Fatally Killed

Brian Edwards writes, in his piece about Chris Carter’s failboat sailing in one last time,

Q.   Can Goff win the next election?

A.    Probably not. But the honeymoon is definitely ending. The electorate is beginning to see Key’s shameless, give-them-anything-they-want populism as weak leadership. And the promise of ‘catching up with Australia’ already looks hollow.

Now, it’s now secret I’m a lefty, but I’d like to think I have some semblance of balance when it comes to my analyses of my situation, and I’m not sure I see any evidence of this at all. I mean the end of the honeymoon, not the shameless populism and weak leadership, that’s pretty hard to miss.

All-in-all, I think mainstream media’s coverage of this was surprisingly good, given how awful it has been up until now. Perhaps they’re all a little sad that they’ll be losing their favourite toy.

Whereby we predict the content of stuff.co.nz’s “entertainment” section for the next few months. We use the word “lesbian” here loosely, because we can’t remember what that term is that people use to describe girl-on-girl-for-dudes’-approval.

August:

September:

October:

November:

December:

And of course, the original… Although the original was last year, when stuff ran the exact same story with either Scarlett Johansson or Megan Fox as the target.

To be fair, this probably says more about our rotten society than it does about Stuff. I mean, we already know that they’re mindless hacks just splooging out whatever draws hits.

3 News this evening led with the news that the government will announce a full backdown on their proposal to open up national parks for mining. Not a big surprise, really for a populist leader to follow the overwhelming public opinion on the matter (I like to think of it as “government without actually having to know anything about anything”*). But the point of this story is that, after allowing their sub-Duncan Garner comedy-political-reporter-stand-in’s report, they ran a told-you-so epilogue, playing a clip of Duncan Garner back in March saying that we could maybe expect a backdown in the following weeks.

Well, duh. Honestly, if you’re proud that he worked that one out, then things are worse than I though. I mean, I’m not a fan of this sort of thing in general (they do it over on One all the time: “Yesterday we broke this awesome story and now things are happening and it’s all because of us!”) but this one is particularly sad. Next, I suppose they’ll claim victory because Garner will have predicted that some of the National Party’s policies will be appealing to business-types.

*And let’s be fair, surely if he came across as knowing something about something he wouldn’t be the affable, approachable, down-to-earth average joe millionaire that the media keeps telling us he is.

… think that the extremely neat rows of people all dressed in black and rising away into the distance looked a bit like a pre-WWII Italian rally of some sort? Something like this:

for example?

OH EMM GEEE! This story is so important and awesome that we have to get it up even before the pun generator has finished propagating its headline to all of the right fields! KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD!!!!!

Ahh, Octopus Story.

Also, Party Central in the air? Sounds like fun.

I was just thinking about how prevalent “as a mum…” is as a prefix to an idiotic statement in television advertising, so I thought I’d Google it…

http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22As+a+mum%22+in+advertising&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Hell, not a hit in sight. I promise, I’ll transcribe one of these ads one day. I find them as ridiculous as when a bishop debates science with a scientist… you know, “as a mum, I know that these nutrients which have been shown in studies to have no effect on anything whatsoever are really beneficial and will help my child grow up to be an iron man and solve all of our family problems. Because, well, I’m a mum, and mums know.”