Piers Akerman, Scott Fitzgerald, Sumner Miller, and boil some water, lots of it ...

(Above: Scott Fitzgerald and wife Zelda).

The thing that worries us most at the moment here at the pond is whether Miranda the Devine is turning into Bill Henson?

Has she lost her mojo? There she was shameless trawling for comments - the cruel and unkind might say trolling - on the situation of Israel v. Palestine, and she only scored twenty seven comments by knock-off time, which as we all know, is when public servants rest from their ardent media-reading duties - where would a public servant be if not across all the current issues - and head home.

Even the vampires, ghouls and zombies that stalk and haunt the intertubes at night only added a dozen bonus remarks.

Is the gerbil factor still in play? Hmm, The Gerbil Factor. Let anyone working on the sequel to the Bourne trilogy pay handsomely for that title.

Will Devine only recover her audience when she faces up to the gerbil affair? Or will she trawl even more shamelessly for conflict, hostility and argumentation? I know, I know, we left the gerbils behind, but the beasts are full of rich mythology, veritable Joseph Campbells for the Devine twitterati. And as we all know, thanks to the Devine and Susan Greenfield, the intertubes and computers rot your mind. How much worse the tweets?

Such are the days of our lives on the pond, as the sand slowly trickles through the hour glass, and we lope towards our doom.

But hang on, it's not Devine day. It's off to sunny Melbourne day. Time to get out the black coat and gloves. Oh heck, the black everything.

And it's also time for Akker Dakker. Yep, Piers Akerman, aka Akker Dakker because of his hard man bovver boy ways with words that rock 'n roll, is at it again, in Labor's crack-up is taxing patience, and in his relentless, inexorable word machine way, he piles up rhetorical insults against the hordes of socialists ruining the country.

This very day he resorts to one of our favourite authors:

The American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, probably best known for his novel The Great Gatsby, wrote that: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

He used the line in a 1936 essay.

It was titled The Crack-Up.

The same title could easily be applied to an essay on the Rudd Government.

When you plough through Akker Dakker on a far too regular basis, you have to seize on the gems. And F. Scott-Fitzgerald certainly knew about crack-ups.

As his wiki reminds us, he was a first class alcoholic for much of his life, possibly compounded by tuberculosis. Throw in a couple of heart attacks, and the incomparably neurotic Zelda Fitzgerald as his wife, and you have a relentless set of exhausting lifestyle choices which provided abundant material for a literary lifestyle. Zelda ended up in hospital diagnosed with schizophrenia, while Fitzgerald ended up in bed with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. And that's just for starters ...

It was the worst and the best of times, with the jazz age as the frame, and of course it's also a measure of the lunacy of Akker Dakker to use a Scott Fitzgerald quotation as emblematic for the current situation of the Federal Government in Australia.

Still, the good news for Australian readers is that, thanks to the vagaries of copyright, you can find a lot of Scott Fitzgerald's works on the local version of Project Gutenberg. You can find a collection of his short stories here - though sadly not The Crack Up, a posthumous collection of letters and essays - happily including some of my favourites, written later in life, such as The Pat Hobby Stories, which evoke what it was like to be a hack in Hollywood.

Perhaps at some point an inspired Akker Dakker might settle down and write a series of fictional stories about what it was like to be a ranting right wing hack for Chairman Murdoch?

There's more than a whiff of Pat Hobby in view in the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, though their main target was of course golden boy leftie Clifford Odets, while William Faulkner must surely be in mind when watching the drunken, contemptuous novelist scribbling for Hollywood moguls.

You can also pick up copies of The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night at Gutenberg and trust me, any volume by Scott Fitzgerald is way more worth your time than reading Akker Dakker.

Akker Dakker tends to write as if he's hysterically evoking a diamond as big as the Ritz, in a way that's more Zelda than Francis.

His vocabulary is like babylon revisited, all partisan exaggeration and lemony astringency. Here's a sample - utterly destroyed, whacking, Labor apparatchiks who inhabit cyberspace and infest the blogosphere (a whiff of paranoia there), rat cunning, gutlessness, multi-million dollar disinformation, lunacy, nervous hysteria, obvious schizophrenia, hogging the limelight, copping the flack, big plans exploding, rackets revealed, Chinese-supplied pink batts (and never mind the Chinese-supplied two dollar stores), crudely implemented, normal rational scepticism (as opposed to abnormal rational scepticism), reckless plunder, ill-conceived stunt, and so on and so forth.

