Right, so everyone’s flapping their gums about MasterChef Australia at the minute. I thought the show was pants, but that’s beside the point. What really worries me is that amid all the chatter about judges, culinary techniques, TV ratings, Hainanese chicken rice, comfort food, cookbook-publishing deals and dumbfuck newspapers that can’t even correctly report the winner of a TWO-HORSE RACE, people may be losing sight of what’s really important:

Oh, and bugger me with a fish-fork if the woman who won isn’t a dead ringer for a certain Pamela Allen children’s book character:

Somehow I missed this when it came out in February. Presenting Ben Lee’s I Love Pop Music.

For those of you too lazy to watch even 30 seconds of a YouTube video because you’re doing something really important like drinking a chai latte, the lyrics go like this:

I love pop music, this is how we do it
It’s politics you can romance to
I love pop music, sprinkle sugar through it,
Philosophy that you can dance to

Inane, yes, but pretty typical for Ben Lee as anyone who caught his disease would know (not herpes, the song).

No, what sends this song into new unseen realms of awfulness are the spoken word verses:

The price of oil is at an all time high and rising,
Global warming threatens life as we know it on this planet,
And leaders have not committed to a plan of action on renewable energy,
The food crisis is currently affecting a hundred million people world wide.

No, really. Go and watch it. Instead of bringing public attention to these issues (global warming? what’s that?), as well as high-lighting the power of music to achieve things, he’s instead ended up making a mockery of these issues, pop music in general, and himself.

Something I’ve always noticed about Ben Lee is his videos always feature good looking young people who fete him like a god, presumably because no one likes him in real life. This video is no exception. What is the exception are the mindless call-and-response background lyrics. Pay attention to the words in brackets in the next verse:

There are over 6 billion people on this planet and not enough fresh drinking water (we’re in trouble),
Religious intolerance creating geopolitical instability (shine a light),
Politicians battling each other like professional wrestlers (ooh),
Further division is not the answer, division is not the answer

We’re in trouble? Shine a light?

A brief search reveals the album on which this song appears, The Rebirth of Venus, has been panned mercilessly worldwide with a slew of one-star reviews, from Uncut  to Slant magazines. And not just because it contains another song called I’m a Woman, Too.

GrodsReaders, what’s your favourite political song? My vote goes to This World Over by XTC. What’s yours?

Marvel as one YouTube commenter comprehensively pwns another while maturely discussing the merits of a Nirvana song:

I love you, internet.

How is possible that a Michael Jackson impersonator looks stranger than the man himself?

Who is who?

“I believe I am alive today because God saved me for this – to make people happy. I have a message to give, the same as Michael,” he said yesterday.

Yeah, um. Okay.

I first saw this clip back in the late ’90s when Les Claypool was guest programming Rage. If memory serves he said he was flipping through the book of clips to choose his playlist and simply couldn’t not select a song called Beer Sandwich by The Fuck Fucks. Enjoy!

After a hectic five days, guess what I’m doing this weekend? There’s a clue in this photograph.

The truth about fishing

Anyone else doing anything awesome?

You have to chuckle at the ludicrous three-way ping-pong being played between Channel Nine, News Limited and Gordon Ramsay. No greater triumvarite of self-promoters ever crossed swords, yet since the weekend they seemed to have captured the attention of the gullible masses. We’ve had parental complaints about Ramsay’s bad language in front of their children at his live Melbourne show (a bit like going to Perisher and complaining about the snow). We’ve heard to-and-fro-ing between Ramsay and Tracy Grimshaw, the mournful talking-head who is the ‘victim’ of Ramsay’s ‘attacks’. We’ve seen the ubiquitous Youtube footage and tut-tutting from just about every rent-a-quote in Melbourne.

It’s my contention that this whole thing is an American wrestling-style beat-up, dreamed up on-the-wire by Ramsay’s agents, PR suits and Channel Nine. It is all geared at whipping up publicity for Ramsay and his programmes, once hot property for Nine but since flagging in the ratings. Others with a working knowledge of the media concur. Ramsay’s public persona is that of a crass, boorish and foul-mouth yobbo, but he is nobody’s fool. Grimshaw, once a real journalist, is now little more than a network puppet. If she was truly aggrieved by Ramsay’s ‘attack’ then she should raise the question of why her employer ran two hours of his TV shows last night – after, of course, yet another ACA re-hash of Tracy vs. Gordon – when Nine might instead support her by suspending them Chaser-style.

