By The Way Robert, They're Not

A lot of my incidental at-work-giggles are delivered when someone is confused or saying something bizarre when coming in half-way through a conversation. Or mishearing what was said. You grow snot Eileen.

In talking about stretching before the City to Surf, one of my Gen Ys sagely said, “Prevention is better than the cure.”

To which my Spanish speaker popped his head over the divide and said, “Oh, are they that good? I haven’t heard of that band.”

Exkayplosmdee.

Score update: XKCD:0. Grey Area: -2

(Click to enlarge.)

Score. XKCD: 0. Grey Area: -1 (recurring)

With a respectful tip-of-the-hat to the excellent XKCD

(Click on the image to enlarge if you are having trouble reading my handwriting.)

Robots Are Good For War

War will become more ethical.

The shareholders can’t afford it otherwise.

The battlefield of the near future will still be the rich versus the aggrieved poor in asymmetrical brawls, it's just that the rich will be using more robots instead of live canon-fodder.

When it comes time to put a robot on trial for war crimes, it will start as Chain-of-Command precedent... until the military guys work out that it should be a corporate law issue. The robot was made by a corporation that was ultimately responsible for the behavioural programming.

The first few military tribunals go against the manufacturing giants and it makes everybody feel better. It appears that justice has been done because something has been held responsible - but no actual humans had the finger pointed at them.

But making the robot the fall-guy is easy until it starts to hurt the profits of the manufacturing company. Shareholders go up in arms and apply such pressure that the robots are programmed so that they almost never open fire, even when they are in immanent danger of total destruction. They just stomp about, shouting, “Stop that. Stop that right now. You are making me very angry and I will be forced to stomp around and shout some more.” The insurgents, while making mincemeat of the robots, eventually become so pissed off with all the stomping and the shouting, that they just leave in disgust and the fighting is over.

I have seen it and it will come to pass.

Pull Your Pants Up

There’s an ad for boxer shorts on telly that fills me with hope.

It features three old boys sporting the sartorial style known as “Harry Highpants”. They’re sitting at a café table, shaking their heads at the three young blokes with their pants under their butts in the style known as “Barry Bare Arse.”

There’s hilarity all round as the generations disapprove of each other in their own charming way, and we are all left with the satisfying feeling of having been voyeurs on a scene that reaffirms our suspicions about everyone.

While I don’t side with the Harry High-pant brigade, it is less obnoxious than the low pant mob. In my area, I’ve even seen the ‘style’ worn without underwear. Ewe! Specially “ewe” on public transport.

I'm certain it’s possible to look good wearing your pants somewhere between scrotum-smashing-high and crack-on-display low.

But the good news is, low-pant is almost over. A mainstream brand has used it in an ad and most large corporations are waaaaaay behind the actual trend-on-the-street. They usually cotton on, just as it dies. Even if, by some miracle, they are getting on the band-wagon at the top of the trend - They nullify the rebelliousness of the fashion and thereby kill it.

Filthy fashion trend… OVER!

On Air And Out Of Your Mind II: This Time It's Moronic

Since my blob on Kyle Sandilands not knowing where his dump was, it has been revealed that it was wilful stupidity, rather than his normal kind. He doesn't like to use a delay - he feels it's better radio without.

From Channel 9 News Site, on the subject of 7 second delay: A 2DayFM staffer said Sandilands believed "pure" live radio was "better entertainment" - an approach which has long made his colleagues nervous.

I suspect it's more likely that people explained to him how it worked, over and over again, and he kept on getting confused and scared and didn't want to be sent seven seconds into the past when he hit the big, red button.

Whatever, it illustrates his thinking on the subject nicely.

I, Kyle Sandilands, will go without the industry standard safety net because what I do is so important, you must not mess with the purity of the truth. We are truth telling mavericks at this Top 40 pop-music FM station, man! It’s all about me anyway, so I’m the only one taking the risk.

Not:

I, Kyle Sandilands, even though I'm lightning-quick and razor-sharp and really, really gorgeous, may one day need to use that dump button to protect an innocent third party. Even from my own, fabulous self.

We know that Kyle is pretty fond of his own opinion, so if there’s one bit of wisdom he can take from his own words, it is that it is “entertainment”. You don’t burn teenage rape victims for the sake of entertainment.

This Isn't Serious, Mum

If you’re older than 20 and want a pleasant, minor, antipodean mystery to remain that way, don’t read on.

