Heath Aston, Quentin Letts, Germaine Greer and a load of borrowed old cobblers

(Above: Germaine Greer in 1974).

The art of the desperate blogger is to filch content, and use it to pad your own.

As a desperate blog, this site has frequently resorted to the tireless art of the hack - remember the good old days of Alan Ramsey, when he began quoting himself so much (or others) that some columns consisted entirely of quotes?

Well Heath Aston has the art form down to a 'T' in Postcard from London: Greer blamed for British ladettes.

In it, he devours the thoughts of Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts with a vigour that would make even a harlot blush.

By my count, he harvests close on five hundred words (496, give or take a word or two) of comrade Letts, in a piece with a total wordage of 822.

Now even stretching the fair use clause to an extreme, and even allowing for the Fagin elements in desperate bloggers - and yes I've been accused of Faginism with my wholehearted, wholesale recycling of the words of others - this amounts to outrageous cheekiness.

Aston does the extensive quoting in the usual way, thereby hoping to hang comrade Letts with his own words, before applying his own flourish of the samurai sword to sever the head.

But it's all a bit of a furphy. As comrade Letts is a bit to the right of Ghengis Khan, and madder than a meat axe, his tirade against Germaine Greer - ostensibly the cause of the rise of British ladettes - is just a standard frothing and foaming, scarcely worthy of a mention even in loon pond, so obvious is it in terms of blatant trolling for attention.

Indeed we could give up on all other loons and concentrate on Letts, so rich and fecund and fertile is he in his folly, but really the man is his own one-person loon pond.

That said, he does know how to spend a word, and not in pennies, but in quids and quids of extravagant verbiage, shucked oysters of spite, so Aston's comeback sounds positively enfeebled:

It’s time that Australian blokes sent Quentin Letts a message: Our women can say whatever they want.

But it’s also your God-given right not to listen to them if you choose.

Oh dear confronted by the splendour of a verbal feather display from Letts, and a bollocking of Germaine Greer, that's the best Aston can manage? What's worse, Aston confesses to not having read The Female Eunuch, and then tries a 'get out of jail' clause by comparing Letts to Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and Tim Blair, all tied together and hit with a stick. "He's right wing, reactionary and excitable."

Um, you mean the Daily Mail manages to outdo all these antipodean loons, clustered in Chairman Rupert's down under stables? Surely not, and surely the Daily Mail is only a paper that Chairman Rupert would love to own so that he might have Letts as the jewel in crown, or in his stable of dung throwers, if you will (especially as Rupert made the cut in Letts' 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain).

Luckily Germaine Greer can sort out the likes of Letts with a quick verbal thrust to the groin, and loon pond is the richer for it.

Aston compounds his slackness by failing in his duty to his readers.

He doesn't provide some immediate links to Letts' ramblings, by pretending it's from Letts' latest book, and therefore some kind of rambling above the polite linking circuit of the intertubes.

Is there an instruction sent out to Chairman Rupert's minions not to provide links, even if available, because that might take readers from their page? Is this the kind of internalized, incestuous cannibalising planned as the future for News Corp offerings to its social community?

Well enough of that already.

With a simple click, you can skip here to the rambles of the raving loony Quentin Letts.

There you will find his trolling about Greer under the header The First Ladette: How Germaine Greer's legacy is an entire generation of loose-knicked lady louts, illustrated with a snap from 1974, which in the tradition of the intertubes now graces the top of this piece.

The goosey Letts yearns for the days of Brief Encounter and mourns that women reminiscent of Celia Johnson's character in that film no longer exists. The sweet deluded possum exists in a bizarro other dimension of alternate reality, but here's the main point - as a desperate columnist Letts already does his own recycling, and he does it with some vigour, enough in fact to make the average harlot blush with shame. His book is but grist to the relentless grind of column writing, with lengthy excerpts designed to send you rushing off to the bookstore while filling up the newspaper.

So you can also get other excerpts from his latest book, such as It's time to rise up and revolt against dumbed-down Britain.

It doesn't occur to Letts that his loonish squawking is helping dumb down the UK - I swear just reading one of his columns cost me at least ten IQ points. Because he is of course just an old fashioned English snob, and a bitchy one at that:

The Queen has altered her accent, shifting it several notches down the posh scale. Her Majesty does not yet prattle like a Milton Keynes hairdresser, but she is a good deal less icy, linguistically, than when she succeeded to the throne.

It is just as well that access to the Crown Jewels is not controlled by a voice recognition device or she would struggle these days to get her hands on the Imperial State Crown for the State Opening of Parliament.

We should be thankful, at least, that Her Majesty has not caved in to that bane of spoken English, the Australian or American rising inflection - the habit of lifting the voice towards the end of a clause or sentence, as though seeking reassurance. People do it because it feels egalitarian, seeking the listener's continued consent.

What's that you say Quentin? I'm not sure I understand you (in a quavering, quivering rising voice). Mayest I go on?

Well it passes the time for those who read the Daily Mail, and it too can pass your time if you want to gain second hand in the antipodes the sense of what it might be like being a brain dead zombie stalking the English political, social and cultural scene with barbs and jibes of a preening, poncing kind.

Why in November alone there are 18 columns, including a couple of theatre reviews - comrade Letts is a theatre reviewer in his spare time, god help the British theatre - and the archives stretch back at Colebatchian length, full of denunciations of all and sundry.

And if you tire of that, you can resort to Rachel Cooke's colour piece and profile, Is this Britain's most opinionated man? in The Guardian. There you can come to a deeper understanding of Letts' legal battle with Alan Sugar, aka Sugarlump.

But I digress. I suspect we've come to a definitive reflexive point, which is to bemoan how the intertubes have been reduced to a loon ranting at a loon for extensively quoting a loon (while ranting at said loon), when the simplest option by far is just to head off to the original loon, and see him in all his feathered verbal finery. Loon central, so to speak.

Well heck, how about this from Letts on Rupert Murdoch, who made 47 in his list of those who'd buggered up Britain:

47 Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch ownership of many media outlets has been efficient if sometimes a little discombobulating. The Sun, News Of The World, BSkyB, even The Sunday Times: all have benefited from an injection of Aussie populism.

Politics without Murdoch would be less frenetic, more smug.

The exception to all this bracing Murdochery, however, has been The Times newspaper - and, in particular, its letters page.

To have a letter published in The Times of old was to lick a teaspoon of ambrosia, its correspondence page being the pre-eminent forum for lay debate.

Today's Times letters page carries a lot of letters from public relations people, and the 'jokey' contributions are rather overdone.

The paper's change to a tabloid format crushed the elegance of the letters page. It lost its status. And a Britain without an authoritative, tightly edited Times letters page is somehow a less civilised place to live. (here for more on the list).

You see! I've caught Aston's disease. Ah choo ...

Letters to the editor?

Sir, I call your attention to the presence of rats in the bar, yours Major Gowen (ret.) Or should that be about the first or last cuckoo? (here and here)

Silly old pommie bastard, what a dearie, what a sweetie. Now if only Quentin would read The Punch so he could expose how Chairman Rupert's minions are buggering up blogging down under ...

(Below: Quentin Letts makes a mess in the kitchen similar to the way he trolls for comments and intertubes fame of a kind).