Friday, December 07, 2018

No need to send in the clowns, the haunting goes on ...

   

The haunting of the reptiles continues … just look at that  hideous grinch, smirking at Santa and smirking at Sharma …

Will this suffering never end?

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so... (the rest here).

But why did the pond pretentiously lead with clowns and Auden?

Just look at this poignant juxtaposition …


With a bit of luck, the cynical - and eminently stupid - fear mongering over encryption will play as well as fear of the blacks did in the Victoria election, but for amateurs, here's how you play politics over security … first look for a gigantic wedge, then tweet …


What a flake and a con artist he is, and what a mess there'll be down the track, when the new encryption ploy and wedge produces slow burn disasters …

But actually the pond resorted to Auden not for this clown but because our Henry was also being haunted … and being classy, our Henry felt the need to resort to classical allusions …


Well there's more Henry at the lizard Oz for those who can stand it, but the pond decided to jump sip when our Henry decided to abandon Ajax.

Happily, speaking of hubris, Rowe had a cartoon about the haunting, with more haunted Rowe here


So what else has been happening in reptile la la land?

As usual, clean dinkum Oz coal, you bloody beaut, oi, oi, oi, has been front and centre, and Lloydie has been doing climate science again ...

 

Never mind fucking the planet, see how the moola rolls in … but poor Lloydie, haunted by the difficult blacks...

Oh no, not the pesky, uppity blacks, not the dark Continent …

Meanwhile, on another planet in the NY Times and Axios



Well they're easy enough to google, or to find here and here, but enough of alternative realities.

As it was meant to be a relaxing Friday frying in the sun, and with the reptiles wildly excited about ScoMo and dinkum clean Oz coal, the pond decided to chance its arm and head off to the Speccie mob.

Sure enough Lloydie's soul mate was beavering away …


What to say? Well the pond has issued many strict warnings and stern injunctions against the watching of too many movies, especially ones made in Australia, and sadly Andrew L. shows what a lifetime of staring at the shadows on the cave wall will do in the way of frying a fizzled brain …

Just look at the essence of science and the huge amount of field research and the peer reviewed  papers embedded in this CV:


Thank you Andrew L'Anonymous for that informative summary of Andrew L's impeccable scientific credentials …

And so to the real treat of the day and the pond's salvation … 

Giles is back, ready to meander around and make the pond feel good that, while it was old, it seemed to have staved off senility for another day …




Why that reminded the pond of the great Tamworth flood of '56 when the pond's scheduled appearance at a game of Hopscotch was cruelly interrupted …

Rake the forests floors, rake the floors...


Actually the pond quite likes calling Giles a conservative weirdo, save for the way it defames ordinary. sensible conservatives not suffering from an excessive of nostalgia and delusions of glory, or a love of the onion muncher …


At that feels better. Whenever there's talk of tennis or largely binary genders or front-line military service in the Cold War (yes, Spike Milligan was in the war too), the pond reaches for a restorative Rowe ... 


Truth to tell, it's impossible to make Giles up … in fact, it's impossible to imagine an actual Giles, and so the pond is grateful that someone played this cosmic joke …

Now the pond can hear some wondering about Giles' many peer-reviewed papers, extensive field research and wealth of scientific observations, and it actually goes back a long way, this astonishing scientific record, as recorded by the Cornwall Arts Index here


It's shamefully, shockingly out of date of course. Remains an art critic? Silly Cornwallians, he's now an expert climate scientist.

That listing doesn't begin to embrace Giles' rich contributions to that dreadful rag lacking in effervescence, the lizard Oz, or his tremendous contribution to climate science at the Speccie mob.

How does the pond know it's pure, undiluted science? Well Giles reaches for the authoritative scientific sources of Dean Swift and John Dryden ...


It's impossible to caricature Giles, and possibly, given the age and the signs of senility, perhaps any attempt would be a tad cruel.

Suppose all the Giles get up and go, 
And all the coal lovers and reptiles run away; 
Will Time say nothing but I told you so? 
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Perhaps the pond should leave the caricatures to an expert, such as the infallible Pope, with more papal pleasures here ...


And now, as the pond started with talk of clowns, and then spent some time in the company of clowns, and then unfortunately the Pope decided to hide his famous portrait of the head clown as he's carried away on that gurney …

So here'a a reminder


… and that done, why not end with a clown singalong …






10 comments:

  1. Hi Dorothy,

    There is a mystery here!

    What is an aesthete of such exquisite taste and refinement as Giles doing in a ‘run-down Sydney apartment’?

    “Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself”, John Milton (1608-1674).

    DiddyWrote

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah, DW, Auty is just running one of those intellectual scams in which he claims to have read, though probably not understood, a bunch of books that nobody of any intelligence or sophistication has gone anywhere near.

