The Zoo Weekly Compatibility Experiment, #24 to #1

Every time I buy anything from the place I got this copy of Zoo from now, the guy behind the counter gives me a knowing look and says “And will there be… anything else with that?”, making him the second most irritating person who’s ever worked there. The most irritating was a man whose eyeballs looked like they were desperately trying to flee his skull before his brain exploded, and would greet my regular 4am visits with “G’DAY MATE HOW’S YA DAY GAAARRRN?”. It’s 4am and I’m buying microwave nachos while wearing the clothes I slept in; how the fuck do think my day is going? He was eventually fired for amphetamine use.

#24 Mark Philippoussis

Zoo Weekly Says: Parlayed a disappointing tennis career into a disappointing TV career. Inexplicably, still famous.

Crimitism Says: Mark Philippoussis’ Age of Love, for those of you who didn’t follow it (“follow it” as opposed to “watch it”. Everybody in Australia knew about it, but that didn’t translate into ratings and it died with a whimper, sandwiched between the late news and re-runs of Stargate) was a Bachelor-style reality series in which seven women competed for the affection of tennis sort-of-star Mark Philippoussis… BUT WHAT HE DOESN’T KNOW is that they’re all in their forties! BUT WHAT THEY DON’T KNOW is that there are another seven women fighting for Mark, and these ones are in their twenties!

Philippoussis himself is almost totally irrelevant to the show, which is just an excuse for a catfight between the twentysomethings (“kittens”) and the fortysomethings (“cougars”). In theory, this should given us a reality TV soap opera in which sex kittens and conniving superbitches took turns at trying to out-manipulate each other, with a rich, inoffensively bland hunk as the prize. In practice, we got some women sitting around a hotel taking pot-shots at each other for having either saggy boobs or sexual inexperience, with occasional closeups of a Mark Philippoussis looking vaguely confused. 45 minutes later, one of them would be sent home and burst into tears about how all their successes are meaningless without a man. As one of the few people who bothered seeing it through to its conclusion, I’ll reveal that he eventually chose a 25 year old. Next time, wizened crones!

Hate? Too inane.

#23 Rhett Hutchence

Zoo Weekly Says: Brother o the late INXS frontman, disowned by this own mother for trying to sell Michael’s personal belongings on eBay, including a love letter to Kylie Minogue. Shameless.

Crimitism Says: Yes, “Shameless”. This is the same magazine that ran a top ten school massacre countdown earlier in the year.

Hate? I don’t care.

#22 Eddie Jones

Zoo Weekly Says: After ruining the Wallabies and the Queensland Reds, Jones went to help the Springboks against Australia. Traitor.

Crimitism Says: Other famous Eddie Joneses include a 16th century Catholic martyr and the actor who played the police chief in C.H.U.D. I have no idea who this one is.

Hate? No.

#21 Owen Wilson

Zoo Weekly Says: “Ooh, I’m so rich and successful and shagging beautiful women all over the place, it’s too depressing to handle.” Pah, you wonky-nosed jessy – we’ll swap places with you if you want.

Crimitism Says: This is referring to Wilson’s attempted suicide earlier this year. #35, if you recall, was Wayne Carey, who was “a louse in the bumhair of humanity” for mocking Nathan Thomas’ fight with depression. By now we should all be used to Zoo getting self-righteous about behaviour that it’s equally, if not more, guilty of, but did nobody spot the presence of two contradictory statements in the same article?

Hate? I’m aware that he’s been in a string of increasingly shit buddy movies, but I’m pretentious so I’ve only ever seen him in Wes Anderson’s feeelms. I once saw ten minutes of Starsky and Hutch, but only in a detached post-modern way, so it doesn’t count.

#20 Damien Leith

Zoo Weekly Says: Remember him? No? Well… he’s the Irish ring-in who pinched the Australian Idol crown last year, going on to bombard us with more Irish lilt than a bucket of dying leprechauns. Go Home, Leith. The pipes, the pipes are calling…

Crimitism Says: What does Zoo have against Irish people (see #36)?

Hate? He doesn’t even sing in Irish accent. He is, ironically, the only Australian Idol winner not to sing in an American accent.

#19 Bono

Zoo Weekly Says: Dear Bono – no matter what the Pope’s told you, you’re not Jesus and you never will be. However, we’ll gladly crucify you if you think it’ll help.

