Completely Biased

Dear Kyle & Jackie O,

I know you two have been copping quite a shitstorm the last couple of days. I’m on your side, guys – it’s all been a total media beatup. So I thought I’d send you this letter of support, to make you feel a little better amidst the torrent of hate mail you’re probably getting right now. Ugh, I can’t believe the knee-jerk reactions of some people.

Let’s face it: you did nothing wrong. It’s a good thing the entire world knows that Rachel was raped when she was 12. We are all better off in some way – Jackie O has kindly offered her counselling, it’s done well for ratings, everyone in Australia is talking about it, and her mum got a good laugh out of it. And really, isn’t interrogating child sexual assault victims what mainstream breakfast radio is all about? There’s stories in the newspaper about women being raped nearly every other day – it’s not like this is a big taboo topic anymore. Rape is now mainstream – football players and everyone is into it! I bet the Sex & The City sequel will be all about it! Those idiots in the media should lighten up and live in the now – you’ve broken new ground here, and this paves the way for future discussions about rape on your show. Next time you do a grovelling interview with Teri Hatcher or Tori Amos, maybe you can ask them what it was like to be sexually assaulted? It’ll be fantastic! Nobody ever asks them this stuff, so I’m sure it’ll be a great angle and get them to open right up. Think of the ratings! We won’t know what they are because none of us can count that high!

Apparently Kyle has friends who have been raped before, so it’s totally cool, he’s like an expert at being sensitive on this stuff. It’s not as if he’s some unqualified insensitive prick or anything. This is Kyle Sandilands we’re talking about! He’s won FHM’s Tosser Of The Year, Who Weekly’s Most Hated Man, Fugly’s Worst Male Personality On TV, and many other prestigious awards because other men are so jealous of how sensitive he can be! It makes total sense that you two are the #1 rating breakfast radio team in Sydney! I spend my days in awe that two people as talented as you are stuck with jobs on radio, instead of doing something more meaningful and related to your skills, like manually masturbating zoo animals.

Anyway I was thinking that maybe you can bring Rachel back along with the guy that raped her, then they can discuss it with each other live on air. Maybe we can up the stakes a bit too – tenth caller gets a crack at her next or something like that. Then we’ll have some “other sexual experiences” to talk about, am I right Kyle? Wedge it between a few commercial breaks and Jackie O’s tips on how to look like an emaciated zombie with sunken eyes in promo pics, and you’re onto a winner.

No doubt ACMA or whoever will have their way, and the lie detector segment is going to be cut from future shows. Not to worry though, because I’ve got a few ideas for segments that’ll bring in listeners by the bucketload. Maybe I can get a cut of revenue or a writer’s credit or something – these ideas are so good that you’ll have to extend the show by another hour a day because knowing your high standards of ethics, you’ll want to include them all:

• First up, we’ll go with the rape theme because it’s got everyone talking. So, you see how much everyone’s talking about yesterday’s segment, and Rachel was raped 2 years ago? What could improve on this? Immediacy. What if we could find girls who had just been raped and were on their way to the police or a counselling centre? None of this two years delayed bullshit! We could track them down the morning after and grill them on-air about their sexual experiences! Or maybe intercept their 000 calls! Or, OR, we could get a listener in, strap a microphone to her, get her absolutely wasted, then leave her on her own to wander the city at 3AM on a Sunday morning! Next show, we then broadcast her screams as she was being assaulted, while she offers a running commentary of the fun time she had and contemplates suicide!
• Not to your liking? True, this whole rape thing has been done before and you don’t want to get stale, so maybe we can continue to break new ground in other areas. Let’s see… we could go on a search to find Australia’s Worst Parent. Maybe speak to some sources inside DOCS, and find some who are forcing their kids to live in squalor and eat their own faeces to stay alive. You know, maybe that pregnant 12 year old’s parents, or the one that starved to death recently, or that one who was murdered by her mum. Kids are born every day, so it’s not like it’s that big a deal when they get killed. I mean jeez, just go have sex and 9 months later the problem’s solved. Anyway we round up a few really shitty families, then maybe do a Survivor-style segment where they have to do challenges and get voted off. Then at the end of it all the winner of Australia’s Worst Parent wins a t-shirt and some concert tickets.
• Yes, you’ve got a point when you say it’ll be difficult to find people that horrible amongst your listeners. Well, maybe there’s something else kid-related we can do. Everyone loves kids. And a woman in the news lately because she really loves kids is Otty Sanchez. We could get her to do a cooking segment, and follow her as she goes shopping for ingredients at playgrounds.
• The problem with all these ideas is that like yesterday’s fun and games, it still gives the impression that you’re horribly exploiting children for your own gain. It could be a good idea to find another segment of society to involve. Maybe we could do some prank calls – call up some cancer patients and pretend to be their doctor, and tell them they’ve got 2 weeks to live, then fade their cries into the latest Lady GaGa single. Or find someone suffering from depression and do a series of calls to him to see if you can drive him to suicide – first tell him he’s been fired, then a few hours later tell him the bank is foreclosing on his mortgage, then pretend you’re a lawyer serving him divorce papers… it’ll be a laugh-a-minute! And imagine if we can capture the sound of him shooting his own brains out? Talk about an Australian first!
• You know who doesn’t get featured enough on radio? The disabled. You could get some quadriplegics (or even people just living out their days on life support) into the studio, and the fiftieth caller in gets an all expenses paid trip to come in and beat the shit out of them.
• Or we could just forget about all these elaborate shenanigans and keep it simple: Kyle can skullfuck a stillborn corpse live on-air. Don’t freak out too much – remember there’s a 7-second delay in case anything gets too out-of-hand. It’s not like the public can say you’re exploiting victims then – necrophilia never hurt anyone!

