Think there’s something to do in Perth?

Those happenin’ cats at PerthNow have assembled all of the evidence that Perth isn’t a boring, atavistic hellhole:

Think there’s nothing to do in Perth?

FOR all those that call Perth ‘Dullsville’, maybe you’re just not aware of all the events happening around the city.

Maybe you’re just not aware of all of the events, but PerthNow is aware of all the events! What follows is an extensive list of all them. There’s so much happening, folks! I couldn’t assemble the whole list here, because it goes on 4 EVA, but here’s a taste:

Tuesday, In One Act

Until Sat 5 Sep, The Blue Room Studio, 8.30pm

This intimate, absurdist play takes you to a world where astronauts carry briefcases and cowboys feed pigeons. A delicate flux between poetry, satire and unpretentious honesty.

A world where cowboys feed pigeons? Get right outta town!

Spring Friday Night Shopping at Harbour Town

Fri 4, 11, 18 & 25 Sep, Harbour Town, 6pm to 9pm

Shop for your spring essentials at over 100 brand direct outlets while soaking up the sounds of jazz trios, contemporary crooners and the cool sounds of the calypso cats.

Factory direct Elwood t-shirts and jazz. A match made in Huhvean.

Catholic Arts Carnevale

Wed 9 Sep, Forrest Place, 9am

See a showcase of talent from Catholic primary and secondary schools. Activities include interactive displays, music and dance performances.

BYO condoms.

When I Grow Up

Sun 6 Sep, Fashion Central, Forrest Place, 10am

Celebrate Father’s Day with your dad at Perth Fashion Central as gorgeous kids and their fashionable dads model the latest collections from Forrest Chase retailers.

Replace the word “gorgeous” with “spoilt” and the word “fashionable” with “emasculated”. Oh, and the word “model” with “whore”.

After this “event”, shit somehow gets even duller:

Doogie Howser, F.A.I.L.

Perth’s tabloids are your grandmother. That’s why instead of page 3 girls, we get page 3 overachievers:

Teen on track to be a doctor at 20

What do people think when they hear child prodigy doctor? Author Bethany Hiatt and her editors hit you over the head with it in the very first paragraph:

Teenage medical student Welwyn Aw-Yong is WA’s own Doogie Howser MD.

Except without the resurgence as a creepily believable pussy-hound in How I Met Your Mother.

Is it ok to make fun of this child? I dunno. Good on him for following his “dream”, I guess?

I’d like to be a rural GP or something like that – maybe

But he’s on page 3 of the newspaper. Why on Earth would you subject yourself to that embarrassing shit! Did The West hold a gun to his head and force him to make that awkward pose? Did his pushy parents demand that he put his smarts on the public record?

Actually, both of those seem like possibilities. The kid is 15, you can’t blame him. I’m not even sure how consent works when it comes to minors and publicity-whoring.

But sorry, Welwyn, this I can’t abide:

Asked why he thought he was so advanced for his age, Welwyn attributed it to “God’s grace” and his ability to set aside other distractions.

Riiiight. Remind me not to see this guy when he’s a doctor at age 20. Wouldn’t want my health complaints attributed to “Demons”.

[Insert pun here]

The West Coast Eagles’ mascot, a live fucking animal, flew away from Subiaco Oval today. Before being captured, it took a stop at the City West dome (BTW, why isn’t that a Worst yet?) and was later attacked by crows. Coincidentally, the Adelaide Crows “murdered” the Eagles in the footy last weekend.

In other news, DAD PUNS ARE OFF THE CHART TODAY, MAKE IT STOP, GOD WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE IT STOP:

Nine news went pretty hard (you’ll have to watch the vid at PerthNow, soz):

The wedgetail took off – LITERALLY…

Problem was, Auzzie had flown the coop…

Sightseeing flight…

Attracting a crowd of angry crows and magpies…

This eagle finally landed…

Despite an injury scare Auzzie will line up for the eagles tomorrow night…

AdelaideNow got a gloat in:

A MURDER of crows cornered fugitive West Coast mascot Auzzie the eagle when she winged it from a club training session in Perth yesterday.

But WA Today soared above the rest:

Eagle Mascot Back After Flight of fancy

Auzzie the Eagle… Flying high around the streets of Perth today.

…flying the coop…

Perhaps he was getting tips from the bigger birds about what it takes to play finals footy after a few years in the AFL wilderness?

Maybe there was some crowing going on about West Coast’s loss last week to Adelaide?