It reminds me of one of my favourite Pat Hobby stories, Boil Some Water - Lots of It.

Poor old Pat his hacking away in his office in the writers' building, and finding inspiration is in short supply:

Pat Hobby sat in his office in the writers' building and looked at his morning's work, just come back from the script department. He was on a "polish job," about the only kind he ever got nowadays. He was to repair a messy sequence in a hurry, but the word "hurry" neither frightened nor inspired him for Pat had been in Hollywood since he was thirty--now he was forty-nine. All the work he had done this morning (except a little changing around of lines so he could claim them as his own)--all he had actually invented was a single imperative sentence, spoken by a doctor.

"Boil some water--lots of it."

It was a good line. It had sprung into his mind full grown as soon as he had read the script. In the old silent days Pat would have used it as a spoken title and ended his dialogue worries for a space, but he needed some spoken words for other people in the scene. Nothing came.

"Boil some water," he repeated to himself. "Lots of it."

The punchline of course - and you really should read the story, but SPOILER ALERT - it builds very nicely a rich ironic payoff as Pat finds himself in real world trouble:

There was a doctor now. Pat saw him say something to the manageress and her shrill voice sent the waitresses scattering like leaves toward the kitchen.

"Boil some water! Lots of it!"

The words fell wild and unreal on Pat's burdened soul. But even though he now knew at first hand what came next, he did not think that he could go on from there.

I'm sorry, but from here on, the ramblings of Akker Dakker, the shambling fate of Pat Hobby, and "boil some water, lots of it", are going to be inextricably linked.

"Boil some rage, lots of it", gasped Piers, and he knew he could go on raging from there.

Akker Dakker tops his piece off by giving us another cultural note which pins him to the wall and ages him like a butterfly chloroformed and mounted:

As the enigmatic Professor Julius Sumner Miller once used to ask on a popular ABC television series: “Why is it so?”

The answer, of course, is it is not “so”.

It cannot be so.

Poor old Sumner Miller. In his day, the good professor was a fixture on ABC television, with Why is it so? running from 1963 to 1986. He was interested in intellectual inquiry, in science, in teaching, and of course was pleased that the latte sipping socialists offered him a forum - yes even way back when, certain ABC types evaded the tea lady's morning and afternoon rounds to find for themselves a decent coffee, while providing space for a mad scientist to preach his stuff to young 'uns.

The good news is that, while Sumner Miller might be rolling in his grave from being used and abused by Akker Dakker in his rant at the socialists, the good professor has been put on the intertubes, thanks to the leftists at the ABC.

Twelve of his episodes are available here in glorious black and white, theoretically great fun for nostalgia buffs if you can only get them to work. Damn you, ABC chardonnay sipping socialists, tend to your online back catalogue! Get them working, or all we can do is read Akker Dakker.

Who knows what Sumner Miller might have made of Akker Dakker's resolute anti-scientific luddite ranting, but one thing's certain - it's more fun to watch him than actually read Akker Dakker's careless ways with rhetoric.

Sumner Miller also bobs up on YouTube, and in the usual way of things has his own wiki here. (There's also a Sydney Uni physics department bio here in pdf form).

Sumner Miller did much to encourage interest in science in the antipodes, never mind the chocolate ads ... an interest Akker Dakker regularly does his best to destroy.

So it's vale to Sumner Miller and to Scott Fitzgerald, who both remind us that there's more to life than partisan political hackery and ranting ideologically driven hysterical posturing.

And if we can only glean that much from Akker Dakker he's served a purpose, however humble, and however useless and repetitive his hackery otherwise sounds ... Or so I'm told by the apparatchiks who inhabit cyberspace and infest the blogsophere rather than live in the two dimensional scribbles of rage-driven ratbags.

Take it away Sumner Miller, and the subject is inertia, which is to say, in another form, Akker Dakker: