Saturday, April 30, 2016

Day 40 - is it day 40 already - can 50 be just around the corner - and the pond surveys the mood of the reptiles this day ...

(Above: and more Popery here).

At last the pond's idea of a VFT linking Newtown to Woollahra is coming to fruition. Provided we use copper for the tracks, the pond can see itself zooming over to Bondi Beach for a coffee and a surf. As for that defamatory portrait of the pond looking at its watch in a cloud of cobwebs, the pond warns Pope he's on very thin ice. The pond never wears a watch ... that way disappointment would be continually confirmed ...

Sorry advocates of the Hornsby to Penrith line, wait your turn. As for advocates of the Bedford Park to Largs Bay, and Dandenong to Footscray lines, you do realise there's no need to visit any of these suburbs at any time?

But sotto voce, there are serious matters to discuss this day, as the reptiles turn their thoughts to the future.

The reptile efforts can be divided into the three broad camps this day. There's the utterly predictable ...


... well yes, it's to the undying shame of clap happy Mark Scott that he never gave prattling Polonius his own show ...and yet he's such an exemplary talent, so full of dry wit, such an engaging personality for the cameras, and surely for discerning viewers, who would be hypnotically entranced by seeing him in full flowering flight ... much as the pond remembers being beguiled by BA Santamaria. Now there was a towering televisual talent.

Then there's the reptiles in team coaching mode ... how to mould the base, disreputable clay of the Turnbull government and get them back into power ...


The oscillating fan is particularly excited by the prospect of Mark Textor returning to do his thing, and indeed, so is the pond. 


Indeed, indeed, about time. Where else, how else, would we get such exciting thoughts as these?



The pond's well into the unofficially official campaign and the boredom factor is high. Forty days and it's still officially unofficial even as we go about the official business of the campaign.

As for the dog botherer, he's in half-time mode. The much-loved Manly - Collingwood if you will - football team is in trouble, but the coach is at hand, and all that's needed is someone ready and willing to take the ball up the guts. None of this fiddle faddle on the edges! Up the guts!


Frankly there wasn't a dry eye at the pond after reading the dog botherer's exhortations and anyone wanting the full coaching manual can just google the text. Feel the onion eater, be the onion eater ...the more they whinge, the more they squeal, the more Malware can be certain he's channeling Abbott.

But then there was a third camp, the doubters and the worriers and the agitators and the provocateurs ...



The controversy even attracted the reptile editorialist:


Now the pond was shocked.

If we can't sell off the farm, what's the point? Does this mean Barners and the agrarian socialists have won and soon enough we'll be paying a hundred dollars for a lamb roast?


Heck, what's one or two per cent of the country? The pond has long advocated a lease back deal with the Chinese which would see us sell off the entire country, make everyone millionaires in the process, and then lease it back at a peppercorn rate ... talk about sorting out the debt, and avoiding paying taxes, as any decent multinational like News Corp is wont to do ...

Yes, the rest of the reptile editorial was more of the usual same, with a bit of alarmist fear and hysteria and paranoia thrown in for good measure ...


Indeed, indeed ... and if the GOP goes with teh Donald - the ultimate fruition and flowering of conservative and tea party endeavours - we'll all want to join News Corp and Malware in setting up international accounts and companies on remote islands ...


Okay, okay, it isn't Moorice, but the pond can only hope for one Moorice a week.

5 comments:

  1. Dear Dorothy,

    A wonderful line on the dog botherer from Richard Ackland in The Saturday Paper today, talking about Samantha Maiden's drink drive charges:

    Who can blame the wretched lass for wanting to get stuck into Textor’s tinctures? After all, she had Chris Kenny in the car all the way to the shindig.

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    1. Oh dear, suddenly it all becomes clear. Who wouldn't want a G and T with the dog botherer for company? And such was the pond's delight we should provide a link for others ...

      https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2016/04/30/gadfly-maiden-voyage-the-dock/14619384003176

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  2. Really excitingly agile and innovative idea, that Turnball thing about 30 minutes cities, isn't it. Just imagine: a city where you are never more than 30 minutes away from where you work, or where you shop, or where you recreate (by car, but of course). It would only take a decade or five to demolish Melbourne and then rebuild it to achieve that magnificent objective.

    But then, the funny thing is that we've had a city designed and built to achieve an even better result than that since the 1920s - it's called Canberra. Canberra was consciously designed and initially built to contain many different centres which contained workplaces, shopping and recreation and residences all in a localized hub. The clearest example in my mind is the 'suburb' of Woden, if only because I worked there for 4 1/2 years.

    It had a central location containing the Departments of Health and Social Security. It had a large retail mall containing everything from supermarkets through grogshops to white goods and furniture retailers, restaurants and cafes and movie theatres and nightclubs etc. And it was surrounded by residential housing so that nobody was more than about a 20-25 minute walk away from the centre. T'rrific !

    Except. What happens when a married couple, living happily in their Woden home (complete with 99 year lease on the land) and working for the Dept of Health ... until he gets promoted from being a Clerk Class 2/3 in Health to s Class 4 in Defence ... which just happens to be on the other side of Canberra. Well of course, he moves out of the Woden house and takes a house near Defense, while she stays on as a Clerk Class 5 in Woden. And they meet in neutral ground in the centre at weekends.

    But never mind. I just think about the tradies (my father was a bricklayer) who are working on a house in Clayton one week, then they finish that and move on to their next gig in Broadmeadows while their home is in Altona. It'll all work real good for them (for those not in Melbourne, just imagine many kilometers from the city centre in three different and quite widely separated compass directions).

    I cannot even begin to contemplate what sins and/or crimes I must have committed to have peanut-brain Turnball inflicted upon me.

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    1. :)³ ... the pond is looking forward to the complete rebuilding of Sydney too, because there's nothing like riding from Pelham Bay to Coney island to remind the pond how compressed New York is, and how easy it is to reach everything in thirty minutes ...

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    2. Yair, Sydney's harder then Melbourne, DP, with all those hills and harbours.

      Of course, compact and tall is the way a city should be, and I guess New Yorkers have been well served by its geographical limitations. In Melbourne, of course, we had unlimited space as this account of Melbourne's first really tall building shows:

      "The first building to break the height limit [132-feet (40.2 m) introduced in 1916 but later extended] is also Melbourne's archetypal postwar 'glass-box' skyscraper. Completed in 1958, the former ICI Building, designed by Bates Smart McCutcheon, was inspired by the new-generation curtain-walled office blocks emerging in the USA. Located outside the city grid and surrounded by parks and gardens, the ICI Building exemplifies the 1950s modernist ideal of a pristine tower in an open field, a situation difficult to emulate in the crowded city centre."

      It's really hard to keep to 30 minutes when everything has to be out of the city centre and surrounded by parks and gardens. Incidentally, due to a design/manufacture flaw, the ICI building habitually defenestrated itself for some time (until all the glass was replaced), dropping large glass panes periodically on the pedestrians below.

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