David Burchell, Mark Day, and any old rope anywhere in the known universe as we saunter towards oblivion ...

The capacity for commentariat commentators to make infinitely stupid statements is infinite ...

There's even a formula for it: ∞ x 0 = ∞

(Careful, that's a patented, watermarked, trade marked formula).

What on earth possesses someone to scribble:

Memo to Julia. Whether you are the more or the less impotent party leader once the wheeler-dealing has finished this week, keep the flatterers, the sycophants and the wheedlers at bay, and keep half an ear to the critics, the grousers, and the bearers of unwelcome news.

The alternative for Labor, in its current parlous state, is complete and utter electoral oblivion.

A party that's just scored roughly fifty per cent of two party preferred is facing complete and utter electoral oblivion?

Oblivion
n.
The condition or quality of being completely forgotten: "He knows that everything he writes is consigned to posterity (oblivion's other, seemingly more benign, face)" (Joyce Carol Oates).
The act or an instance of forgetting; total forgetfulness: sought the great oblivion of sleep.

There's exaggeration for effect, and then there's just plain old fashioned stupidity and then there's David Burchell scribbling Coming through loud and clear, Julia. A man so careless with the meaning of words is surely deserving of Oatesian oblivion before he makes me experience the great oblivion of sleep.

There's another line that applies to Burchell: the only time his scribbles are comprehensible is when they're comprehensively silly.

The notion that the Labor party should pay attention to the grouser Burchell is surely profoundly offensive, since he spends his entire columns in deluded states of historical fantasy, flattering the Liberal party and peddling nonsense, and without a shred of balance in his partisan bones (and might I just for a rousing flourish, damn to hell everybody who offers a welcoming assessment of his unwelcoming assessments).

Can someone remind Burchell that while the electorate rebuffed Gillard's team, they also showed a singular reluctance to embrace Abbott and his team? Is he proposing that Labor take note of the party that saved Labor not from oblivion, but a drubbing? The Greens and their preferences?

Scribbling about one team only, with no reflection on what it might more generally means, points to a kind of obsessive compulsive failure to comprehend reality.

Enough already. There's more fun to be had seeing poor old Mark Day attempt to cope with the latest bizarre endeavours of the minor fringes of Murdoch land, in Gripping end to voyage of the bland as Australian politics gets hot.

To be fair, Day spends much of his column comparing and contrasting Sky and ABC 24/7/12/365/∞ coverage, in which ∞ = tedium, but then he can't resist dipping his toes in the cooling waters of the pond, aka AdelaideNow:

The "swinging election party" on AdelaideNow was altogether different.

It was experimental and off-the-wall, seemingly taking a leaf from the Don's Party era of the 1970s and turning the vote count into a kind of variety show with cartoons, crooners, guest pollies and gimmicks.

Experimental? Well that's a nice word. Next time I watch community television I'll know the word to use. Not amateur, not half baked, or half assed, or klutzy, or done with the sniff of acid mingled with an oily rag, or for two and sixpence and it showed, but as experimental, in a kind of hallucinatory and surreal way that evokes a kind of metaphysical appreciation of mundane reality ...

Hosts were former Nine newsreader Kelly Nestor and former Sydney Daily Telegraph editor David Penberthy, now editor of News Limited's online "conversation" site, The Punch. They were helped along by a collection of video clips, a stream of email, SMS and Twitter comments from viewers, and a bloke called Barry playing old songs on an organ (I think).

If this sounds bizarre, you're right. At one point, former Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone said to Barry: "You're on something, aren't you?" You kind of had to be watching: it was surreal, but hypnotically appealing in a train-wreck kind of way because of its rawness and amateur approach.

Ah, at last the truth comes out. Train wreck.

Amateur hour is amateur hour, wherever you find it, and by golly you can find it in Murdoch land just as much as in community television, especially as The Punch has set the new standard in cheap ass conversation, which is to pay nothing so that desperate wanna be Warhols can come forward for their fifteen minutes of fame, and get it by offering up their scribbles for free ...

Poor Mr. Day seems to have been entranced, though sad to say, ever since the time I spent a few minutes watching AdelaideNow's online coverage of the SA election, I've been known to wake up at 2 am sweating and in the grip of nightmares, screaming at my partner, "No, I'll do anything, anything, just don't make me watch it, just make the dreams go away".

There was a very pregnant Kelly, feet up, yakking to Penbo who was sprawled on a couch offering comments on what it all meant. There was precious little detail about seats or individual winners and losers.

I found it hard to work out whether this was meant to be a stimulus package for 1970s retro partygoers, or the kind of election coverage you have when you're not having an election coverage.

Poor Mr Day seems to think this kind of nonsense might actually be the future:

But it was worthy of attention because, if the experts have it right, this is a large part of the future of newspaper websites.

Worthy of attention? Well lord knows my toenails are worthy of attention lest they produce a tear, but only the sweet long absent lord knows what experts he might have in mind, or what future he imagines for cash strapped newspaper websites, but reading this is like reading how the late much lamented Gong Show charted out the future of free to air television.