Crimitism Says: Bono’s nationality doesn’t get a mention here, oddly. It’s not like you can’t have legitimate grievances with Bono, but they’d take more than two sentences to explain and aren’t actually very interesting, so Zoo just calls him a bit of a prat instead. And so he is. But if the entire argument against Bono is that he’s prat, rather than anything involving tax havens or photo opportunities with war criminals, then surely there are people more deserving of the label who haven’t also tried to raise awareness of world poverty? What about Marilyn Manson, who doesn’t even have the courage of his contrived and poorly-thought-out convictions? Or, on the subject of Bono, Bob Geldof, who’s been working with MRA group Fathers 4 Justice, whose concept of justice involves a campaign of orchestrated harassment against the family courts because they are so very unfair.

Hate? Not really.

#18 Harry Potter

Zoo Weekly Says: Hey, Harry, here’s a tip: every time you get a creepy new teacher, it’s really Voldemorte.

Crimitism Says: Also worse than the KKK: A fictional teenage wizard. I’m not going to say anything about Harry Potter, because I haven’t ever read it and it’s not like I have a history of spouting off half-formed opinions at 4am.

Hate? Somebody said I looked like Snape once.

#17 The Jamaican Cops

Zoo Weekly Says: “Bob Woolmer’s been murdered! It’s definitely murder! Wait, no, it’s a heart attack. Or maybe he choked. Actually, who knows”. Bloody idiots.

Crimitism Says: Actual reason to hate the Jamaican police.

Hate? Yes.

#16 Gerard Way

Zoo Weekly Says:The chisel-faced emo weirdo represents everything that’s wrong with modern music. Whiny, self-absorbed and stupidly rich. Yet still, strangely, a very unhappy man. He makes no sense and must be killed with a stick.

Crimitism Says: I managed to graduate from high school scant months before “Emo” became acceptable to throw around in Australia, which turned out to be a good thing in retrospect. I was too depressed to fit in with my peer group – ie. the people I was lumbered with in year six and was expected to stick with throughout the entirety of adolescence, despite massive personality clashes and the fact we didn’t really like each other in the first place – but lacked the sense of theatrics required to be a goth properly, although I gave it a shot anyway, with… not exactly disastrous results, but it still wasn’t a big enough improvement to justify the poetry readings. Had “Emo” been an acceptable lifestyle at this point, I’d have immediately migrated there and found solidarity amongst other people who thought the juxtaposition of cartoon skulls and neon pink hearts was totally awesome, rather than people who threatened you with physical violence for not liking Limp Bizkit and/or excruciating Dungeons & Dragons novels.

The affect this had on me didn’t become apparent until after I’d graduated and met people I actually liked. And who wouldn’t like people who were perpetually jokey, on top of it all and never let anything get them angry or upset? As somebody who was used to being told to shut up by middle-class thugs whose genetic makeup had more in common with cookie dough than anything mammalian, this was, as far as I was concerned, utopia.

What took me a depressingly long time to realise – or admit I realised, anyway – was that their perpetual coolness wasn’t anything to do with them being sophisticated and tolerant human beings, it was to do with how deeply entrenched their sense of orthodoxy was. If you spend your life hanging around people whose opinions on everything are so in line with yours that you never disagree, if you communicate almost entirely in catch-phrases from Adult Swim cartoons, if you’re totally insulated from the rest of the world by a protective layer of ironically-purchased Superfriends boxed sets, then… Yes, of course you’re going to be on top of it all, why wouldn’t you be? Express a dissenting opinion, no matter how fucking trivial, however – Anything vaguely negative about The Lord of the Rings is a good place to start – and suddenly you’ve just told them that the world is flat and the sky is orange. Since this is their reaction to disagreement, you can imagine how they react to being point-blank told that they’re wrong.

And funnily enough…

These were the same people who I ended up disowning earlier in the year after they insisted on spewing their unearned privilege all over conversations they weren’t even invited to take part in and ended up (1) claiming that rape statistics had been exaggerated (Because “the numbers don’t add up”, a conclusion drawn after looking at the index page of a rape crisis site for ten seconds – this gem courtesy somebody who’d previously lamented that he “hated being a nice guy”) and (2) that if women are being raped, its their own fault. Not because these were honest opinions that they’d formulated after considering the situation, or that they genuinely sided with rape apologists, but because what was being said didn’t square with their otherwise-insulated worldview, and this simple fact made it unacceptable. As somebody who’s spent most of their life being told that they’re both wrong and stupid, I’ve managed to avoid taking this particular personality quirk on board, although it hasn’t stopped me becoming self-important and smug.

I have no idea who Gerard Way is and can’t be bothered looking him up.

Hate? I just noticed he’s wearing a sheriff’s badge in the photo. That was my contrived eccentricity, circa 2004.

#15 David Walliams

Zoo Weekly Says: Not that funny, not that handsome, still nails every beautiful woman on the planet. Inexplicable.

Crimitism Says: Indirectly responsible for “Australia’s answer to Little Britain“, The Wedge, which easily makes him the worst person on the list so far. If you thought Little Britain got repetitive after eight weeks, The Wedge has been going for 32, and it wasn’t funny to begin with. His success with women stops being inexplicable when you factor in that his best friend / co-star is gay, which must remove a lot of his competition at parties.

Hate? Hang on, why aren’t the writers of The Wedge on this list? Surely not even the protoplasm that read Zoo think it’s funny, especially after 32 fingerprint-identical “guy at press conference can’t read his statement properly and accidentally says something rude” sketches? It’s like the studio is haunted by the ghost of Ronnie Barker.

#14 Peter Costello

Zoo Weekly Says: Has all the soul of a tax return. Whatever happened to funny pollies like Keating and Hawke?

Crimitism Says: Possible positive outcome: Peter Costello has no physical features or speech impediments worth caricaturing, so if he somehow does become Prime Minister, otherwise-useless satirists would have to raise their game and actually attack his policies rather than just doing impressions of him.

Hate? How about that George Bush? He can’t even pronounce words.

#13 The Health Minister Of Every State Except Northern Territory

Zoo Weekly Says: For completley banning smoking in pubs. Only in NT can you still enjoy a beer and a durry the way God intended.

Crimitism Says: They don’t invoke the Nazis this time, although I’m sure they tried. It’s possible to form a sort-of-argument here, because this will cause more people to stay home and lead to revenue loss and… Oh, fuck it, why am I bothering?

Hate? No.

#12 Michael Bay

Zoo Weekly Says: For giving Optimus Prime lips. Lips!

Crimitism Says: A giant robot pissed all over John Turturro and the lips are the problem…? At least he didn’t bring back Wheelie.

Hate? Christ, now I’m remembering Pearl Harbour. I’m not anxious to die, sir… Just anxious to matter.

#11 The Writers of Lost

Zoo Weekly Says: How about answering just one riddle, just one, before creating a whole new season of mentalness. Come on, be honest – you haven’t got the faintest idea what any of it means, do you?

Crimitism Says: As one of the few people who followed The X-Files‘ increasingly desperate conspiracy plotline all the way through to its vaguely conclusion-shaped ending, I’m not about to get my fingers burned again, thank you very much. At least The Prisoner’s illogical cop-out finale had a monkey in it.

Hate? Oh, probably.

#10 The Australian Track And Field Team

Zoo Weekly Says: They’ve always got some reason why they do badly – pole vaulter Steven Hooker moaning that the track’s too bouncy, Tamsyn Lewis and Jana Rawlinson (nee Pittman) sobbing about teammates and the crowd, Sally McLellan griping about the other runners – it’s never just that we’re a bit shit at athletics, is it?

Crimitism Says: After previously attacking people for being shameless, abusive and insensitive, Zoo now goes after people who keep moaning about things. Are they doing this on purpose?
Hate? I have inherent sympathy for athletes who aren’t footballers or cricketers.

#9 Amy Winehouse

Zoo Weekly Says: A boozy party-girl with a great voice should be on our People We Love list – but her bag-of-coathangers body, demented spitting-at-fans behaviour and frantically self-destructive antics are too annoying.

Crimitism Says: Oh, blatant misogyny, how I’ve missed you in the second half. We’ve covered the “party girl” thing already, so let’s move on to “bag of coathangers”. At first glance, it’s a bottom-feeding men’s magazine sniping at somebody for not being hot enough, even though she’s a singer and they admit she’s got a great voice, because hotness trumps everything, provided you don’t get drunk too often. If you’re familliar with the situation, however, you’ll know that the “bag of coathangers” appearance is the result of her having bulimia. And they’re blaming her for it, rather than any sort of ancillary mindfuck culture, because that would involve admitting that they’re part of it (the only non-model woman in the issue has a snout drawn on her, for fuck’s sake). The implication seems to be that she was hotter before the bulimia, and gosh darn aren’t Zoo magnanimous for sticking up for women who are only thin, rather than dangerously thin.

