for what you can get.

News.com.au, not to be outgunned by a rag like The Sunday Times, countered the same day with the screamer “IT’S OVER, CANNIBAL KIDS – Killer shark siblings to breed outside mum”. Turns out the only killin’ these sharklets had been up to was of baby bro and sis. Oh well, better raid the pics library for some scary shots of mum. Voila:

grey nurse shark

Steerewth! Looga dem fangs! The grey nurse boasts a fearsome dental display awright. You gotta be grateful they’re on the edge of extinction. Continue reading Shark! Croc! Chimp! →

Media, Perth, Society

Tis The Season To Pickpocket, Falalalala la la la la

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Thieves target Christmas shoppers!

Thus trumpeted news.com in today’s morning lead story on the Perthnow site (the online presence of Perth’s trashy Sunday Times newspaper). Here’s the pic that accompanied the story:

perthnow-shoplifting-pic.jpg

Sooo, the thief is
a) black and
b) wearing an Italia baseball cap.

Well, whaddayaexpect? Wouldn’t be One Of Us perpetrating this low act during the season of goodwill…but hang on.

When you read the text that links to the pic of the lightfingered dark foreign kid ripping off One Of Us, you find it’s nothing about Christmas-specific thievery. The report cites “police records” of “more than 3000 incidents reported in WA from July 1 last year to June 30 this year.” Oh. So this news is 6 months old, then. BUT, a police spokesman is reported as warning Us “to be extra vigilant during post-Christmas sales.” Uh huh. Especially of black foreign kids, yes?

Well, no. Acting Inspector of Police Neville Beard is quoted as attributing “a significant number of these thefts” to “organised individuals or groups”. Of course, there is the possibility that he’s referring to black foreign kids hunting in well-organised packs…

More likely, though, that Perthnow had zilch in sensational reports to jag early morning browsers with and resorted to fabricating a bullshit story out of old “news”. But how to really grab ’em…that is the question.

And the answer is to engage the WASP majority by depicting One Of Us – a burdened WASP Dad-type doing his last-minute Xmas shopping – as the hapless victim of The Other. Can’t make the little shit blatantly aboriginal (bah humbug to fucking PC restraints), but dark’ll do. And a fez woulda been better than that cap, but “Italia” does the job – signifies foreign, the alien within. Good enough. And we get to retain that sense of journalistic responsibility. Bit crass, resorting to Muslim-kickin’ comin’ inta Christmas. Plenty of opportunity fer more of that in the New Year!

Time for a coffee.