In which Dame Slap goes fruity speechwriter haywire, the dog botherer does an impression of a monoturd, and it's left to our Gracie to analyse the narcissists ...

 

 

In its daily walks, the pond has noticed the curious phenomenon of the odd couple. 

This usually consists of a woman wearing a mask, and a man not bothering, thereby rendering the point of the woman wearing the mask entirely moot. Not once has the pond noticed the phenomenon in reverse, with the woman maskless, and the man covered up ...

The pond has occasionally thought of wandering up to the odd couple and asking "and your fucking point is?!", but realises that this could be dangerous, with the woman offering up a submissive sigh, and the man carrying on like a ratbag devotee of the dog botherer or Killer Creighton ...

Better just to walk by, maintaining the distance ... but it reflects the troubled times in Sydney, accustomed to an easy superiority, but now required to do a few hard yards, and wilting under the strain and sending sundry reptiles into a state of hysterics.

As a result, this day at the pond is exceedingly boring and tedious and yet at the same time astonishingly weird and wondrous, and who better to start off proceedings than Dame Slap?

 

 

 

Suddenly it's urgent?

Might the pond humbly suggest another urgent emergency? The need for the reptiles to fix their graphics department ... oh and perhaps get back to some good old-fashioned climate science denialism, so we might enjoy the Dame Slap of yore ...

 

 

 

Need any more compelling evidence? To accompany Dame Slap's discovery of the bleeding obvious they dig out a Getty Images snap of a queue? A queue? Might as well run a snap of paint drying...

Forgive the pond, but this is an unmitigated catastrophe, a crisis of the first water, and the reptiles must develop a sense of urgency if they're going to win the race to fix it ...

As for the other matter, you know, people dying in their homes, here's where it gets truly weird ...

 

 

Say what? Dame Slap has turned PM speechwriter? The chairman of the IPA is going to put words into Scotty from marketing's mouth?

Is she really that keen to provide evidence that SloMo is just a reptile sockpuppet?

Never mind, let the charade begin ...

 

A couple of notes:

It turns out that Dame Slap can be as batshit boring as any political speechwriter.

And surely it was a mistake of the reptiles to show the real PM in a clickbait video clip hard up against Dame Slap wanting to put words in his mouth? 

The pond had to neutralise images of the real SloMo immediately by way of a screen cap, lest some stray passing innocent felt the need to see the sockpuppet speaking, and yet somehow failing to do his sockpuppet duty, and sound off in the manner demanded by Dame Slap in her inimitable way ...

 

 

Um, how did the reptiles allow that? That is not political speechwriting. That is a dreadful assembly of cliches, truisms and dull rhetoric of the tedious "to our people, I say" and "I want to insist on one point" kind ...

It's hideous, it seems designed to make the pond grateful for real politicians,  even one as dreadful as Scotty from marketing ... and it doesn't get any better ...

 

"Therefore, I proposed"; "regarding flights", "regarding the remaining elderly"?

Tedious, pompous, bloated, stilted, and with curious notions, such as the elderly must be "doubly cautious in watching themselves" ...

So the elderly must sit in front of a mirror and contemplate their navel? Can they do it in a meadow, ad infinitum?

Sorry, the pond was racing ahead there a little, in its urgent desire that all this end ...

 

"My friends"?!

That's the giveaway of course. At one point when one of the pond's email addresses was being relentlessly spammed by US politicians, the opening line was always "My friend", when the scribbler had about as much familiarity with the pond as a bar of soap had to Tamworthians trapped once a week in a bath tub ... and it was always followed by the line "my friend, send me a quadrillion smackeroos and I will make you rich and the planet a veritable paradise", and as the emails usually came from Republicans, the pond knew at once it was a devious lie ...

For a moment the pond ended up being endlessly spammed by the orange one, but the pond will leave donning the MAGA cap to Dame Slap ...