Sure there'll always be a market for people wanting to watch Kyle Sandilands doing election night coverage, and just as surely there's going to be dumbwits willing to watch Penberthy make a goose of himself, especially if they've dropped a tab or had a toke.

I'm partial myself to a screening of The Big Lebowski every so often ... but then the Coen brothers had a better sense of fun, and most importantly a budget.

Poor Mr. Day feels the need to toe the corporate line:

The Tiser, under its long-serving editor Mel Mansell, is the most advanced in Australia in developing its website as a television medium. He says the transition from providing news and information services on paper to onscreen digital will be slow but relentless. Editors are being tasked to maintain the old while ushering in the new.

Advanced? This is the most advanced?

A bunch of inept amateurs bumbling around relishing their ineptness has all the charm of community television. If you're going to do it online, you need a budget, or you may as well not bother, because people with a budget will do it better, unless you have an audience already blissed out, and unable to tell or to care if they're watching utter crap ...

I can't begin to imagine what the hits were like for AdelaideNow's "experiment". I dropped in for a few minutes, remembered I had better use for my broadband cap, remembered the ghastliness of the SA business and the nightmares, and dropped out again, satisfied I'd seen another cracker barrel novelty item from the bottom of the Xmas stocking that only masochists and parochial perverts would enjoy ...

Hang on that's me, and I still couldn't find the wit or wisdom to enjoy it ...

From this wretched "experiment", which didn't offer strippers stripping as they read the election news, or The Onion acting like an onion, or the Chaser lads offering comedic class and death stares, or even Mick Molloy doing the Late Show, Day draws a long bow:

More and more internet space is being used for video. We are not far from seeing the video newspaper, brought to life by a finger-tap on display pictures as video on gizmos such as the iPad.

Oh dear Mr Day, do get a life, it's here. Except of course if you want to access what The Times might have to offer, whatever that might be ...

Video grabs will be the key to news available on mobile phone screens. Dick Tracy's two-way wrist TV is no longer a comic-strip flight of fantasy but just around the corner.

What? Like this?

Well if you want to hold your wrist at a funny angle for hours on end while watching a never ending Avatar sending greenie coin into Rupert's pockets, why not go back to the future and try this tasty dud from Seiko, launched on an unsuspecting market way back in 1983 (here)?

Yes, yes, the future is here and now, or at least just around the corner, and will perhaps land tomorrow, and never mind that wrist TV is about as futurist as my aunt, just as wrist phones were, and never mind that people couldn't see the pleasure of looking at or burbling at their wrists at odd angles for hours on end, and instead when phones with pictures came along voted with their wrists, but allowing for the marvels and wonders of futurism, and as a devout adherent of futurist thinking, do these fantastic bits of plastic need to be full of crap?

It seems so, such is the vision in Murdoch land:

Earlier this year, Mansell experimented with an AdelaideNow coverage of the SA election.

Oh yes, I remember. And never mind the crap, feel the width and the hits.

The website pulled almost as many viewers as Channel 10 in Adelaide, which is not a lot compared to the number tuned into Nine or the ABC, but still a surprisingly large number for an untried and, in the public mind, alien form of media.

I wouldn't vote for AdelaideNow as my favourite election-night coverage, but it deserves full marks for experimentation.

No, it doesn't. And it isn't alien media, it's just reheated, cheap ass old media dressed in gilt, utterly familiar, and comparable to Don's Party (remind me again who made that telling comparison, along with references to nineteen seventies retro dribble?), and served up as sludge on the full to overflowing intertubes.

It didn't even deserve full marks for surrealism, just as I don't offer full marks to a rave just because a lot of punters want to groove like electric eels after dropping a tab ...

There'll always be space for community television or the like (unless the new government throws away the bandwidth), and people into novelty, but you can't do this sort of amateur nonsense all the time without spending a bit of money on it to make it at least passably professional ... which is to say with decent sound, and reasonably professional contributors.

Somebody should give AdelaideNow some money for their "experiments", or bring in the Media Resource Centre, or simply tell them to stop it, and stop it quick, before we all go blind or get young lads get hair on their palms ...

Pay for such nonsense? Sit through advertising to get more of this nonsense? When it's now possible to waste a life watching rank amateur offerings on YouTube ...?

Yet quality will out, and people will keep watching after the novelty wears thin, providing the quality is there ...

AdelaideNow's online election coverage was shockingly shambolic and inept and perverse and if that's the future of the intertubes, then the lord help the intertubes and us all ...

There's a term for old television programs, reheated and sent into syndication or the brave new world of multi-channeling.

Old rope.

Never be confused by the notion that new rope is new. It's just new rope waiting to become old rope ...

Will we ever get to a point where Rupert's minions understand that while Rupe might have said content is not just the king, it's the emperor of all things electronic, he was talking about content, not delivery systems. And content is content, and crap is crap, and futuristically delivered crap remains crap ...

(Below: speaking of old rope, perhaps the intertubes could reinvent itself, and chart the way forward into the brave new digital world by running celebrity television available to hand anywhere in the world at any time on any device on any wrist? And that's not enough by way of "any", how about anywhere in the known universe on any known alien retro wrist?)