(Above: flashback to Nicholson in 2008, here).Here at the pond we're trying to ween ourselves off the Murdoch rags, like an infant trying to overcome the inconsolable loss of breast milk, before the price of breast milk spirals out of control and we have to make do with Woolies home brand.
As the commentariat prepares to disappear behind the paywall, we wave a fond farewell, while consoling ourselves with the idle notion that there's plenty of other stuff to read on the full to overflowing intertubes.
Like Stephen Mayne's stirring of the possum in Hun comments reveal: News Corp 4th worst performer in ASX50:
The shortlist would be very long indeed. The low point will probably be coverage of Friday’s AGM at Fox Studios in Los Angeles when record protest votes will be recorded against the directors and the remuneration report.
The News Awards? Coming soon to an antipodes near you?
Yep, that's where News Limited awards awards to inhouse players deserving of awards, in a way that makes the AFI Awards look like some kind of standard for excellence.
The Awards culminate in a black tie presentation dinner attended by News Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch to which all finalists, their partners, and News Limited editors are invited.
The dinner rotates each year to a different city. In the first year, 2005, it was held in Adelaide; then Melbourne and Canberra. In 2011, it will be held in Sydney.
Oh Sydney, huzzah, hurrah ...
Is there something pathetic, tragic, perhaps even sordid about an organisation making in house awards to in house employees (with cash prize pool), without reference to external competition?
You betcha, but when you're into navel gazing to the point where you can see your fundament, it must all seem perfectly normal ...
And as well as the cash prizes?
Remind you of anything?
"Comrade," said Snowball, "those ribbons that you are so devoted to are
the badge of slavery. Can you not understand that liberty is worth more
than ribbons?"
Poor Mollie, she did so love her ribbons, but hey it's just another sad day on Animal Farm, and luckily Mollie came to understand you have to leave the farm to get to wear the best ribbons ... (meanwhile, over at the Walkleys - who cares?)
Orwellian moment aside (here's a dollar for the swear jar), thanks to the Hamster Wheel - watch out for the pop up ad - we learn that if we'd been properly devoted to The Australian, the heart of the nation, we could have stayed up to date with the story of a dwarf porn star who was Gordon Ramsay's double being found dead deep in an underground chamber by Ministry of Agriculture experts ahead of a planned badger-gassing program ... or at least according to the lizard Oz's reliable source, The Sunday Sport. (Gordon Ramsay's dwarf porn double Percy Foster dies in badger den).
Yep, thanks the hamsters - the new Media Watch - it turns out the heart of the nation is into a bit of grubby tabloid smut, and we thought we were farewelling a high flown broadsheet ... now blowfly or porn dwarf blown ...
Well at least reading about dwarf porn stars dead in badger doo dah is more fun than reading Greg Sheridan's rant Julia Gillard's great leap backwards to the trashy 1970s.
As well as a style guide, is there an in house off the rack rant guide, wherein all the old favourites hated by News group think can be assembled in a slightly new order, to suggest original thinking at work, and then battered with a piece of 4 x 2?
As if there's something trashy about the seventies, when they were in fact a time for a creative flowering, a musical nirvana, unprecedented since perhaps the Renaissance, and culminating in the Village People ...
As always, Sheridan gets himself into a lather over all things union, as well as Green, and then unloads this sort of nonsense:
The Qantas brand, one of Australia's few national champions recognised internationally in any industry, is being systematically trashed by savage, irresponsible union action in support of wage and conditions claims far more excessive than those in comparable airlines. It takes decades to build up a good reputation but it can be destroyed fairly quickly. The unions apparently think Qantas will always be profitable because of its de facto protection on domestic routes and because no government would ever allow it to go out of business.
Actually the trashing of the Qantas brand began in earnest with Geoff Dixon, and if Dixon had been able to have his way, and hand the airline over to the asset strippers, it would already be out of business (ah the good old days, How Geoff Dixon's millions grounded Qantas, Qantas ex-boss paid $11m for 5 months work).
Now Alan Joyce is continuing the grand tradition, determined to turn Qantas into BA, or perhaps Aer Lingus, one of the wretched cost cutting airlines that wake passengers up to sell them stuff ...
The notion that Qantas somehow remains a national brand - when its pilots get based in New Zealand and its maintenance is done somewhere, anywhere in Asia, and management is planning to get everything it can offshore and into low cost operations - could only belong to Sheridan and Qantas management.
The years of mismanagement have produced a resentful, fearful staff with the cabin manners of a BA crew, and now the physical operations of the airline are coming apart at the seams, and to imagine it's all the fault of the unions, a la Sheridan, is cosmically comic. The pond now flies Singapore Airlines and Virgin, and so it goes ...
