David Penberthy and some deep sugar frostie thinking to get the mental and dental decay working for the weekend ...

(Above: say what?)

The Australian media theorist resident at the pond once said that the media has no message, and if it did it would be better off using a telegram, except telegrams are no longer with us these days.

I'm not sure what that really means but it seems a suitably disingenuous, misleading way to start a column about the condition of fuckwittery: that is, the state of being up others for being up themselves, when it's actually a handy way disguise the fact that you're up yourself.

Hang on, hang on, I feel a plagiarism suit coming on. Those beginning pars sound a lot like David Penberthy sounding off in The Punch in Bourgeois wankerdom and Friends of the ABC:

The American media theorist Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. I’m not really sure what it means but it seems a suitably pretentious way to start a column about the condition of pretentiousness; that is, the state of being up one’s self, a show pony, a poseur.

That's Penberthy's intro to a piece of raillery about the ABC, and it immediately heads off into drollery of the most inimitable minion of Murdoch kind:

The particular class of poseurs I would like to discuss today belong to a group called the Friends of the ABC. I used to live among their number while a resident of the People’s Republic of Leichhardt, in Sydney’s groovy and organic inner west. It’s a terrific part of Australia, marred only by the presence of an old Volvo on every street bearing bumper stickers saying “No Aircraft Noise”, “The Goddess is Dancing” and “Hands off our ABC.”

Actually it isn't Volvos, it's an abundance of four wheel drives in narrow streets, but you see Penberthy has a chip on his shoulder:

So that people didn’t think less of me, at neighbourhood barbecues I would tell folks that I worked in a laboratory rubbing cheap cosmetics into the eyes of bunny rabbits, rather than admitting to editing The Daily Telegraph.

The man who routinely published Piers 'Akker Dakker' Akerman and encouraged the noisome Tim Blair to fill up the digital ether with blather? Ten years working in a leper colony might see some forgiveness.

Well the rest is a tiresome piece about ABC programming, the kind a journalist like Penberthy can knock up in his sleep (come to think of it, it has all the qualities of a piece written with the aid of valium, or designed to produce a valium effect).

That's until we get to the real punchline. You see the ABC has committed a mortal sin, and it involves sport:

If there’s a theme here it’s that the ABC often seems to be home to two competing cultures, one which is devoted to serving a mainstream audience and one which is deeply iffy about the mainstream. It’s for this reason that the ABC is currently on the receiving end of richly deserved criticism in two footy-mad states, WA and SA, over its plans to axe the broadcast of local Aussie Rules games.

Oh noes, not plucky mighty double blues Sturt up agains redoubtable roosters North Adelaide. Quick, someone bring me a whiff of smelling salts, I feel faint.

Poor old Penbo begins to foam at the mouth at this perfidy:

Both the WAFL and the SANFL still command good crowds and decent TV audiences.

Uh huh. Well we're indebted to World Footy News - a place we don't regularly frequent - for this insight into the SANFL:

The two AFL clubs started to slide down the ladder, the crowds started to fall, the finances fell quicker, TV ratings have slipped. The SANFL began to bail out Port Adelaide and even the Adelaide Football Club posted a 2010 loss. The SANFL reached the end of its credit line, Port's situation worsened, a low point was reached. (here)

But in the campaign to keep football on the ABC in WA, some compelling figures were led:

WAFL telecasts are understood to be the highest-rating sport on the public broadcaster.

Each televised WAFL game attracts about 100,000-150,000 viewers and costs the ABC between $30,000 and $60,000. Last year's Grand Final thriller between Swan Districts and Claremont drew an estimated 426,000 viewers. (Call for Aunty to hold off axe on WAFL coverage).

Uh huh. So it seems there's a simple solution that will satisfy everyone. Let the SAFNL disappear into oblivion, and since the WAFL is such a raging telly success, let the commercial networks pick up the broadcasts and give the games a spin. After all, they robbed the ABC of everyone sport that remotely looked like turning a buck ...

Did the pond once again hear the sound of crickets?

Actually it's the sound of rampant socialism, because like any ranter with a pet peeve, Penberthy thinks it's the duty of the ABC to cover what he likes, and he's bloody Marxist about it.

Didn't that reference to bourgeois wankerdom in his header give you a clue to his radical revolutionary socialist proletariat roots?

Under the ABC’s charter, as evidenced by a brilliant radio program such as Grandstand, the broadcaster is obliged to cover significant sporting events, especially for people in the country unable to travel long distances to see their club play.

The fact that the broadcaster got to a point where it would even consider axing these programs suggests that the toffs and elitists have got the upper hand, and that someone needs to kick the people with the berets out of the board room and simply stick the charter under managing director Mark Scott’s nose.

Don't you just love it when a minion of Murdoch is revealed to be nothing more than a humbug socialist intent on having his own pet shows on the ABC and to hell with the rest? Worse still, dressed up as agrarian socialism, and sounding just like Dad Rudd out of On Our Selection ...

Why it's as perfect an example of lumpenproletariat wankerdom as could be imagined, complete with flip flops and zinc cream and an esky full of tinnies. The tosser lines about toffs, elitists and berets in board rooms are just the icing on the silly git moo cake ...

And so at last it stands revealed why Penberthy is so agitated about the Friends of the ABC:

The fact that we have, until today, heard nothing from the so-called Friends of the ABC about this issue ...