So thank you very much, but no thank you at all, please, someone stop Dame Slap from ever repeating this dreadful experiment.

The pond has no idea what came over her, but it's convincing evidence that we were better off when she just ranted, and raved, and heckled and carried on like a pork chop ...

Speaking of pork chops, next up was the dog bothering, and he was in a right old state of hysteria ...

 

 

 

 

At last an evocative illustration, even if it's one worn down by repetition, because the dog botherer is determined to punch somebody or something or someone in the moosh ... 

It's the dog botherer way, and clearly the current lockdown has had a severe impact on his mental health, which true to tell, has always been a little suspect ...

 

 

Might the pond interrupt the rant here to quote John Birmingham? The poor lad was recently in a state of medical shock, as he outlined here ...

On Saturday, three things happened.
A young, otherwise healthy woman, Adriana Takara, a 38-year-old accounting student, died of COVID in Sydney.
Thousands of protestors marched through the streets of the same city (and through Melbourne and Brisbane) raging against lockdowns, and masks, and black helicopters, and 5G nanobots, and Jewish space lasers and whatever and ever amen.
And my surgeon came with the results of the biopsies.

Oh dear ...

 

Well yes, and luckily there was good news at the end of it all, and the pond knows feeling -  the pond was once pronounced dead on the operating table, and for years, the pond's mother was convinced that it was the power of prayer that brought the pond back, but there's a certain clarity that arises and speaking of performative wanknuffery and fringe-dwelling monoturds, on we go ...

 

What a whining, moaning, whingeing, foot-stamping snowflake ... or monoturd, if you will ... as on and on the dog botherer rambles, with meaningless lamentations about some kind of mystical and non-existent national character ...

We all know the sort who blather on about national character ...

 

 

Back to the dog botherer, full of the vapours ...

 

 

East Germany? Oh for fuck's sake, and there was Polonius prattling about Burnside, and yet here's the dog botherer evoking the Stasi?

And yet the real emergency is that the reptile graphics department has reverted to form, as if a shot of two politicians in masks somehow illuminates the dog botherer's Stasi words, and help with the crisis at hand ...

 

 

Yep, it takes a dog botherer to defend a useless mob of fuckwits and loons, but perhaps that's because, as a monoturd himself, he feels a comradely kinship ...

Some might wonder if in any of this, is the dog botherer helping, and of course he's helping himself, because he needs the occasional brain fart to ease the tension ... but luckily there's only one gobbet to go ...

 

 

Did the pond mention monoturds and precious snowflakery? 

JB ended his piece this way:

I was plenty sick, but the nodules were most likely an imaging artefact.
I received this happy news on the day Adriana Takara struggled for her last breaths, and Jon-Bernard Kairouz the Tik Tok Covid Numbers Guy guy filled his lungs to roar out that he was the ‘People’s Premier’ and he was protesting for ‘free dumb’.
It all seemed connected and disconnected and freighted with meaning and meaningless.
By the end of the day, however, Kairouz had deleted any evidence of his having been at the rally, perhaps thinking he could claim that his earlier livestream from the event was some sort of imaging artefact too.
But fuck that guy. He was there. They all were.

Yep, and the dog botherer was there too, yelling his version of free dumb and blathering about wimps and pussies, while stumping about like a bullying monoturd ...

At the end of it all, the pond finally understood the odd couple syndrome: the dog botherer was the one without the mask, roaming around, and shouting at the clouds, and the masked woman walked three paces behind ...

 

 

 

For a more detailed analysis of the syndrome, the pond turned to our Gracie ...

 

 

The pond would have hesitated at diagnosing the dog botherer as a narcissist, but in her new and free state of mind, our Gracie didn't hesitate ...

 

 

Indeed, indeed. Or they might end a column with ...

 

 

 ... and think it a fine rhetorical flourish, as monoturds are wont to do...

Please, do go on with the analysis ...