Hate? If only she’d just take a deep breath and flip the magical “stop having an eating disorder” switch, everything would be fine. I’m led to believe that’s how things work, anyway.

#8 Ayman Al-Zawahiri

Zoo Weekly Says: The real power in al-Qaeda, this lunatic is long overdue for a toetag and a vinyl bag. Continues to stir up hatred and violence around the globe. Plus he’d ban ZOO in a heartbeat if he ever took power in Australia.

Crimitism Says: No, really, that’s what they said. Controlling women’s sexuality in public vs. controlling women’s sexuality in private, which do I choose?
Hate? Yes.

#7 Nicole Richie’s Unborn Baby

Zoo Weekly Says: Destined to be the most annoying member of the 2025 Brat Pack, unless OH WELL FUCKING STOP WRITING ABOUT THEM THEN. No, I’m not going to bother finishing this one.

#6 Gretel Killeen

Zoo Weekly Says: With her pushy interrogations – sorry, “interviews” – with ex-housemates, lizard-like stare and giant man-hands, Gretel’s the scariest thing with a womb since Madonna hung up her sex book and started having kids.

Crimitism Says: Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.

Hate? Just don’t make me think about her. Shit, too late.

#5 Kevin Andrews

Zoo Weekly Says: John Howard’s Immigration Minister. First he refused to let Snoop tour here, saying he wasn’t “the sort of bloke we want in this country”. Then he cancelled Mohamad Haneef’s visa based on… well, nothing really. Didn’t even have the self-respect to apologise when the court announced he was dead wrong. Clown.

Crimitism Says: What if he’d sent the Irish home? I should point out that Snoop Dogg was denied a visa because he’d been recently convicted of drug and firearm offences – things that would stop anybody getting a visa – rather than the personal dislike on Andrews’ part they’re painting it as, but you could probably have guessed that. Nevertheless, I will agree with the Haneef thing.

Hate? Sure, why not?

#4 Tony Mokbel

Zoo Weekly Says: Fled Oz during his trial for importing coke (found guilty), leaving his sister-in-law holding the bag. She was arrested after failing to scratch together the forfeited $1m bail bond. Then Mokbel was caught wearing the stupidest wig ever. Bald git.

Crimitism Says: Of course, when it’s a guy with a dumb wig being charged with drug offences, things are different.

Hate? Yes, all right, he was actually importing the stuff, which is worse.

#3 Seung-Hui Cho

Zoo Weekly Says: Mental Korean who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech College (before shooting himself) because his girlfriend dumped him. Bet that made her regret it.

Crimitism Says: Deftly, they manage to not only ignore the way they exploited the shooting for their Top 10 Massacre Countdown, but go for the xenophobia angle (as if being Korean means anything when every other fucking school shooting is by white guys), lump everybody with a mental illness together (because they’re all psychopaths waiting to go on a rampage, duh) and, finally, blame the woman who wasn’t even his girlfriend anyway. That’ll be the whole Zoo philosophy in a nutshell, then.

Hate? But she provoked him by existing.

#2 Shiek El Hilaly

Zoo Weekly Says: Publicity addict who spewed hateful rants denying the Holocaust, blamed victims of rape for the crime, and said white Australians didn’t deserve to be here as they’re convicts – before finally being given the arse in June.

Crimitism Says: Zoo lays into a publicity-addict for being a misogynist! A lot of those convicts were Irish, by the way.

Hate? Yes.

#1 Daniel Johns

Zoo Weekly Says: Wanky orchestral pretensions, did-they-didn’t-they tonking tales about Bono and Peter Garrett, wearing eyeshadow, not wearing shirts – it’s simply a shame Johns’ talent isn’t as big as his ego. Settle it down, son, just settle it down.

Crimitism Says: What’s interesting – or, at least, what seems interesting given I’ve just spent two hours annotating a copy of Zoo – is that the higher we get up the list, “women we hate because they’re not hot enough” get replaced by “men we hate because they’re not manly enough”. The venom directed at El Hilaly and Al-Zawahiri is perfunctory and clearly just thrown in to avoid the thing looking completely petty, and they can’t even be arsed getting genuinely angry at the KKK, but bring eyeshadow in and suddenly things get personal.

I still don’t know who Australia’s sexiest feminist is.

TOTAL COMPATIBILITY SCORE: 28%

BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME ^_^;

Good! Now I can write something that doesn’t cause me physical pain.