Whatever the conversation, it was creating much crowing among the Perth media, who dropped everything to race to City West to witness the ‘event’…

“Crowing” in this context is a standard Dad pun. But “the conversation was creating crowing” throws Dad alliteration into the mix. Dadtastic.

Later in the piece, WA Today devolves into stream of consciousness verse poetry from a coked-up Monika Kos mode:

The idea to bring Auzzie’s familiar gameday perch – and oversized red Sherrin – bore fruit, and woman and bird were reunited on Zempilas Street – perhaps a good omen for namesake and Perth sports guru Basil, who takes a flight of his own on Saturday for his wedding in Greece.

O…

K…

Chicken Boner Dishwasher

Anyone who can decipher the opening paragraph of this story on WA Today in less than 3 reads gets a gold star:

Three warnings in five minutes see boner sacked

Chris Thomson

August 26, 2009 – 6:39AM

A gun Lenard’s Chicken boner fired after receiving three warnings in five minutes has been awarded more than $11,000 in unfair dismissal compensation.

Huh?

Chris Thomson isn’t always this obtuse, but he does have his own blog at WA Today called “You’ve Got Male” which mostly seems to be anecdotes about car parking.

Murder on the dance floor

It was about time this happened. I’m referring to PerthNow’s tenously linked pommy bashing headline that read:

‘Stabbings injure three at English-themed pubs’

I’m not endorsing that headline. I could have done without it, we all could have. But i’m not not-endorsing the neck-stabbing at the Elephant & Wheelbarrow. How could you when the whole dance floor looks like this:

Pack'it o' crisps an' a pint of cock, govnor

Thats right. The Elephant & Wheelbarrow’s dance floor turns into a (English-themed) Greek bath house after 11p.m. The place is crawling with desperate middle aged men on too much viagra.

I know this because I frequent this shit-hole regularly. It cages the only women I seem to get these days.

The insinuation that those two pubs being English-themed had anything to do with the two stabbings is a load of crock. This is what Perthnow does best. Feeding off past prejudices that they’ve pumped up in their dirty loins. In this case it’s pub violence in England and rowdy English tourists, especially the barmy army. I know there’s no direct mention of it, so you’re more than welcome to disagree, but we all know whats going on here.

Putting two entirely seperate incidents together and making a shit-burger of a news story is what we’ve got on our hands here.

But hey, the Ashes is on and it’s pommy bashing season!

Who could resist that?

By the way, police are looking for a white male between the age 0f 30-65, balding & greying hair, portly build and he was wearing a beige sports jacket.

Congratulations, you’ve just described 90% of the clientele of the Elephant & Wheelbarrow.

UFOs in Perth!

A while back I wrote about The Sunday Times’ credulous reporting on the police use of a psychic in the Rayney murder investigation. But that ain’t shit compared to this story, which appeared on PerthNow yesterday:

PerthNow reader photographs mystery lights over Perth Hills

No author is identified. Apparently, The Sunday Times couldn’t find a journalist with the appropriate level of self respect (none) to put their name to this story. But for mine it has Narelle Towie written all over it.

Unsurprisingly (surprisingly?) The Sunday Times itself didn’t run the story today. Reporting worthy of the Weekly World News is good enough for their interweb readers, but not good enough for print, I guess.

The Weekly World News. This newspaper knows it's a joke.

Also, tipsters beware! Diplayed prominently on the perthnow.com.au front page:

By contrast, tucked away in the story:

The photographer stresses that he did not believe he had photographed a UFO, but has no explanation for the coloured lights which appeared on the digital images. [My emphasis]

Well played, PerthNow. Well played.

Heath Ledger endorses “scientific” human slaughter

I never really understood the adulation of Heath Ledger, Dullsville’s biggest Hollywood success story.

He was pretty good in the Aussie flick Candy but he didn’t do himself any favours with roles in saccharine duds like A Knight’s Tale.

Since he’s kicked the bucket, though, like Jimi Hendrix or, more recently, J Dilla, his output has been both prolific and top notch. The latest Batman wasn’t quite Terminator 2, but Ledger was nuts scary in it.

And now we find out that before he died he also directed a Modest Mouse video clip that features the brutal slaughter of human families by grizzled cartoon whales. The analogy might be a little stoner-obvious (“dude, imagine if whales hunted us“), but check out the execution:

[Ed: The video is now down due to a copyright claim from Sony. I guess the greedy fucks don’t want their band to get free promotion. You can still see it at Rolling Stone.]

That’s how they make ginger bread men! Gross. Awesome. Success.