      Such as works by Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball and Paul Kengor.

      Now I don't know about you but persoanlly I have never even heard of that gang of importuners before, and I certainly don't intend to change that state ever. Then he adds a few well know anti-intellectual con artists: Kevin Donnelly, Jordan Peterson and Ian Plimer - again, have you read anything by any of that gang ? Do you ever intend to ?

      But the con is basically a take on a Denis Bloodnok scene in the Goons when he has this exchange with Neddy Seagoon about his time in India:

      Denis: "Have you ever been to India ?"
      Neddy: "No".
      Denis: "Good, then I can speak freely !"

      Speak away with total freedom, Giles.

      Delete
  2. You're right, DP - Giles is well and truly beyond parody, so I won't even try - it would defeat much sharper wits than mine.

    However, I am slightly puzzled by his reference to his "front-line military service..... in Germany at the height of the Cold War". I can understand serving at the front in an actual Hot, shooting war, but of course a Cold War doesn't involve outright physical battle. I can only conclude that either (a) Giles was stationed in West Germany as a British Army soldier - probably doing National Service - at some time in the 1950s, which would have offered plenty of opportunities for tourism and picking up cheap WW2 memorabilia, but not much actual fighting; or (b) he was some sort of Cold War spook.

    If the latter, is he perhaps in breach of the Official Secrets Act by alluding to such activities, even at so late a date? This could be the "Spycatcher" case all over again; perhaps Malcolm Turnbull would like to offer legal services to Giles on a pro bono basis.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Giles Auty, war hero. National Service in the RAF, some months service at RAF Fassberg, about 50 km from the East German border. And that qualifies him to describe the onion-muncher as some mute inglorious Monash...?

      If he wanted to boost his military cred, he'd have as much luck telling us that he watched every episode of "Get Some In"...

      Delete
  3. Giles the Auty: "do you recall those grossly misshapen light bulbs we were all supposed to buy some years ago in our supposed life-and-death struggle with 'global warming'"

    Do I remember them ? I still have some number of them working away every day delivering low electricity consumption light. Some for at least a decade, and now they are holding up my desired, but delayed, transition into LED (only needed a couple so far). And they are all still delivering lovely yellow-white light that's fine to read by. "Grey light" ? Whoever heard of that ? Only Giles the Auty !

    And then: "how much better off our more intelligent children might be learning Latin than baseless scientific myths."

    "Baseless scientific myths" ? Now I've heard about a lot of "baseless myths" - eg Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Scientology, Capitalism, Communism and Australian Conservatism etc - but baseless "scientific" myths ? What on Earth are they ? Oh, and may I point out that if our more intelligent children actually learned mathematics - the single greatest achievement of Western civilisation without which we would not have much sophisticated science - they would be heaps better off than wasting their time learning a dead language which was long ago superseded by Italian - which is a language in which many mathematical theorems and systems came into existence back around the time of the Renaissance.

    But then, quoting from Dryden: "The most may err as grossly as the few."

    You know, I think the silly little Wiffle Piffle is trying to hint that the 97%+ of scientists who support the science of anthropogenic climate change are actually the "most" who are grossly erring..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maths! Good heavens, that's all a bit hard, and not easily dismissed with the sort of subjective waffle you would expect from an art critic.

      The reference to latin shows a yearning for another age where classical studies were the marker of the British public school boy. The assistant commandant at Woolwich Training Establishment 1902 "We would rather have a classically educated boy than one who has given his mind very much up … [to] physics and those kinds of subjects. We want them to be leaders in the field first … Power of command and habits of leadership are not learned in the laboratory. Our great point is character; we care more about that than subjects". Didn't that work out well in the Great War?

      Giles could have found no more appropriate example than Abbott. A talentless clod with no real-world experience. I assume he would have been one of those officers marching to battle armed with an umbrella or kicking a football.

      Delete
    2. It was always better "back then" wasn't it (just ask Ross Douthat and his worship of WASPs).

      But I tend to think that the emphasis on Latin comes from the insistence of the Catholic Church that the Bible should only ever be available in Latin, a language which the clergy were educated in and that kept the Bible as inaccessible to the laity.

      Until those evil Protestants created their vernacular bibles, that is. And that really put the pigeon amongst the cats when anybody and everybody could arrive at their own version of the faith.

      Delete
    3. Perhaps Giles was thinking of the learned scientists who still argue for a flat earth …

      https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/youtuber-successfully-completes-flatearthers-100000-challenge-flatearther-refuses-to-pay/

      … if only he'd put the challenge in Latin, who would have known or cared?

      Delete
    4. Et terram istam non rotundam esse, sit quadratus.

      Google translate knows that George Bernard Shaw cared.

      Delete

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