 

A grandiose sense of self-importance? A lack of empathy for others? A need for special admiration? A calling out for special treatment?

Could we add blather about national character, because then we'd have the dog botherer down to a T ...

As usual, the pond began to wonder how much longer our Gracie might want to turn up on this reptile platform and nestle cheek to jowl with the dog botherer ...

Look, there they were this morning ...

 

 

 

The monoturd narcissist and the shrink on the spot to do an analysis of the narcissist ... but as usual, everything must come to an end, even a session on the couch ...

 

 

Sorry, Gracie, but the dog botherer and News Corp in general will go on infecting the country, it's in their nature ... and how much are they paying you to act as their shrink and in-house therapist?

Luckily, after a Freudian session, the pond can keep on being distracted by the immortal Rowe's alternative games ... with more alternatives here ...

 

In which the pond goes sans-culottes with the hole in bucket man, before moving to air-conditioned Mullumbimby with Lloydie ...

 

 

 

 

Yes, there are many better ways to spend Friday than brooding about Macron and the unvaccinated, especially in the company of the hole in the bucket man.

If the pond might put it a touch crudely, but with some vigour, fuck the unvaccinated ... and that's really all the pond has to say on the matter ... but not our hole in the bucket man ...

 

 

Of course Macron faces particular difficulties, because herding the perfidious French towards anything is far worse than herding cats ... but that said, do we really need two snaps of him in the one Henry piece?

 

What a libertarian song and dance about nothing. And yet our hole in the bucket man keeps blathering on ...

The law of tort? As one reader noted awhile ago, if tort is the solution, prepare for a long-winded legal answer ...

What the fuck has our Henry been smoking of late? What's the point of this tossing about? If someone wants to declare the unvaccinated republic of Nimbin and Byron Bay, let them, and let the border be closed long and hard ...

In the end we have the ripples of Faux Noise and Q and all that US shit at our doorstep, and none of it would have been thought about it back in the day when the pond stepped up to a dose of sugary sweet pinky liquid served up in a spoon, aware that there were still people forced to walk about with the aid of calipers, Alan Marshall style ...

It's true Marshall made a good fist of his lot, but what's the bet he would be interested in all the anti-vaxxer tosh doing the rounds? Or the hole in the bucket man wringing his hands and worrying about the suffering of the unvaccinated ...

Oh and why do the reptiles keep interrupting our Henry with meaningless shots of the French ...

 Couldn't we just have had another shot of a man punching a horse, or perhaps refusing a Covid test? N'est-ce pas?

And then the hole in the bucket man gives the entire game away by referring to France as instituting "vaccinal Jabobinism" ... which the pond hastens to add has nothing to do with vaginal, except a certain melodic rhyming ...

So perforce it's just not fuck the unvaccinated, it must be fuck the hole in the bucket man too ...

 

Institute a system whereby access to the lizard Oz is restricted to the unvaccinated? The pond could perhaps live with that, in the hope that the readership might die off a little more quickly ...

As for an intelligent argument, sorry, all the pond has to offer is fuck the unvaccinated, and fuck our hole in the bucket man too, and if you've got a problem with that, have you thought about spending your life in Mullumbimby in a state of delusion and denial ...

Speaking of reptile denialism, the pond was pleased to see that the saviour of the Amazon was back out and about, spreading, in his usual way, fear, doubt and uncertainty ...

 

That's the best the downsized, awesomely pathetic lizard Oz graphics department has got?

Couldn't they have helped out the saviour of the Amazon by stumping up for a different image, and perhaps a different story?

 

 

Sorry, that's in another paper, and perhaps Lloydie's saving of the Amazon is a tad exaggerated, so it's on with the uncertainty and doubts clause ...

 

If the pond might be so bold, Lloydie's diligence should be viewed in the context of reptile defensiveness and the pounding SloMo and Australia's deep and abiding love of dinkum, clean, virginal, coal is likely to cop at Glasgow, as we cling to our precious bodily fluids and gaseous substances ...

