In the digital age, the thing that has hurt newspapers the most is when they unlocked the gate to the mouthbreathing internet commenters. With most reputable newspapers, it’s fine. They include it more or less to look like they’re playing nice like the rest of them. The problem is when newspapers bait their readers for opinions. That’s when the walls get smeared with monkey shit. 

The Age is the worst for this. It must have something to do with generating more revenue from ads. On a slow news day, or when the opinion writers (often with the same sense of superiority as a 4chan poster) feel slighted, they’ll pick a topic, write something inflammatory, and sit back and watch the peasants squabble over it. 

They’re best at widening the gender gap. Following pop-feminist lines, they feel the best way to encourage debate and discuss ideas is to divide the sexes through broad generalisations, then selecting the more wild comments to ‘further the debate’ (my comments, mostly along the lines of ‘get a proper job, you blight on civilisation’, are never accepted). Every week there’s something on misogyny, on gays hating women, on men hating women, on women hating women. Mind you, if I’m looking for an enlightened view on the matter, I should probably look elsewhere. 

It’s gotta be the internet. Something about it gives everyone an inflated opinion on their own views (www.teampicklemouse.tumblr.com), as I don’t draw all over the newspapers in my house. And then when you start to wonder if the news pieces are being tailored to cause the most outrage… No wonder I get all of my news from memes. 

Every now and then on TV or radio some low-budget monstrosity comes through where the ad’s content is in rhyme. It’s usually for curtains or homemade stationary. 

The ad is wasted money because nothing, NOTHING in the universe is harder to sell than poetry. The money would be better spent on airing a recording of a pig being eaten by bears. 

There needs to be a short, sharp and violent message given to long-haired buffoons who wear topknots. It’s starting to happen and it has to be nipped in the bud. 

I thought there was a hard and fast rule about this: it’s all right if you’re wearing it in service to your feudal lord. So unless you wear a dress and compose syllabically restricted poetry, I don’t think you can pull it off. 

This is the problem with letting the internet tell you how to dress. It’s a slippery slope. One minute, you’re turning the cuffs up on your jeans a la Huck Finn (and I thought that there was a hard and fast rule about that too: unless you’re poling down the Mississippi, don’t do it) and the next, you’re bringing ‘irony’ to everyday wear, something that’s definitely going to make Grandpa wince. Come on, a good rule of thumb is if it’s going to make Pop write you out of the will, you’re probably not doing it right. 

When asked what sort of gift I would like, I said “Lots of cheap scotch! No! Some good stuff! No!! Some book vouchers. Do that.”

Nice to see I’ve skipped one complete refinement step. 

http://www.theage.com.au/world/reporter-lifts-lid-on-tabloids-murky-world-20111130-1o6y7.html

”In 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never actually come across anyone who’s been doing any good. Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in. Privacy is evil; it brings out the worst qualities in people. Privacy is for paedos. Fundamentally, nobody else needs it.”

It’s zingers like this that get you out of bed in the morning. Well, that and the eight children I have stuffed down a well will need to be fed.

Imagine a hundred, two hundred years ago - could anyone imagine a Brit talking like this? Arguably, they were bringing this sort of grim determination to bear in other places. Instead of invading someone’s privacy, for instance, they were invading China. 

The best thing about chaps like this is the way other journalists (I was about to say ‘real’ journalists but I didn’t want to distinguish between them to that degree) are hesitant to damn them. The system isn’t broken, they’ll say. We promise we’ll do better next time. It’s just a few bad people doing a few bad things. 

Bet there was a collective sigh of relief when the riots in the UK happened from the journos. 

PE teachers who leave their tracksuits in the cupboard and get real jobs outside the public school system. I’m fairly confident that these people are solely responsible for giving australians bad names in backpackers across the world.

I love it when I get cornered by somebody who rants about the public transport inspectors like they’re a rampaging horde of blackshirted stormtroopers riding about on ponies setting villages on fire. Like they board a train or bus and immediately set out to oppress the weak, the downtrodden, and the ones wearing glasses.

Catching public transport is fairly simple - you get on where you are and you get off where you want to go or else as close as the said transport gets to it. That’s pretty much what public transport delivers, as well as a list of times that this will happen. The traveller, on their part, pays an amount of money to use this system. It’s a social contract. Hell, it’s a contract. And the best thing about it is the people who always whinge about the inspectors are the ones that never pay for a ticket.

That’s generally when you can disregard anything they say. They’re not social champions of injustice, they’re moochers that get tapped for what is essentially theft. You just know if they were caught and the inspectors apologised profusely for asking for a ticket in the first place and they didn’t have one and the inspectors let them off, the complainer would be then pissed off about the lack of cringing servility in the inspector’s goodbye bow. You’d love to see them in a place that house real dickbag law enforcement. That or to be tossed off the moving train.

I’ve been on a ridiculous health kick lately, which has no secret or arcane tricks about it, no silver bullet or corner-rounder involved. It was this simple thing called effort.

Whoa! You say. But yeah, like healthy meals and stuff? Busting my arse with exercise? Damn you moonspeak you say!

Anyway, the amount of backhanded compliments coming my way from the women at work have been downright insulting. ‘Oh, it’s easy for you to lose weight because you’re a man.’

Maybe it’s easy because I don’t shore up my emotional vulnerabilities with cake?

The first few comments are geniunely questions/answers until that one person comments on one of the others in a snarky way and it just gooooeeeesss from there. It’s like watching monkeys eat a meal at the zoo until one of them touches the wrong banana and BAM, suddenly it’s a shit-flinging frenzy.

It goes:

Q
A
Additional A
Snarky comment on answer A(2)
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
(Thrown turds)

I drew on the ad for SJP’s latest movie that had the tagline ‘if it were easy a man would do it,’ and got roundly criticised for it. (What did I write? ‘Complain?’ Or, in Sarah Jessica’s* case, ‘jump steeplechases?’)

She’s untouchable. Women see a saviour, men see an unsustainable amount of spending given that her sole occupation in shows is blogging in her underwear. And the argument that I’d be happy to watch a show with her in it with a female if we then sit through an equivalent amount of time watching girls in bikinis operate power tools is apparently irrelevant.

Apparently making a movie about a woman who, judging by the ad, has a job, children AND an ipad is something people want to see? Maybe it’s FANTASY. Am I right? Fellas? Eh? Sigh.

Maybe this is where we need houses with twin tvs installed in the loungeroom. The top one plays tv and dvds with Julia Roberts in it eating yoghurt with her eyes closed and an insufferably smug look on her ritz. The bottom one, Fallout 3. It’s how couples can hang out together!

*She should have gone for a name change**. She has the most boring name in existence, and to top it off, tried to make it less boring by using her middle name to distinguish herself from the rest of the Sarah Parkers of the world (as though being able to neigh wasn’t enough, and as though the other Sarah Parkers weren’t ostracising her for bringing down their name). It was a good idea for the split second it took for the thought to enter her equine head that her middle name was Jessica. If you’re going to sex up ‘Sarah Parker,’ Christ, Jessica? It’s like having a beige feature wall in a white house. 

**And making fun of SJP in my environment is like making cancer jokes in an oncology ward. Or of Jesus in a church. Seriously, cheer up Jesus. Can someone paint him with a Goddamn smile?