Dan, The 'Showbiz Editor'.

It’s funny how you remember some people.

You might have seen / heard the kerfuffle around the News of the World crashing and burning this week after it’s come to light they hacked a whole bunch of cell phones in the UK including that of a murdered girl. The fuckers.

So sensing a shit storm, Rupert Murdoch shut the whole paper down. It was a spectacular move and a spectacular story, even here in NZ and naturally our media did what they always do when something actually newsworthy i.e. Not the Harry Potter movie premiere, happens. They try to find ‘the NZ angle’.

And this one was easy because the News of the World has a NZ staff member, Dan. We’ll call him Dan because that’s his name. Not his full name you might have noticed but as he strikes me as the kind of cat to Google himself, regularly, I won’t use his last name.

He’s the papers’ Showbiz Editor. No really, there is actually such a position. It’s an oxymoron really because ‘showbiz’ is not really news; it’s scripted, planned and marketed. In fact it’s about as un-newsworthy as it gets so it’s a bit of a fucken stretch I think to describe the guy as a ‘journalist’ like all our media are.

Incidentally I always wanted to be a journalist but two things stopped me really a) that the prospect of four years study when I’d only just flunked college was not appealing and b) I thought I knew it all anyway. Still do.

My dearly departed Grandad was forever offering to pay for me too. He also regularly dropped the knowledge on me that I should learn Japanese and get into the tourism biz. Coming from a man who fought the buggers for 3 long years and still trusted none of them 50 years on, it was an admission of sorts that the bastards had won out, eventually.

Anyhoo. Dan was on the telly too, with his faux English accent that started out all hoighty toighty but quickly denigrated into colloquial Kiwi the madder he got at having just been left without a job. Given that he’s only been in the UK for about five years I thought it was the height of wankiness that he tried the accent on in the first place.

See, I’ve known of Dan for quite a while. He used to write a daily piece in the Dominion that was one of those ones that you just know he must’ve sucked some cock to get the column space because it contained no journalistic merit at all.

His crowning glory came the day he decided to poke fun at the masses who wore sneakers with their work clothes when hiking up Featherston Street from the train station. He thought he was being insightful and witty, everyone else just thought he was being a douche. Needless to say the complaints poured in.

I remember it so well because it was one of those times in my life I read his rubbish and regret that I had never taken Grandad up on his offer on the journalism. How Dan went from criticising peoples comfort to ‘Showbiz Editor’ I don’t know but again, I suspect it involves a lot of penis.

Oh and don’t feel too sorry for Dan, he reckons he’ll find a new job real easy because he’s on “a lot of TV and radio” and he’s “one of the most recognised faces in the showbiz industry”. His words not mine. See what I mean about him being a big self Googler?

Yes it’s funny how you remember some people.

Sienna had her cell phone hacked.