(Above: a work by Norman Lindsay, included only for gentle men and women interested in the finer aspects of fine antipodean art. Those wishing to explore further the works of Mr. Lindsay can start here at the wiki, or head off to Project Gutenberg for one of his books. Sure it's only The Magic Pudding, but there's more to life than breasts).
"Wowser" is one of those evocative antipodean onomatopoeic words that should have wider currency. After all, travel the world, and everywhere you go you'll find wowsers.
C. J. Dennis defined it best: 'Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder'.
Like the battle against Satan and pure evil, the battle against the wowser is never ending and unceasing, without any final resolution in sight. It's as good an argument that the world is Manichean as you might find anywhere outside the Bible.
Long ago, poor old Norman Lindsay had many epic battles with wowsers, who got upset with his penchant for painting nubile nudes (or scribbling about the beneficial effects of lust), so we've used one of his paintings to illustrate this latest update on the wowser wars. (And you can do a little more reading on the origin of the word here).
The latest frolic revolves around the Australian Christian Lobby (carrying proudly its wowser status online here), which beguiled the Daily Terror into a front page headline last Friday about TV networks getting embroiled in a holy war (Wrath of God is TV's next big hit). If you head off to the ACL site you can read more than you need to know about it.
Because, you see, in their delusionary capacity for taking political action, the front page of the Terror is as good as it gets for the wowsers, never mind that online the Daily Terror is a sleazebag array of the lowest and latest forms of visual titillation available from the vast, full to overflowing resources of the intertubes.
That's why you can go off to the Terror and look at a gallery of Kate Neilson, apparently a girlfriend to a some time one time footballer named Wayne Carey, or feast your eyes on a gallery of New York fashion week eyepoppers, or pop your eyes at Megan Fox, or best of all, take a gander at worst wardrobe malfunctions (of a female kind natch). And they keep rotating them like a band of whirling dervishes. Never a moment where you can't see a tit or three.
Of course when the Terror shows a gallery of wardrobe malfunctions, they can only mean you can see tits or crutch through a sheer dress, and what a shock that is.
Dear lord, I feel faint already.
For wowsers to get traction in this kind of journal is like Christ joining a campaign to get sex off television and into the Daily Terror online where it naturally belongs and where it can generate the hits Chairman Rupert craves in this brave new world of digital content.
I also smell a bit of a rat in the Daily Terror results, published in the ACL site, so I feel no guilt about doing a spoiler.
Hmm, well I guess in one of those random sample routines, it might be possible for the wowsers to organize a vote in campaign which sees the answer spin their way. They wouldn't be so devious and deceptive would they?
Well sadly a wowser is never happy unless others are equally unhappy, so the way these poll figures skew show a mysterious and ineluctable result. Strangely they don't seem to match up with the massive ratings achieved by both the Underbelly series. Perhaps it's a case of vote against it in the Terror, then click over to watch the tits and gangsters in action up on the big plasma screen. Indeedy, the two shows were so successful that the 'tits and gangsters' formula is now being trotted out for a third series. Let's just hope it doesn't turn into Godfather III.
Because even tits and gangsters can't keep on keeping on - in the end people get bored with this kind of fare as much as they get bored watching endless variations on fairy tales about princesses marrying handsome princes wearing the right glass slippers and living happily ever after in proto-Christian bliss.
Leading the charge in eternal wowser vigilance is ACL managing director Jim Wallace, who lately hasn't been seen writing columns for the Fairfax rags, but now seems happy and busy organizing campaigns targeting smut, along with the usual nonsense about abortion, euthanasia (culture of death the ACL shrieks), a bit of Islamic bashing, the dangers of video games, and the shocking horror of atheist tirades.
Frankly if you wanted a loon pond installment every day of the week, you could do yourself a favor by trotting off to the indefatigable ACL"voice for values" website.
Well I hate to tell the hapless wowsers at ACL but the Daily Telegraph just loves shock horror stories about sex, and the more dear old Jim Wallace rabbits on about the F word (I think he means fuck), and a discipline fetish scene, and a rape scene, and the nightmare of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and the startling horror of Californication, the more the hypocritical Telly is likely to join in with his lamentations, and cluck along with sympathy and righteous indignation. Because that means SEX SHOCK SCANDAL HORROR in the front page header.
Why they might even organize a gallery so we can see the assorted tits and filthy bits of Underbelly III so we can all be shocked and scandalized even more (the one at the moment is sooh tame, there must be more to come).
So it's ever been with the yellow press and so it will ever be in the future so long as the wowsers cultivate the tabloid mind in the rest of us (naturally any tits on show will be given a discreet pastie, not to be confused or conflated with the Cornish pastie of the same name, as required, so we can all keep our minds clean).
And you know I'm always ready to join in, so I've attached a couple of sample images that were available on the Terror at the time of writing. So we know what we're talking about.
Quick rush off to the Terror, so you too can get agitated about the prevalence of sex and violence on television. But whatever you do, don't get agitated about female wardrobe malfunctions.
Oh and one last thing. The ACL is a major supporter of Senator Conroy's loonatic scheme to develop and impose a blacklist on the intertubes. By your company so ye shall know them, and so this week I vote Senator Conroy as "wowser of the week", an award which fits well with his award of internet villain of the year (and ain't it piquant to go off to Nick Minchin's press release at the Liberal Party site here.)
Boy when Nick Minchin calls you heavy handed and manic in your determination to be a censor and a wowser, you really are a solid gold wowser. Maybe even platignum, or is that a pen with a nib and a lot of red ink?
My tip? Don't like it, switch off. And leave the rest of us alone to enjoy Norman Lindsay.
(Below: Sharon Stone having a wardrobe malfunction, the Terror trolling through sites unknown to dig up a rough and ready photo of Megan Fox, and Kate Neilson beguiling readers into a better understanding that there's too much sex on television and not enough on the interweb, especially on Chairman Rupert sites. With Lindsay Lohan last of all providing a special bonus malfunction).
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