What is nepotism? Is it something the rats should feel sore about being born without, or can they live and die without it? It looks like a sweet enough ride from the outside looking in, but in all seriousness, what’s in a name? Also on the agenda for our freeloaders this week; how Charli XCX’s pending album is already hella Skins coded (Skins > Euphoria obvi), how tax and civics are complete mysteries to anyone under the age of fifty (and even then), the financial pipe dream of ever being in Edinburgh Fringe again, and why our love of Tamatha Paul is the reason we will continue to keep our distance from her (it’s for her own good).

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Happy Fourth of July! Just kidding. There’s no way either rat would ever attach positive affect to a day celebrating the most obnoxious landmass this side of Pangea (and wasn’t SHE a bitch). But the rats WILL settle for shitting on its golden child Taylor Swift whose wedding, despite being a BIG SECRET, we can practically remote-view with full accuracy for the Shein-flavoured polyester nightmare that it most definitely was; and, not to be bested (and certainly testifying to the spiritual pettiness of the whole American race) Beyonce’s surprise release of new music to pull focus from the White Devil (quote Ivy Wolk) probably landed as well as Lena Dunham’s awkward speech about all football players being secretly gay.

The rats LOVE a wild and unfounded speculation about a male celeb’s secret fruitiness. However, the gays probably don’t want to be tarnished with that big white brush, except for the beige gays who already worship Taylor (and to be clear, Taylor gays are the ones that think salt is a spice and consider Twilight ‘literature’). But enough about an empire in decline; this week the rats also discuss contemporary NZ art. Specifically, is Dick Frizelle’s Mickey to Tiki a problematic faux pas, a benign piece of pop history, or a prescient foreshadowing of our inexplicably deepening relationship with a neo-colonizer? Okay yeah the rats can’t stop themselves from harping on about America. But that’s like, only because their new ambassador here wishes we’d renege our stance on nuclear power/weaponry and like, this is pretty much the beginning of an ugly and drawn out end of American hegemony, which if we had any sense as a country at all we’d get well clear of; just like you’d get clear of the smelly drunk guy at a house party who no one can remember inviting, but that everyone’s afraid of because he seems totally volatile. Yeah. Merika.

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Holy mackerel, what the effing eff is wrong with this country? Referring of course to the vermin issue NZ is currently facing. The vermin in question? Not your usual bright eyed fluffy tailed hosts, but one neoconservative Christian asshole, a reverend (is he?) B. Tamaki whose recent vitriol—a literal call to exterminate immigrants/muslims—is being met with the kind of infuriating lassez faire that, where D Church and related parties is concerned, we’ve unfortunately come to expect. As if this sort of ideological tarnish was something that just goes away by itself; like an STD you’re too embarrassed to acknowledge, so you start rinsing with apple cider vinegar and stop looking down when you pee and hope for the best rather than go to the Puhutukawa Clinic where you just KNOW the nurse will guilt you into starting the humiliating text chain of notifying potential exposures (say goodbye to your situationship lol). But seriously, between Brian and One Nation across the ditch, and NZ high schoolers denying the Holocaust in class (a real thing) you start to wonder if the conspiracy theorists who revile CERN for jumping us around timelines might actually be on to something. Like, who could’ve predicted back in the innocence of the early 2000s that THIS is where we’d end up. Oh, did we say innocence? We forgot that America killed like a million people in the Middle East. I mean, that was the decade Britney’s Black Out was released, so pardon us for being distracted. Oh yes, then there was that big September thing at the beginning of the decade.

So…maybe we’ve only imagined this time of innocence and actually we’ve been languishing in American-stoked geopolitical chaos since, well, forever. So if anything’s truly changed maybe it’s just our perception and we’ve actually been living in hell this whole time. Who can say. Also this week; the oddity of Madonna, the ever-loving lure and hype of drink driving (caveat, neither rat has ever done this), the unshakeable feeling that it’s all for nothing, the creeping dread of a dying world, the niggling regret of knowing you don’t really love your partner and maybe wanna go gay, the REAL reason Rihanna hasn’t released music since 2015 (Gen Z says who?) and, finally, a sample of Susan Boyle’s leaked EDM single ‘Unpasteurised’ off her forthcoming new album Twin Peaks; Ballads about my Big Juicy Naturals.

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