Today the Herald Sun went even further with a gutter-delving implication that Ramsay might well be gay. The ‘evidence’ of this, says the Spun, is a 15-year-old caution stemming from drunken nakedness and tomfoolery in a Tube station toilet – because as we all know, every canned-up young bloke who gets his kit off or flops out his shrivelled manhood must “bat for the other team”.  For additional confirmation of Ramsay’s dubious sexuality they went to his embittered, press-savvy former lover – who is, wait for it, female. Further comment was also sought from two of Ramsay’s arch-rivals, who had nothing of note to add other than that noting that Ramsay “looks like a cross between Patrick Swayze and a ventriloquist’s dummy”. A very shaky house-of-cards indeed and one that would, on any other day, never get past Murdoch’s in-house lawyers.

None of this concerns me too much: commercial TV and its stars will always play contrived games of cross-promotion and draw in the celebrity-obsessed masses when they do. What bothers me is the completely inappropriate involvement of our political leaders. Kevin Rudd, now so populist that he comments on just about every non-political matter raised at pressers, referred to Ramsay as “low life”. Julia Gillard more pithily advised him to ”stay in the kitchen” and make “nice things for people to eat” - good advice that Jules and Kev might want to follow themselves by confining themselves to matters of government. Their attempt to extract votes by tapping into a public ‘issue’ that is, at best, wildly exaggerated and, at worst, fabricated cheapens politics and insults those whose concerns run deeper than a foul-mouthed chef and a nondescript TV host.

Red Hot Chili Willies!

Another week, another inevitable backlash.

Despite what some people say, this sketch isn’t making fun of children with terminal illness, but rather our attitudes towards them. Are the kids in this the target of ridicule, or the faux terrible charity?

In the end though, the sketch is a failure for comedic reasons, not for moral ones. Like most ad parodies, it’s very by-the-numbers. The moral outrage this morning is the result of the sketch failing to make anyone laugh. As a result, everyone missed the point and it appeared as though the humour in the sketch came from lambasting dying children, which it wasn’t supposed to.

It was clumsy comedy that they simply should have handled better.

Incidentally, it’s almost a virtual re-write of a McDonald’s House charity parody they did on CNNNN for Fungry’s, and I don’t remember anyone complaining then. Why? Because the sketch hit its satirical mark and there was no question as to where the comedy was aimed.

But to all the people complaining – how many of you even saw the sketch go to air? Mia Freedman didn’t. Like the obituary song, most of the outrage will be generated by the current affairs and morning shows who will gleefully replay it in a cheap grab for ratings.

Seriously, wowsers, go back to The Wedge.

This week’s clip comes with French subtitles at no extra cost due to the YouTube and copyright Nazis disabling embedding on basically everything.

Ladies and gentlemen, Da Funk by Daft Punk.

Hey Boy, Hey Girl by The Chemical Brothers. London 2001. ‘Nuff said.

In all seriousness, do film clips get any better than ’80s hair (1990 counts as the ’80s), fake rain, bad CG lightning, exploding light bulbs, flying paint, and flapping fish?

Once again, mothers are up in arms over some B-grade celebrity getting her gear off for a men’s magazine. Funny how we never hear dads shrieking about the demise of our morality in the same way.

Anyway, this time it’s… hang on, can’t remember her name, let me check… oh yeah, this time it’s a certain Kellie Crawford, apparently a former Hi-5 “star”. She stripped down to her underwear and pranced around a studio while someone took photos of her for publication in Ralph. Great rag, that. Or so I’m told by some men in my life.

So, I’m reading this news thingy about this Kellie whoever and how “family groups” reckon Kellie is sending out a “negative” message to young girls everywhere.

“The fact she’s posed on a cover is particularly problematic because magazines like Ralph are on shop shelves at kiddy eye level,” [Women's Forum Australia spokesperson, Melinda Tankard Reist] said.

“It’s an abuse of her position with tens of thousands of little girls looking up to her.”

No it’s not. Kellie whatsis doesn’t owe any little girl anything, particularly if she’s no longer a member of Hi-5. Relatedly, from the pictures I’ve seen of Kellie’s norks, the tens of thousands of little girls looking up to her wouldn’t even be able to see her chin anyway.

Julia Gale from Kids Free 2B Kids also criticised Crawford.

“Older teenage girls will wonder why performers feel the need to pornify their image,” she said.

“They are damaged and harmed by messages that they need to sexualise yourself.”

Oh spare me! You’re the fucking parents, you can control what your kids see (although, granted, with the internet these days… ).

Plus, “pornify” is NOT A FUCKING WORD! I looked it up.

As for Ms Crawford, I was a bit alarmed when she said, “I did [the photos] for myself to remind myself that I am a woman.”

To remind herself that she’s a woman?

Okay! Here’s hoping she now has absolutely no doubts about what she is.

UPDATE: Judge for yourselves…

Getting in first. Enjoy. (NSFW or Near Kids)