Wow, what a year this week has been! Just when you think the stink of western madness couldn’t get thicker on the air…it does. But anyone living on this side of 9/11 knows already that it can always get worse; and just in time for Christmas! One of our favourite things to do over the Christmas period is spiral in the family home after declining to join your loved ones at lunch, only to pull back from full dissociative affect by watching a familiar movie. Often this is Batman Returns or Eyes Wide Shut. But this year, why not remember the year that was by spiralling into a classic Rob Reiner, who we are presently mourning after he and his wife were stabbed to death in their LA home. The man gave us Princess Bride, and also This Is Spinal Tap, among others. And much like the inconceivable tragedy on Bondi Beach, Reiner’s death has already been re-framed by a toad-faced politician with a tic-tac-choad. Apparently, his death was an inevitable result of being anti-Trump (or so says Trump). Also on the agenda this week; theorist Byung Chul Han’s notion of terrorism as the ultimate selfie (kms), the offering of comedians versus the offering of musicians, the semiotic wasteland of techno neo-feudalism, the mirage of nationalism, and the unlikely power of Lynn Ramsey’s latest film Die My Love, in which impending climate doom and The Malaise Of The End are gorgeously rendered as one woman’s struggle with post natal depression (serious, it’s lit; and also the most punk thing you’ll see this year).

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It is officially Wicked Season and if you’re not a shrill femme jumping on the Ozian Express and getting your landing strip dyed a pleasing shade of verdigris, are you even ALIVE??!! Arguably, as our producer has pointed out, the true cinema of Wicked is the press tour, and by golly if Cynthia and Ariana haven’t ratcheted up the lezzy-platonic-whatever-it-is thing that they have going on like a director cut sizzle reel of the L Word. Truly, Cynthia Erivo is a force to be reckoned with and any mere mortal would be questioning their sexuality around her. Who doesn’t want to be Cynthia’s little pocket princess right now? Even if Ariana doesn’t get the Oscar, she’s got Erivo’s jacked arms and soothing upper-crust-British accent (worthy consolations). Oh to be the quasi-erotic fixation of a superhuman vocalist with the physical discipline of a Russian gymnast. Also, while the rats opine their lack of a Cynthia-Ariana style romance in their own lives, they discuss how finding a partner at this point is predominantly about just having someone beside you when we inevitably all burn together. You know, a fellow witness for the End of Everything (feasibly fucking imminent LOL). But in their chronic singleton status there’s always the symphonic stylings of Rosalia’s LUX (a cultural landmark akin to Moses’ high camp unveiling of the Ten Commandments on Sinai) to ease the stubborn agony of being alive in 2025. *sigh.

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There’s something rotten in the South Pacific (it’s cops, we’re talking about cops). Recent salacious pedo-adjacent revelations in NZ’s law enforcement aside, there is just SO MUCH to cover here at the end of everything, and the rats feel so honoured to have an avid listenership to join them in bearing witness to the rising seas (and everything that comes with that). Firstly, Auckland’s hornet problem, made more terrifying by the fact that they’re squirters (relatable, but ya know; time and place). Secondly, Johanna revisits her experiences as a young aryan-looking dressage aspirant at Horse Camp, a REAL THING THAT HAPPENED. While tumbling down nostalgia lanes, Johanna also tours us through the good Welly times of a local dairy-cum-party-hotspot, of which it’s reasonable to say Auckland has its own variations (not without a meth element though, which just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea). Second-to-lastly, we explore the recently disused Anthropocene moniker, and elect Cthuluhcene as a possible replacement, even though it feasibly all ends the same (so who tf cares; like, everyone dead etcetera). And last but not least, MUSICALS! Believe it or not Sam only saw Cabaret for the first time THIS YEAR, and is aghast at his own cultural lethargy. Turns out Bob Fosse is something of a genius. Get amongst!

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Get ready non-paying listeners (cough; no shade) for a very special and hopefully consistent-hereafter Agony Aunt section in which we answer your queries qualms and primal screams. Well, we do our best. As we see you have; your responses to our calls for willing plaintiffs has been voluminous and shrill (a compliment). And how can we blame you—life feels like a succession of vertigo-inducing obstacles in this particularly fraught historical moment. Obstacles the rats give a brief but strangely comprehensive tour of, from the national blight of Judith Collins, to the tragic regional loss of Bacios, one of Whangarei’s long standing (and infamous) night clubs where both rats have had formative experiences, on par with how golden age celebs of the seventies wistfully talk about Studio 54 (minus the A class drugs and human trafficking . . . we assume). A stretch sure. But not a place without its charms.

Like . . . the enduring appeal of the Great Unwashed, a type of bush-man known only to rural areas that city folk CANNOT comprehend. And as anyone that is viscerally repulsed by class violence will know, once you get a whiff of His forever-pheromones (soap and hydrochloric resistant) you’re under His spell, and you’re either ending the night in the back of his ute, or drinking enough whiskey you can give him a languid gobby in Bacio toilets without thinking about why the floor is so sticky. Sigh—truly the end of an era. Also, Azealia Banks has turned her fetid coat on Isreal yet again, in a string of tweets nearly identical to the last time she played in Tel Aviv in 2018. First she loves it, then she hates it. We’re presuming not because her common humanity rightly opposed genocide, but because the venue didn’t provide her with the kind of drugs that make playing in an apartheid state possible. Silly bitch

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This week, Melbourne vs Auckland. Which is better? Just kidding; it;’s obviously Melbourne. And yet the rats, being measured journalists, provide a balanced review of both locales, two places that are so different but also so similar; like their resemblance in local cuisine (meth). Or the casual and continued usurpation of the indigenous! With that in mind Johanna is settling in well, having just sourced an apartment in the scabies-riddled hipster paradise of Fitzroy; rivalled in plaid and stick-n-pokes only by neighbouring digital nomad hot spot Brunswick.

Could this be the beginning of a dynamic cultural exchange between Australia and New Zealand, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Gallipoli? Maybe. Also on the agenda—as always—the inevitable decline of the west, whether or not nazis deserve sex, the unbearable lightness of Lime bikes, small dogs, dank matter, the conspicuous collapse of Grindr every time more than one Republican enters a room, the timeless allure of femboys, the scheduled war between China and the US, how Sam’s been helping Johanna’s dad out of remission, human faeces, a waning interest in whether we live or die, and the on going beef between Nadia Lim and Missy Elliot.

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