(Full disclosure: I also happen to love Modest Mouse so much I want to take take them behind a middle school and get them pregnant. Start with The Lonesome Crowded West).

The Perth media seem a bit torn (excuse the pun) about this video, especially given how shamelessly they covered every aspect of Ledger’s death and the ensuing public mourning process:

But don’t ya love PerthNow?! Who in their right mind would describe a music video clip that way? “Heath’s gruesome last video” had me guessing they’d discovered video of his last moments of frantic autoerotic asphyxiation. Nope. Relax, PerthNow, it’s a cartoon.

WA Today, by contrast, continue to lose the race to the gutter by sticking with the boring “graphic”. Seems quite restrained, really:

Music journalism on rye

For a while, I contributed the occasional CD review to Australia’s worst music web site: The Dwarf.

Run by a couple of unambitious indie kids “normal people doing a job they enjoy who don’t appreciate psuedo-journalistic tosspots taking jibes at their livelihood” [ed: see comments below] out of a labyrinthine office upstairs from McDonald’s in the Melbourne CBD, The Dwarf relies on anonymous, unqualified hacks like me for its content.  The hacks are paid only in kind, with a free CD or concert ticket for the review.  It’s a recipe for some of the shittiest writing ever published, a high school compendium of half-arsed reviews of the school musical. I mean, here’s the opening paragraph of the first random Dwarf CD review I clicked just now:

Raised in South Florida and now a New York native, Roberto Carlos Lange under the moniker of Helado Negro has assembled an intimately sculpted debut album, Awe Owe is not hacked from quarry-fresh hard stone; but lovingly chiseled from handmade soap.

Soap! Also note the intimately sculpted, lovingly chiseled, affectionately carved use of Word thesaurus.

Having stuck my toe into the tepid, lukewarm bath of music “journalism”, I feel marginally qualified to comment on X-Press magazine, Perth’s ubiquitous street newspaper.  X-Press claims to be Australia’s largest free weekly publication.  Not sure if “largest” refers to circulation, physical size, or both.  But whatevs.  In my experience X-Press has the most categorical gig guide of any street newspaper in Australia, which is pretty convenient for Perth music-goers.

But everything else in X-Press, especially the music journalism, is polony.

Man sets another man on fire, puts fire out, is called hero

Ronald Mitchell, the bloke who set on fire after being shot with a taser in Warburton, remains in hospital with extensive burns.  In the meantime, The Sunday Times continues its assault on balanced journalism with today’s saucy page 3 spread:

Click for readable version.

Yes, the cop that shot an Aboriginal man in the face with a taser is a “HERO” of the community’s Aboriginal children. I guess? The article doesn’t go into why Sergeant Hamer is apparently a Pied Piper of the local schoolchildren, but, well, they’re pretty cute.  Maybe the kids wanted the good people of Perth to know that they understand, profoundly, the fundamental right of the police to protect themselves with fiery force from the erratic behaviour of the marginalised drug addicts of their own community? Or maybe they got some lollies?

Look, I don’t know whether Sargeant Hamer acted appropriately in shooting his taser at Mitchell’s petrol-soaked nose. I also don’t know whether it was the taser that set Mitchell on fire. No one knows these things yet. But you wouldn’t get that from stories like this, which read like so much police PR. You know, “move along now, nothing to see here”.

The caption of the photo is probably the real highlight of this article:

LOCAL HERO: Sgt Nick Hamer, from Warburton police station, is back at work after being burnt saving a petrol-sniffing man who caught fire after being Tasered. He was welcomed home by local schoolchildren on Friday.

In just 24 words, observe how beautifully that first sentence misrepresents the story. Hamer’s involvement was “saving a petrol-sniffing man who caught fire”, right? Imagine a newspaper article that described the police who batoned Rodney King half to death as “saving a crack-smoking man who got beaten”, and you get a picture of just how crazy-biased that sentence is.

The only other real point of note in this puff-piece is that it contains Hamer’s first hand account of the incident:

“I told him to keep his distance from me and if he did come any closer then I was going to Taser him,” Sgt Hamer told The Sunday Times.

“He just kept coming so, with his prior history of violence both directed at people and police, I just wasn’t going to take any chances with him. There were too many people around that could have got hurt.”

“The fire has then started on him. I then dropped the Taser and threw him on the ground. The surface up there is fairly loose red sand and I held him down and shovelled sand on to him wherever there was flames and I burnt my left hand and my right finger.”