So anyway that’s just a few ideas to help you plan your next piece of entertainment. Personally I can’t wait to see what you come up with next, and how you’re going to absolve yourselves of all blame and responsibility from it. Today’s kids are like yesterday’s adults, so in my view it’s totally the girls’ fault that she brought all that up on-air. And all this talk about blaming the mother? Pfft, parents always know what’s best for their kids. Looks to me like the only person in the studio that had a problem with it was the girl, and she’s the last person we should be worrying about in this situation. I mean, hello, you two are bonafide celebrities! Not some no-name loser with a ruined life! She’s 14, she can take care of herself.

By the way Kyle, it might help with your migraine problems if you just let the penis hang free from your forehead instead of trying to cover it up all the time. I’m sure all this negative attention isn’t helping with them. Cheer up, give it a few days and everyone’ll be over it. I mean come on, rape happens. People shouldn’t be so up in arms about it.

I look forward to seeing and hearing the two of you on my TV and radio for many years into the future. And I know I will! If there’s one thing this world has taught me, it’s that if you’re rich and famous, you can ride out pretty much anything!

Best of luck,

David.

It’s been almost two years since the last time I tried to get this site back up and running. What’ll be different this time? I’m not sure. I’m not spending 3+ hours a day travelling to/from work anymore so that’s in my favour. I miss the old days of obsessively researching and bitching about things, and the big ego rub that comes with people commenting on your stuff, so I’m gotten all nostalgic and have decided to dig this out and try again.

I don’t really give a shit about politics much anymore, unfortunately. I still care, but it’s more like I read a few stories in the news every day, sigh, and then get on with my life. So I don’t expect to be writing about that stuff much, unless something is really on my mind.

In summary: I’ll (hopefully) start posting to this again, and will attempt to clean up broken things on this site. But I might keep the theme like this; it still appeals to me after all these years. Might make the fonts bigger though.

Wow, three years later and I find myself here once again. The last iteration of this blog died out due to a lot of apathy on my part (I mean come on, how hard is it to hold any sort of interest when Fat Kim is your opposition leader?), and I don’t know how this time around will go, but let’s give it a spin. If two weeks pass and this is still the only post on the site, then you can be confident that I’m not as angry or passionate as I used to be (but just as lazy).

So I’ve upgraded WordPress, flushed out all my old rants on Kim Possible and Eurovision, and I’m here to once again extoil the virtues of our fearmongering leader and his OMG AMAZING vision for the future. I’m not exactly sure what that OMG AMAZING vision is, but he keeps repeating it, so surely it must be true. He’s magic like that. So far I’ve managed to deduce that this OMG AMAZING vision for the future includes:

• Change one insignificant sentence in a document nobody reads, in an attempt to cancel out 11 years of fucking over a certain race of people.
• Give everyone a bigger tax refund in an attempt to buy a few votes (appears to be working, too) instead of actually spending it on useful shit. I used to work at the refunds desk in Target – nobody ever commented on my OMG AMAZING visionary leadership skills when I spent my weekends giving customers their own money back (whilst trying to avoid strangling them), so I don’t get what the big deal is here.

I’m sure there’s far more policies designed for short-term political gain on their way too, but in the meantime, I’m going to get the rest of this site set up properly.