The Boomtown Rap

You know, don’t you, you mostly taciturn hordes of Boomtown Rap faithfuls, that my default position is to support the little guy in any stoush with management? Oh believe it. My experience of managers is almost entirely negative. They seem to me a loathsome breed in general: small on EQ, big on arrogance and self-regard, prone to blame-shifting, defensiveness and rationalisation while projecting these same flaws on to subordinate adversaries (and, by contrast, licking the arses of their superiors regardless of the shit that comes out of them)… I could go on, but you get the idea. Read the rest…

‘World news break’ from thewest.com.au – Dude does donkey and horse. I was gratified to learn late in the article that at least he doesn’t have a “stable address.”

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). Read the rest…

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:

Steerewth! Looga dem fangs! The grey nurse boasts a fearsome dental display awright. You gotta be grateful they’re on the edge of extinction. Read the rest…

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:

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.

Read the text that links to the pic of the lightfingered dark foreign kid ripping off One Of Us, and 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!

Bewdy. Ed’s gone for it. Time for a coffee.

I acknowledge from the outset that I am no fan of The West Australian newspaper. This rag has peddled blatant pro-conservative propaganda in the guise of an “Editorial” for as long as I can remember. Not to mention their “feature writers” like the big-headed, self-righteous arch-conservative foghorn, Paul Murray (although, one upside of having Murray around is this crack-up of a thread from local blog The Worst Of Perth).

Indeed, the anti-ALP bias of The West Australian was so extreme in the lead-up to the recent WA state election that in a post-victory interview, outgoing Lib Matt Birney was moved to chastise the West journos for carrying on a personal vendetta against ALP ministers who had raised their ire during the Carpenter reign. Birney is not known for handing the ALP any bouquets. Hats off to him for speaking up. It is some measure of the extremity of The West’s bias that he – a political beneficiary of their propaganda – should feel moved to speak out publicly as he did. Read the rest…

Last month, The West Australian’s West Weekend Magazine food critic, Rob Broadfield (whom I lauded in a previous post), wrote a business-buster of a critique of the Little Cloud restaurant in Peppermint Grove. His review was so withering, I could have felt sorry for the chef were it not for three factors.

The first was this remark of Broadfield’s that so filled me with mirth that I had no room left for other emotions:

The salmon dish was like Tourette syndrome on a plate. Its many flavours and textures, none of them agreeable, were shouting and yelping away at each other in a cacophony of uncontrolled chemistry. Read the rest…

On 60 Minutes last night, we had some dippy professor, Louise Newman, asserting in relation to the Henson photographs that it is irrelevant whether the artist was intentionally eroticising his images or not, but that “if one paedophile views those images as sexually arousing and that encourages them in their behaviour, then we have a serious problem.”

This twit is head of Child Psychiatry at Newcastle University. Which doesn’t say much for the standards of academe in Newcastle, or, perhaps, for the affirmative action policy that – surely! – put the good prof in her seat. Read the rest…

For those who have not bothered to google for the blog where the Troy Buswell quokka-kicking rumour originated, click here for the home page of the offending blogger, Matt Hayden.

Further down in my post (in blue) I’ve published in its sorry entirety this wanker’s stupid and thuggish quokka-soccer post incriminating Buswell, but for those who want to see it in its original context, it can be accessed here.

I am an active blogger, have long supported and promoted the cause of the citizen journo, and look upon the mainstream media with general disdain (and the Libs, for that matter). Going by the content and general timbre of his posts, the same applies to Matt Hayden.

But he has undermined the credibility of bloggers everywhere with his Buswell quokka post, which amounts to an act of blogging vandalism. The most outrageous instances of foul play can sometimes be saved by humour – sometimes – but Hayden’s quokka post was not remotely funny as it was written, and I do not believe it was intended to be. The tone of the post gave no indication that it was tongue-in-cheek as Hayden is now claiming. Read the rest…

It’s taken me a while longer to get this post up than intended. Was doing some stretches on the floor a few days ago and my lower back went into the most excruciating spasm. Have been shuffling around bent over like a reading lamp ever since, unable to tolerate more than a few minutes at a time seated in front of the computer lest my back seize up and weld me to the chair. A spinal version of that dire risk face-pulling kids are traditionally warned about of the wind changing and freezing them in some grotesque grimace for life. Gotta stand. Back in a few minutes…cre-e-e-eak…

Last post I awarded the inaugural Boomtown Rap Wooden Spoon for worst food critic in the West to one Ms Jacqui Bahr, of The Vincent Voice. Ms Bahr can take some solace in having inspired the creation of this award – at least her “winning” review was remarkable, albeit remarkably bad. Most of her food critic brethren and sistren in Perth are so mediocre, so bland, as to be unworthy of any comment at all.

There is but a solitary shining light among local food critics, representing a glimmer of hope and comfort like Gatsby’s green light across the bay to the few who, like me, actually care about such things. I refer to…drum roll… Read the rest…