“Once I could see he had flames around him my No.1 priority was his welfare and to make sure the flames didn’t totally engulf him.”

Cool, fair enough.  Reads like it was heavily vetted (“with his prior history of violence both directed at people and police” is clearly a practiced line, and notice how he only hints at the actual tasering with the watered down “I just wasn’t going to take any chances with him”) but, all else aside, it does seem like he really did act heroically once the fire broke out.

What’s interesting though is that this story seems pretty inconsistent with the police/media versions that were published initially.  Recall that Mitchell was reported to be carrying a lighter and container full of petrol when he ran at the cops, the implication being that he was manically attempting to light THEM on fire. Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan, with typical bluster, claimed that:

there is a very strong possibility the fire was caused by the lighter [as opposed to the taser]

And yet, in Hamer’s account here, we’ve got no mention of the lighter, the container of petrol, or Mitchell running – essential facts, one would have thought, to justify his use of the taser.  Instead we get:

I told him to keep his distance from me and if he did come any closer then I was going to Taser him.

He just kept coming…

If we accept that Mitchell, a crazed petrol-sniffer, was running toward the cops from inside the house carrying fuel and a lighter, isn’t it strange that Hamer had time to give what was apparently a level-headed warning? And if Mitchell was running, why on Earth would Hamer describe it as “coming”?

Never fear, the police investigation is going to take “months”, and Mitchell is going to be charged with attempted assault once his burns are causing him less excruciating daily pain. In the meantime, the children of Warburton are just so chuffed that the police and their tasers are around to protect them.

Patti “Fallacy” Chong

Patti Chong’s blog continues to prove what everyone already knew: this woman is a strange fig.

In her latest The Verdict post, Patti again falls back on what’s fast emerging as her favourite rhetorical device: “Won’t somebody please think of the children”.  To wit, her opening paragraph quotes Helen Lovejoy Dietrich Bonhoffer:

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.

She goes on:

There is nothing more heartbreaking than prosecuting or defending child sex abuse cases which gives the fallacy to the above saying.

The expression she’s looking for is “gives the lie” (224,000 hits on Google), not “gives the fallacy” (7 hits).  And she doesn’t even mean what she writes.  Patti is trying to say that child sex abuse cases prove that our society has failed the test of morality set down by Bonhoffer.  But what she actually says is that child sex abuse cases prove that Bonhoffer’s statement is false.

It’s amazing that Patti Chong gets away with muddy thought and expression like this.  The woman is a famous LAWYER.  Logic and communication is supposed to be her game, but she doesn’t seem to get it.  Her very next paragrapher is a logic-clanger that a first year philosophy undergrad would spot from a mile off:

If the test of the morality of our society is what it does for our children, then we must be living in a decaying society or one that is lacking in any moral values.

Even assuming that Bonhoffer’s test is true, Patti’s argument here goes something like this:

I have seen a lot of child sex abuse cases.  Therefore, society accepts child sex abuse.

Just doesn’t follow.  If you’re generous, you might call it weak inductive logic.  But it’s probably just hyperbole.  Either way, it’s a logical fallacy.  How’s that for “gives the fallacy”?

I called Patti out in a comment on her blog:

Patti, by the nature of your job you are exposed to allegations of this sort on a magnitude that most other people are not. How does it follow that “we must be living in a decaying society or one that is lacking in any moral values”?

Come on. If our society had no moral values, we wouldn’t prosecute these people at all. That statement is either shady inductive logic, or hyperbole. So which is it?

Of course, Patti responded with an absolute corker:

Dick

what I meant about ‘ living in a decaying society or one that is lacking in moral values’ is a reference to the proliferation of alleged perpetrators.Why are there so many people who think it is alright to sexually abuse children?

Child sex cases are so common that no member of the public is ever in court to see how such cases are tried. It is embarrassing and people like to sweep it under the carpet and pretend it does not happen.

Patti

Patti [sic]

She should have answered with a simple “Dick, it was shady inductive logic”, because she pulls some shockers in her answer by baselessly claiming that:

• there has been a “proliferation” of perpetrators (a subsequent commenter named Harold thoroughly puts the lie to that by pointing out that the number of cases has been steady for the past decade);
• a lot of people think it is “alright to sexually abuse children” (Sure they do, Patti); and
• child sex cases don’t get public attention, and in fact people like to pretend that it does not happen(!).

Right, because this child sex case wasn’t one of WA Today’s top stories yesterday and WA Today’s front page didn’t contain two prominent links to child sexual abuse stories today:

And look who it is!

Shut up, Patti.