 

Uncomfortable? Lots of the planet is already uncomfortable, thank you very much, and even the reptiles joined in by offering a bit of alarmism about Russia's coldest regions, which in the interests of the reptiles' ongoing climate science denialism, the pond was forced to neuter as a screen cap ...

We'll have none of that nonsense about the planet burning, or freezing, or flooding, at least not when our Lloydie is out and about and keen to talk to the only climate scientist he seems to know ...

Yes, come on down denialist neo-sceptic Judith Curry ...

 

Just for the DeSmog Curry record ...

Yes, yes, air conditioning and a herbal diet in Mullumbimby, that'll fix it all, how foolish of the pond to worry ...

And so to the search for a bonus, and what slim pickings the reptiles had on offer on a Friday ...

 

 

The Swiss bank account man had an awakening? Who knew, who cared? Just keep cutting down the trees and digging up that coal ...

And Sharma with a statement of the bleeding obvious?

Perforce the pond went with the """ man, kindly offering advice to Scotty from marketing ...

 

 

You see, there's something truly weird and wonderful about the man from the John Curtin Research Centre explaining how SloMo might keep his job ... what with the splendid job he's been doing of late ...

John Curtin might be rolling in his grave, but hey, if Scotty from marketing just manages to be a little bit more like Little Johnny, all will be well ...

 

 

The moral of the story? The pond is searching for one ... perhaps a new bout of furriner bashing is the answer?

At this point, the pond had to neutralise another reptile distraction by turning it into a screen cap ...

 

But aren't we offering advice so that the mean, tricky and out of touch anyone might yet score another term in office?

Please, do go on, help the lad out ...

 

Indeed, indeed. What joyous news. Just a few minor policy changes, courtesy of the John Curtin Research Centre,  and SloMo's position is recoverable, and we might yet have another few years of clap happy speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, and shouting out to imaginary friends as we await the rapture ...

 

 

Something to truly feel sorry over? Was that an attempt at irony? But we already had a generous dose of irony, a hearty dose of irony, with the John Curtin Research Centre busy researching the way that Scotty from marketing might recover, and then offering the findings to the reptiles, so that they might put them behind a paywall ...

With friends like these, is it any wonder that Labor has no need of enemies and is routinely doomed?

That said, the pond will admit to an ulterior motive. It really only wanted an excuse to put up another relevant Rowe, still staging his alternative Olympics, with more relevant Rowe here ... can't get enough of those sharkie shorts ...but just who is locked up in that gold standard box? Don't ask the pond, we're off to enjoy the air conditioning with Lloydie in Mullumbimby ... or at least we might be, if the gold standard ever lets us out ...

 

 

 

 
 

In which the pond's reptile guardian angel saves the day from petulant Peta with a load of old cobblers and dashing Donners...

 

 

 

 

Only a moron would take the rambling delusions of narcissist Newman seriously, and for a nanosecond the pond was about to crank into gear when it realised that this was Thursday, and that it had banned morons in favour of loons ...

 

 

What a baleful glare, but it helps explain why she'd give the nod to the Campbell soup man ...

Still, the ongoing, perhaps eternal, for the moment never-ending, ban on petulant Peta left the pond in a potential Thursday pickle ... but luckily the reptiles heard the pond's pitiful cries of woe, its lamentations, its donning of sackcloth and ashes, and lo, they sent unto the pond a messiah ...

 

Even better, the reptiles honoured dashing Donners with perhaps the most pitiful and wretched stock image yet to be yanked from some cheap-arsed version of Shutterstock ...

But the sight of that teacher did evoke the fundamentalist Catholic creed, still locked into the pond's mind from the days when it had to mindlessly recite the Catechism each day, and if the pond got a word wrong, perhaps could hope for a clip over the ears from a woman in penguin garb ...

