In which the pond ends up in an IPA rabbit hole with the bromancer, before turning to talk of the mango Mussolini with Claire ...

 

 

There's only a few more sleeps until the pond reaches its final Sunday meditation and post for the year, and that's just as well, because we're already fully into silly season ... what with pollies out and about making silly promises, and the reptiles gravely noting them and making them front page, top of the digital edition material, as befits Pravda down under ...

 

 

 

Second thoughts, maybe Josh isn't joshing with us ... could we have a million new contact tracers by summer?

And so to this astonishing juxtaposition ...

 

 

 

 

What the fuck? Nazis or grinches? Wasn't it just one giant-sized grinch who stole Xmas anyway? 

Yes, it was, it was, the grinch was a grouchy, solitary creature who wanted to cancel Xmas, and ever since the pond has been after the author to settle a massive defamation case ... because damn it, the pond and the grinch had a lot in common, and what's wrong with being a grinch, though perhaps shouting 'bah humbug' is more traditional ...

As for the rest of the reptiles... talk about a complete waste of time...

 

 

 

There's a few """ types in that crowd, and there's the reptiles proposing in the lizard Oz editorialist way that governments should get out of the way, when top of the page we've had all that reptile-approved Pravda style blather about Josh creating jobs, and there's going to be a gigantic bout of pork-barreling to come, and once again the reptiles can't join two notions together, such is their state of cognitive dissonance,  as sublimely evoked by Rowe, with more sublime stuff only a tweet away  ...

 

 

 

 

The mighty Rowe invoked this early in proceedings? 

Yes, that's how desperate the pond is, but at least when in a desperate search for delusion and seasonal follies, the pond could turn to the bromancer, playing the sort of childish, mindless parlour game of listicles that once swept the intertubes ...

 

Note that snap well, because it'll come in handy, as we get on with the bromancer trying to talk up the IPA's latest attention-seeking gambit ...

 

Okay, okay, here the pond must intervene, and note that it actually went off to the IPA and found the assorted meaningless and profoundly stupid listicles, and it has nothing to do with being leftist, but much to do with being completely clueless ...

Yes, they did leave out Ken G. Hall, the man who single-handedly made some 17 features on the trot in the 1930s, and was a national phenomenon, before heading off to crank up Nine in the 1950s. It's true that Hall was very interested in his shows making money, and so his movies now look tame to the modern eye, though some get by on sociological grounds, as with Strike Me Lucky, which was a complete dud but offers cultural historians a chance to see Mo in action ... 

And how about Colin Thiele being listed as the director of Storm Boy ...

Poor old Henri Safran, but perhaps his name was a little too froggy and obscure ... 

As for the history component?

 Is that all the lives we've got? And instead of Manning Clark's six volumes, we get the cutdown version?

 

 

Because the IPA thinks the Australian canon must have the attention span of a gnat, and thinks the Readers' Digest version is the way to read Shakspere?

There you go, the pond sucked in to a truly stupid game, so moronic that, like the bromancer, the pond isn't going to provide a link to it. Oh it's easy enough to find, but why bother?

If the IPA thinks they can get by with that sort of click-bait trolling, fuck them ... and now back to the bromancer, providing his own set of cavils ...

 

More stupidity and nonsense, as in that bromancer line that Steele Rudd's books "led to the birth of the Australian film industry in the '30s."

Gong! That answer wouldn't even get you Covid at the quiz night at the Oxford tavern in Peterhsam. Australia had a flourishing silent film industry, before US and UK interests combined to bring it down.

Perhaps Raymond Longford's silent version of The Sentimental Bloke isn't to the bromancer's taste, but he'd surely be attracted by the heroic Australian themes of the deeply racist 1928 The Birth of White Australia ...

At that point, the pond was reminded that such listicles aren't about genuine insight or awareness and are a complete waste of time, but they do reflect the tastes of the time ... and the IPA came up with a deeply middle class view of the past, while the bromancer came up with alternations, variations and additions that reveal his awesome eccentricity ... and the abiding influence of B. A. Santamaria on the tykes of the lizard Oz ...

Luckily there was just one gobbet of tosh to go ...

Fabulously welcome? Well I suppose you have to pretend to welcome the mad uncle or aunt down from the attic to attend Xmas dinner, but what a fuckwitted way to waste the silly season ...

For those that care, and because the pond refuses to provide a link, here's that list of songs ...

 

Peter Allen but no pedo Rolf? And yet there was a time when bad taste Rolf bestrode the nation like a colossus.

Next thing we know the IPA will be taking a stand against flying ducks on the wall and a proud indigenous warrior in the garden, foot on knee, just like in that Pom Roeg's Walkabout ... and the Poms scored a double with Michael Powell, and what no mention of good old Tom Kruse and Back of Beyond?

Whatever,  here's the list of novels/short stories ...

"The Australian Canon"?!! 

What a brain dead exercise in grandiose stupidity, but it does go to show that you can sell the bromancer any kind of pup ... and if you go looking for a mention of architecture, the built environment that shapes all our lives, good luck with that hunt ...

And so, as a bonus, to Claire, with astonishing insights ...

 

 

Oh fucketty fuck, it's too much for a koala bear to bare ... first silly season with the bromancer, and now Claire taking Gorgeous George and his Nazi blather seriously?

Couldn't she just have invoked Godwin's Law and stopped right there ... or at least got into a meaningful,  nerdish discussion as to what constituted Godwin's Law ...

There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself) than others. For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that, when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law.

But no, on we go ...

 

Well the pond will allow that quote to stand, seeing as it can be found in an ANU pdf here ...

A constant theme in Hitler’s Table Talk in 1941 following the invasion of the Soviet Union. In February 1942 he made the connection with earlier colonisations plain: ‘No sooner do we land in a colony than we install children’s creches, hospitals for the natives. All that fills me with rage. White women degrading themselves in the service of blacks.’ Then: ‘The Russians don’t grow old. They scarcely get beyond fifty or sixty. What a ridiculous idea to vaccinate them. In this matter we must resolutely push aside our lawyers and hygienic experts. No vaccination for the Russians, and no soap to get the dirt off them. But let them have all the spirits and tobacco they want.’ Table Talk: 319.

But surely Herr Hitler has a point. After all, we're being herded towards a nightmare future, the sort of vision that would fill gorgeous George and the reptiles with rage ...

 

 

Sorry, the pond just had to slip in that reptile nightmare by hook or by crook ... and so to the last gobbet ...

 

 

Sorry, Claire, every so often the pond feels the need to break Godwin's Law ... like Ted once did ...

CNN founder Ted Turner, never shy about speaking his mind, has compared the ascent of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News to the rise of Adolf Hitler before the second world war.

That was way back in 2005 and George W and the Iraq war, and such like, long before the mango Mussolini came along, and well before Tucker Carlson and Laura and Hannity and such like were a thing, but given the current proto-fascist state of things in certain parts of the United States, the comparison is worth a lot more than an IPA listicle ...

And now to end with a genuine cultural icon, the infallible Pope ...