Loon pond takes a break ...

The time has come to abandon the pond, and jump out into a bigger pond, the Pacific ocean.

Thank the absent lord it won't be by Qantas, not the airline it used to be. But rest assured, it isn't a cruise either. The day I go cruising, you have my permission to follow me and toss me into the water ...

In the meantime, since the pond specialises in exotica, esoterica and meaningless data quoted by ranting loons, why not head off to worldometers for a brisk gin and tonic of statistics whirling around faster than ever.

Once you see the data ceaselessly whirring and ticking, you'll realise it's easy enough to understand the dangers of fornication, and its impact on statistics, but how on earth does the grim reaper keep up the required pace? Memo to Christopher Pearson: don't worry about the world being underpopulated because of gay marriage ...

Not to your taste, but feeling frisky as a film-maker? In its constant quest for world domination, Amazon studios have set up a kind of universal world-wide Tropfest, under the name amazonstudios. Sheesh, as if the world wasn't already flooded with crap movies and half-baked ideas ...

This is what happens when a company gets too much money and time on its hands ...

And finally, something for the anxious conservative male, disturbed at the way women are getting uppity. Time for a Japanese android ... and she's ever so polite, as you might expect of a Japanese woman of any construction ...

Sssh, don't mention her existence to Christopher Pearson, we wouldn't want an unseemly infatuation to develop ... and next thing you know he'll be scribbling about android marriage ...

Yep, there are a billion stories on the intertubes, and the information superhighway is here and now, which is why it's such joy to see the Liberal party and the coalition wanting to keep it to the rutting, bumping, juddering, unpaved roads of the nineteen fifties ...

Ah the good old nineteen fifties, when radio was the major entertainment. My name is Randy Stone ... I cover the night beat for the daily ... Stories start in many different ways.

This one began with Malcolm Turnbull making a fortune out of dial up, and then whacking everybody else over the head so hard they saw stars and everything went black, and so they stayed with ... dial up ...

Don't know what I'm talking about? Well here's a dose of OTR nostalgia from New Zealand and over at the Internet Archive there are abundant copies of Randy Stone doing the radio show Night Beat, saved from the junk heap of OTR, and made available on the intertubes ...

As everything from the past, from the smallest bees' droppings to the beeswax of Christopher Pearson, begins to reside in the cloud ... and the Liberal party want access to the cloud to be at a pedestrian pace so that the sheep can be clipped, not just by speed, but by price and by cap ...

So it goes ...

Meanwhile, thanks for dropping in on the pond.

If you clicked on the worldometer, depending on the time and the hour, you'll see that blog posts posted today are well into the hundreds of thousand and zooming past the half million mark, and this was just one of them.

Feel exhausted? Well that's why we're off to explore the Pacific in regions where broadband matches the concept of the Her Majesty's Loyal Luddite Australian oppostion.

Business - the long absent lord willing - will resume in a week or so and in the meantime enjoy ...