 

Sixpence! And with the imprimatur of noble Daniel Mannix himself - quick, kiss his ring - and perhaps best of all, the whole blessed thing served up at Trove here ...

 

The pond could still remember the old version and it also knew the new version off by heart. 

Who ruined the world? Gramsci! How did Gramsci ruin the world? Radical Marxist thinking rampant in Australian schools! Is there but one devil? Yes, but his neo-Marxist forms are many ...

Please join dashing Donners in the recital, and for those anxious for further inspiration, remember the pond's educational offering of Mr Polly yesterday ...

 

Radical! Gramsci! Neo-Marxist! And yet how the pond hungered for the old ways ...

Ah, blessed chief mysteries, and the munching of human flesh and the drinking of human blood on a Sunday. Now back to radical! Gramsci! Neo-Marxist! Radical!!

Indeed, indeed, the very last thing we need is children parroting meaningless nonsense ... and yet, and yet, what a fine educational model it is, and practised by the very best ...

 

 

Eating of the forbidden fruit. And yet here was the pond eating of the Donners, and learning that there was delightful wickedness in the world, and temptations and distractions, and ways to leave the path of true nonsense...

Only at the end of the recitation did the pond realise - too late! - that it had actually failed to engage with Donners, and alas and alack, there was only a small gobbet to go ... Gramsci, neo-Marxist, radical!

 

Oh heck, have another serve before the pond moves on ...

Ah good old guardian angels, and someone at the lizard Oz was acting as a guardian angel for the pond with yet another offering ...

A splendid opening gambit, and truth to tell, the pond shed a tear of joy at the reptiles' snap of the Hunter Valley. Why soon the whole world might be made to look like that, and what an improvement that would be on banal images of rustic folk  and jibber jabber poems about daffodils and the like ...

But then the reptiles made a strategic mistake. The graphics department is now so reduced and desperate that they flung together logos, thereby promoting the enemy.

The pond had to admit it was the reptiles wot done it, but downplayed it as best it could ...

Why on earth hadn't they done the right thing, and shown some decent news?

 

Say what? Adani boasting about its solar stuff? That can't be right, it's dinkum, clean, virginal Oz coal to the world, oi, oi, oi, and if the planet has to be fucked, why then, fuck the planet the pond says ...

Oh indeed, indeed, and let us not forget the need to make a profit while fucking the planet, because the planet deserves a good coal fucking, it really does ... and who are the banks to stand in the way?!

 

Indeed, indeed, and why ignore the way we might turn the whole of Australia into a giant pit!

 

 

Such a splendid vision, such a reptile dreaming, the pond couldn't get enough of it ...

Around this point the pond felt in urgent need of an infallible Pope offering a little comedy relief ...

 

Too cruel, infallible Pope. Fair, but ever so cruel ...

And so to the bonus, and the pond couldn't but help notice the first reptile rumblings about gold standard Gladys at the top of the digital Oz page ...

 

 

Oh there's a switch, there's a change in the ether, and as it always does in times of trouble, the pond turned to the lizard Oz editorialist for help ...

 

 

 

SloMo saves the day, as he always does in reptile la la land ... why it's better than having a guardian angel at your beck and call. Please go on, lizard Oz editorialist, give the pond the clap happy, laying on of hands, speaking in tongues, rapture inducing SloMo godspell ...

 

Oh yes the unworldy safetyism of health academics! How much better to get the advice of the likes of Killer Creighton and the dog botherer, hoping that lockdowns might fail, and masks not be worn, and if a few oldies cark it, what the fuck, toujours gai Archie, toujours gai ...

And so the pond realised it had managed to quite enjoy its Thursday without a petulant Peta. Oh the pleasures of sinning...

And so to wrap up with the Rowe of the day, and the pond realises it promised it would never mention the Olympics, but truth to tell, Rowe has made the pond realise that there are some events even the pond should note, and his staging of said events is great fun, with more splendid events to hand here ...