Oh the cruel callous indifferent derelict fiends

... when they almost went on a hunger strike about the proposed axing of a Radio National program about vexed theological questions with an audience of nine, shows that they too are out of step with the mainstream, or perhaps too busy putting new bumper stickers on their Volvos to care about something as silly as sport.

Well it's a light hearted way to head into the weekend, knowing that Penberthy is just as much a tosser as anyone calling for live coverage of macrame knit ins, or the annual marathon epic crossing of the great dividing range by frogs ...

We look forward - since it seems such a sure fire commercial proposition - to the Murdoch rags in the BAPH states sponsoring the ongoing coverage on television of noble provincial regional football teams going about their business.

Perhaps it's time to promote the broadcasting of curling? And what about the lawn bowls, which so outraged Bronwyn Bishop and Kelly O'Dwyer? (Lawn bowls petition to pressure ABC).

Perhaps the Northern Daily Leader might even show Group 4 football matches, since the ABC seems to find them of limited televisual appeal?

One thing's for sure. The notion of getting out and playing sport, instead of wasting a life indoors watching semi-amateurs go about their business has long flown out the window ...

Thank the absent lord the minions of Murdoch haven't got their hands on ABC programming ... or we'd be sitting around all day watching tiddly winks and pub darts and billiards and horse racing and the trots and the dogs and half-baked provincial soccer matches from the toe of Italy (oh wait, that's SBS).

Now if we can only rid ourselves of vexatious moaning, whining, whingeing journalists, at least the ones who think that the people of Leichhardt should give a flying fuck about the fate of the SANFL, or vice versa, that the tigerish people of Glenelg should give a stuff about the fate of the Sydney Tigers ...

But it brings us to another end of week highlight, and inevitably it involves the anonymous editorialist at The Australian, showing yet another lumpenproletariat chip on the shoulder in Fruit loops can be dangerous.

As always, the anon edit is agitated and upset about the arrival of the nanny state, this time in the matter of cereals full of sugar, salt and fats dressed up as healthy, when in fact they are the purest, drossiest scum bucket forms of junk food known to humanity.

But the rant of the anon edit at last provides a way forward:

By the time the legal battles with companies defending the right to market their products are resolved and the lawyers' bills settled, today's tubby tots will have waddled soberly into their teens and 20s, cosseted by traffic-light colour codes on food, health warnings on alcohol bottles, plain cigarette packets, compulsory sun hats and safe playgrounds.

Yep, it's time to bring back unsafe playgrounds. For too long kids have refused to accept personal responsibility. Let's face it, if you can't handle the monkey bars, you deserve to end up a contender in the Darwin Awards. And as for compulsory sun hats, they should be banned at once. Children should discover in due course the personal growth they experience while having melanomas cut out of their skin ...

As for smoking, children should learn at an early age that smoking a fag behind the dunny is a wildly attractive social life, and leads to the exciting prospect of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema to you) in old age.

As for health warnings on bottles of alcohol, the pond has decided to campaign for a skull and crossbones, with a pirate shouting out the beguiling invitation: aye me hearties, get as pissed as parrots, and kill off as many brain cells as you can while you're young, because we need to train you down to the level required to read Murdoch rags ...

You see the nanny state is everywhere:

... the social police will be free to switch their attention to cutting speed limits, banning high heels, putting allergy messages on cosmetics and warning magazine buyers of the risks of paper cuts and reading in a poor light.

Uh huh. But what about that warning we propose for all Murdoch rags advising that reading the anon edit at The Australian on a regular basis can leave you brain dead, or at least twenty points down on I.Q. within two months, as proven by clinical trials ...

Naturally the anon edit resorts to the personal, parental, family responsibility riff, as everyone does when it comes to the right to shovel crap down consumers, aided and abetted by commercials.

Well it took the pond years to shake a sugar addiction begun by eating sugar frosties and coco pops in the morning, a most perverse outcome for good old John Harvey Kellogg, who started his empire on the basis of a fetishist devotion to vegetarianism, nutrition, enemas, exercise, sexual abstinence and warnings about the dangers of onanism.

Talk about an engaging fruit loop, especially when he argued that nuts would save the world.

Sadly it turned out that these days nuts can mainly be found writing for the Murdoch press, whether demanding the ABC cover regional football matches of absolutely no interest to the world, or demanding that speed limits be abandoned, the right for women to have their feet bound be allowed to make a come back, and cosmetics full of allergy generating materials be sold as a matter of the free market at work (and don't expect any explanatory warning labels. You're on your own in the bid to become a winner in the Darwin Awards).

Of course all this blather about personal responsibility depends on a couple of notions.

Television commercials don't work, and they simply can't persuade or incite people to a course of action. Golly, will someone tell the industry, marketeers, manufacturers, retailers and the like that they're totally wasting their money.

And free markets mean you no harm, because everything they propose to you will do you no harm if taken in moderation, because free markets are caring, compassionate and ethical.

Uh huh. I can see why the tooth fairy had to call often at your home, and I do hope the dentures you got - after a little time on the public waiting list - are a comfortable fit.

Now how about lighting up so we can burden the public health system for a decade or two with slow remorseless suffering, full of oxygen bottles and cramped breath, until death becomes a merciful release.

Then you can send a note of thanks to the chirrupy anon edit blathering on about personal responsibility, as if that's the simple-minded answer to matters of addiction ...

Damn it, how those cardigan wearing nanny state do gooders ruined the world by banning footy and this kind of ad ...