My colleague Smurf is a typical kind of Australian. He’s a bit of a mish-mash of cultures because he lived in England during some formative years. He holds three passports, one for here, one for there and a small blue one for when he needs to go back to the village in the woods.

This means that there are funny little blank areas in his popular culture reference map. I don’t mind this at all because it means I get to instruct him on some of the important stuff and shape him in mine own image… sorta.

Anyway, I mention this because that’s how I ended up showing him a couple of TISM clips from the interwebs. (Greg, The Stop Sign and You’ll Never Be An Old Man River). For those of you that aren’t familiar with the band, they started in the early 80s and were noteworthy because, a) They were funny, and b) They remained anonymous by using pseudonyms and wearing masks. It was always one of those titillating, urban-myth type arrangements, to know someone who knew someone who went out with one of the guys who could be in TISM.

So, the band was fresh in my mind when I sat down to watch Spicks and Specks the other night. (La la la laa. Aaar. With me now.) The show had a "garage punk group" on that goes by the name of Root.

As I was sitting there thinking "these guys are pretty funny", a small underpowered globe went on over my head. (Actually, honestly, it was more like a guttering candle). The voice, the lyric style - followed by four seconds on the interweb and I now know what one of the TISM boys looks like.

It’s not a great moment, but it's not a disappointment either. It’s just one of those things. My life has been enriched in a small way by discovering this one small thing. I thought I’d share.

On Air And Out Of Your Mind

I want Kyle Sandilands to punch me in the throat.

Or at least give it a red-hot go. (For those of you not aware of his particular 'style', this is how he threatened a detractor a while back.)

The good and the great are rushing to condemn the oxygen-thief right now, and fair enough. For those of you not in Australia, or those who’ve been living in a cockerel’s boot, he acquitted himself with his usual aplomb when, after a 14-year-old girl tearfully admitted live on air that she had been raped two years ago, he treated it as a normal sexual experience and kept on pushing the topic. From the ABC news site:

After initially sounding uncomfortable with the questioning, the girl started crying and said she had been raped when she was 12.

Then Kyle Sandilands replied: "Right ... is that the only experience you've had?"

For Grey Area readers, my dislike of the radio 'personality' is well travelled territory. If you put his name in the search field on the right, you’ll see that I’ve had a consistent opinion about the guy - this isn’t just Johnny-come-hately for me.

His response to criticism is often to threaten the messenger. His ethics are questionable (his wife, a singer, unaccountably received a lot of air-play on the station he infests) and he is entirely too ready to let everyone know how damn good he is. He comes straight from the venal breeding grounds that gave us Laws, Jones and Price.

It’s very rare I actually get to write about something I know anything about in these posts, but I know a little about radio. The excuse he trotted out for this fiasco was that he panicked, but if you don’t know where your dump button is after years of on-air experience, you’re an even bigger pillow than I had previously suspected.

As a former broadcaster, I can say three things with authority.

Firstly, start with the mother who put her daughter on the spot. Start with her good and proper.

Then, go to the producer. What was the producer doing putting those two to air? That’s exactly what producers are supposed not to do. They’re supposed to find interesting material that‘ll make good radio and, you know, do it without setting people on fire or publicly putting lie detectors on teenage rape victims.

And then finally, we can take to Kyle Sandilands, who didn’t know where his dump was.

For those of you who haven’t been broadcasters, live radio that involves the public calling in usually happens with a delay. At the stations I worked at, the delay was traditionally about seven seconds. I cut my teeth broadcasting in the lean, mean hours of the night where I also panelled myself. (As well as doing the talking, you drive the technical bits - sliders and buttons and stuff.) If you didn’t have one digit hovering over the dump button, you weren’t saying the right things.

If someone called in and said something that was going to land everyone in jail, you dumped it, lost the last seven seconds of broadcast, cut to an ad break, built your delay up again and pushed on like nothing had ever happened.

I hesitated to even write about this, because you just know that Sandiland’s radio management, while wringing their hands in public at the unfortunate event, are clapping their hands with glee behind the boardroom doors. You can’t buy this sort of PR. I didn’t want to fall for it and give it any more attention. But, as I mentioned, I do actually know something about this. It’s really simple. THE DUMP BUTTON, DICKHEAD. IT’S THE BIG RED ONE OVER THERE ON THE RIGHT! You don’t even have to think that fast. Count out seven seconds and ask yourself if you could recognise danger in that time.

And he pouts for photos. ‘Nuff said.