If you want a more accurate guide to the shenanigans at Qantas, give up the ideological zealotry of News Corp, and take to reading Ben Sandilands' blog Plane Talking ... think of it as part of the weening ...
And remember, there's always Paul "Field Marshall Grumpy" Sheehan, now doing two tours of duty a week at Fairfax ... yes, you can still get your commentariat fix, along with milk and weetbix, without paying for it.
Today you'll be astonished to learn that Sheehan's a resentful rugger bugger follower venting his spleen yet again with In the cutthroat world of sport, it's the simple gestures that tell a lot ...
After meandering through some thoughts about New Zealand's unhealthy fixation with and dependence on ruggering, Sheehan comes up with these splendid insights:
If some of the All Blacks persist in ending this latest version of the haka with a throat-slitting motion, they will be using a very big stage to remind people the Maoris once engaged in unspeakable conduct, which we don't discuss any more.
Say what? The Maoris invaded England, took over the land, domesticated the natives, and added them to the Great Maori Empire? Who knew, but if that's the case, it certainly was unspeakable conduct, especially as they preferred to use guns and canons to knives and clubs and spears ...
But we won't discuss that sort of unspeakable conduct any more because it would be unspeakably stupid to do so, and instead we can return to the unspeakable Sheehan:
I'll simply allude to this by quoting the journal of Captain James Cook: ''There was not a man aboard Endeavour who, in the event of the ship's breaking up, would not have preferred to drown rather than be left to the mercy of the Maoris.''
Indeed. Probably in much the same way as Indians would have preferred to have stayed home than turn up at a religious festival in the Punjab and become an extra in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Enough already. We could list all sorts of British massacres, including the Boston one and the routine maltreatment of the Irish, up to and not limited to Bloody Sunday, with all sorts of people explaining how they'd rather not be left to the mercy of the British empire, but that would only cause Sheehan to froth on about lazy Celts.
Instead we looked up the actual meaning of the haka in its very own wiki:
In the run-up to the first All Blacks Test of the 2006 Tri Nations at Jade Stadium in Christchurch against Australia, the NZRU completed their review, and concluded that the gesture had a radically different meaning within Māori culture and haka traditions, indicating the drawing of "hauora", the breath of life into the heart and lungs. And so "Kapa o Pango" was performed, complete with the final gesture, before the Australia test. (here)
Say what? It's about breathing life into heart and lungs? No wonder generally grumpy Sheehan was so grumpy ...
I expect the All Blacks will dominate Sunday's final but New Zealanders should remember two things: about 96 per cent of the world does not care about rugby; and the violence suggested by throat-slitting gestures has no place in sport or sportsmanship, especially in the national colours.
Indeed, which reminds the pond that about 99% of the world doesn't care about the opinions of Paul Sheehan, and the nonsense he parades has no place in sports commentary, especially when he uses said nonsense to deliver back handers to Maoris by returning to the nation-building days of Captain Cook ...
Was he being richly satirical, wonderfully post modern, suitably ironic?
No, never, just tone deaf in the inimitable Sheehan style, but at least Maoris and New Zealanders in general can feel at one with lazy Celts, and greedy thieving Greeks in knowing that they've been Sheehaned ... (warning, offensive words in Urban Dictionary at other end of link) ...
Take it away Martin Tupper:
And England, now avenge their wrongs by vengeance deep and dire,
Cut out their canker with the sword, and burn it out with fire,
Destroy those traitor regions, hang every pariah hound,
And hunt them down to death, in all hills and cities ‘round.’
Cut out their canker with the sword, and burn it out with fire,
Destroy those traitor regions, hang every pariah hound,
And hunt them down to death, in all hills and cities ‘round.’
Oh okay, you too Dickens:
Watch out Maoris, if that's how the British might feel empowered to treat Indians living in India, what might they do to you?
Oh wait, it's France and New Zealand in the final ... so it goes ...
(Below: part of Paul Sheehan's rich fantasy life?)
Sheridan's like an old sound system. His Master's Voice.
ReplyDeleteSheehan was, of course, very, very skeptical about that magic water, wasn't he?
How did these dills ever get published?
Sheridan on the Greens:
ReplyDelete"These forces represent a broad stream of essentially nihilist philosophical rejection of modern Western society and, as in the 70s, are given massive assistance by taxpayer-funded cultural organisations such as the ABC."
Mind-boggling. Environmentalism as anti-Western nihilism. Sheridan's bookshelf must exclusively contain Cold War era tomes written by American conservative scholars (and the old P. Kelly tract).