2008, I hardly knew yeAnother year come and gone. As usual I spent this New Year's celebration watching the fireworks on TV. Each one is less spectacular than the last, but at least for 2008's I was wearing pants. The best part of the annual New Years night coverage is the parade of celebrities who've had the good fortune of dying before the year is through. I find it sad that all the non-actors have their profession written under their name, as if only New Idea readers are watching.
There are a few people who I had never heard of until sometime in 2008, and if I'm lucky, I will not hear of again in 2009. Here's a handy list of those people that I'd just as soon burst my eyeballs with a rotary hammer than see in the media again.
Ms Johnson is the spokesperson/founder/puppetmaster of Bravehearts, a child advocacy group. This is a woman capable of seeing in black and white only, no mean feat considering the vagueness and sensitivities inherent in her profession. Wherever there is a possibility of media attention, Hetty will be there. She's essentially a female Tony Abbott, and just as likable.
In one short year she's managed to piss me off with a string of brainless statements, each trumped only by the next. Send a free man to prison indefinitely? Hetty said it. Confuse naked people with porn stars and call for the censorship of art? Hetty said it. Enforce censorship of Australia's Internet despite admitting that it would be ineffective? Hetty said it. Boggle!
Yet here is the real rub. Society considers those with the interest of children at heart to be infallible. When they're right, they're heroes, and when they're wrong, at worst their motivations are understandable. If I oppose every word that comes out of her rabid maw, does that make me a child-torturing deviant with a heart of pure hate? It's one of life's little tragedies that moderate people need to polarise to the extreme to be heard over the fanatical ramblings of the few.
From zeroes to heroes, last years Olympics churned out its usual payload of quickly forgotten faces. Fleeting fame awaits the very few who can savour the spoils of a wasted youth, and thanks to the constant media masturbatathon, it's something the rest of us just have to put up with. Thankfully Olympians have a limited shelf life, but for those few Olympic weeks they're simply unavoidable.
Stephanie Rice is one such blight. There were a few weeks last year where you couldn't turn around without seeing her gleaming face, beaming a IQ-sapping smile at you. I can't decide whether it was all an act for the media, or she just genuinely could not stop smiling. Either way, a permanent smile makes her look like the village idiot and raises my ire.
Wow, hating someone for smiling. I've hit a new low.
I know that winning an Olympic medal represents success, sacrifice, blah blah blah, but just once I'd like to see a Nobel Prize winner gracing my box of WeetBix.
Have you ever known someone well enough that you know what they're going to say before they say it, and when they're about to put their foot in it you give a preemptive, almost unconscious wince? I've never met Sarah Palin, but I wince. I wince hard.
In case you've been under a rock and in a Tora Bora cave all year, Sarah Palin was the Republican Vice Presidential nominee for this year's US Presidential race. There's nothing much that I can say that hasn't already been said a million times over. She thoroughly deserves the caricatures thrown at her, after all she was chosen to balance out a serious and competent John McCain.
Conservative. Creationist. Anti-abortionist. NRA member. It's like all things I despise, wrapped up into one convenient target of a person. The straw that broke my camel's back was her wanting to have Intelligent Design taught in schools. Frankly it pains me to grace those two words with capitalisation. How can someone with such a tenuous grasp on reality have the chance to lead a nation, let alone the most powerful one in the world?
Hopefully her fifteen minutes are over. Of all the people on my list, I think that I'll be hearing again from Sarah the least.
My list is all women so far, maybe it's my misogynistic streak shining through. You don't have to hate women to hate Roberta Williams though. Roberta has shot up through the national consciousness in the last year, easily eclipsing the notoriety of (former?) husband, drug dealer and murderer Carl Williams. I know that Roberta has been an obnoxious harpy for years, but it's only in the last year that the media has crammed her down my throat. The way the media has carried on about Carl you'd think he was a Batman villain. He's not, and Roberta is far from being Harley Quinn.
The only difference between Roberta Williams and that woman at the supermarket screaming at her kids is a Channel 9 camera. Just when you think that the media is done with her, someone hits the rinse-cycle and it all starts again. She was almost on Dancing With The Stars. Seriously! What does one do when one has almost fallen from the media's attention? Do a Zoo Weekly shoot of course. Hey, it worked for Krystal from Big Brother. Right? Remember her? All that's missing is for Roberta to endorse home loans.
You know what the problem with class is? It has no opposite. The word that is used the most to describe the opposite of class is classless, and that is really just a lack of class, not having the opposite of it. If I were to invent a term for the opposite of class, it would be Roberta Williams. Roberta Williams is full of Roberta Williams. If I threw Roberta Williams at David Attenborough, I'd expect a universe-ending annihilation.
I'm going to sit down.
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BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!?! WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!
Good call on all of the above. What each case shares in common: a low IQ; a steadfast belief in the black and white; and blind HYSTERIA!!! Roberta is probably the exception. Not because she's a MENSA member, but I really don't think she gives a fuck about the children. Let's just get these babies out and where's the cheque already?
I'm glad i don't watch TV and only bother with important information via internet. I don't know who any of those people are (except, painfully, Pailin). And wow, it seems as if Roberta Williams has suffered a dramatic fall from grace since her days designing the King's Quest games...
P.S. That Palin pic reminds me of the excellent vector work of Thelonegunman (Paul Kelly III) from the BreedArt collective. Where's it from?
It's the work of the lovely Zina Saunders. You can find more of her work here: http://www.drawger.com/zinasaunders/?cat_id=136
