A special Friday Hardly Normal edition of the pond, complete with Gerry Harvey, Cynthia Banham, mail order treats, burqas and Julie Andrews as a nun .

(Above: please show this online catalogue to Harvey Norman).

Sometimes it's tempting to turn the pond into a kind of cut and paste imitation of The Australian's feral cut and paste column.

Confronted by sundry tidbit sized chunks of hearty goodness, what to do?

Why there's Gerry Harvey, from the fondly named retail institution Hardly Normal, feeling hurt by all the attacks on him, as recorded in Harvey hurt by buyer backlash. Sure the full page advertisements during the Boxing Day sales period was bad timing, and sure the message was poorly communicated, but why are people so unkind?

How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend

Oh sorry, it must be Friday. The vicious savage assault on Mr Harvey is of course all the fault of the intertubes:

He said the rise of social media such as Twitter and Facebook had increased the ''vicious and hateful'' attacks against him and a fellow retail boss, Solomon Lew.

Damn you intertubes, what with Julian Assange, pornography and social media, you're ruined the world. In the old days, it was easy to get away with being a privateering goose:

''You might have got a nasty phone call or a letter back in the old days but now anything slightly controversial, these people, whoever they might be, they go for you zealously and with hatred all over Twitter,'' Mr Harvey said. ''If you are a CEO of a company and you speak out and then the board gets involved … it is suicidal.

Damn you people, what went wrong. You used to sit around, and be nicely silent as the corn was shoved down the throat and you were fattened up, ready to become a nice retail pate.

And the shocking insight that's been twittered about?

''Because of my profile, I then get all these threats and people hone in on me. It becomes me, Gerry Harvey and Solomon Lew - billionaires, greedy, ugly, old, out-of-date c---s, and the people writing this seem to think we have been ripping them off for years and that we deserve this."

Actually here we must put aside any residual bitterness on the pond, and stick to the brief.

Let's ignore the error once made where a familiar within the pond once engaged Hardly Normal for a job, and subsequently had to endure broken tiles, lifting plaster, mysterious recalcitrant leaks and shattered glass - the result of normal glass being used where regulations insist on safety glass - and thus a yearly sense - as another thing broke - of having been profoundly ripped off.

Instead - bitterness, quoi, moi? with a tilt of the head and a laconic Mehitabel laugh? - forget it Jake it's Sydney, a hardly normal town - let'sconcentrate on the other points raised.

First Mr Harvey doesn't endear himself by using the word 'cunt' (at least that's what the dashes might be an attempt to evoke) when 'prick' or 'dickhead' would have been entirely appropriate and less sexist.

Secondly Mr Harvey does himself no favours in his arguments:

'What we are talking about is someone buying a guitar in New York, for instance, and having it sent over here 30 per cent cheaper. It is giving that overseas retailer the advantage.''

As more than a few million Australians have already pointed out (the Herald had to close off one set of enraged comments as it climbed over the eight hundred mark, given their system starts to totter above the thousand), Mr Harvey just doesn't get the maths. Add on 10%, even allow a hearty 5% for freight, and you still have a 15% discount. The overseas retailer still has the advantage ...

The only thing that's changed in recent days is the exchange rate, but here at the pond we purchased from Amazon when the exchange rate was unfavourable, and erased any retailer pricing advantage because of the diversity of goods available and the promptness and ease of service ...

It remains a mystery, with these maths skills and empathy for the consumer's plight, that Mr Harvey has managed to turn himself into a greedy, out of touch, out of date billionaire.

And Mr Harvey still doesn't get it, as shown in How the big operators missed the boat, as he thinks his call of the dotcom bubble over a decade ago still applies, when a year is a lifetime on the intertubes (why I believe that the future is now, if you want some Mark Pesce futurist psycho babble).

''Back in the late '90s, before the dotcom boom burst, I set up a site looking at how many hits they had. I had a thing with hundreds of people there and I got up and said my opinion is that you will all go broke … site over site blew up,'' he said.

Yes, yes, but that was yesterday, and we all believe in yesterday, heck we all long for yesterday, we need a place to hide a way, a place where our troubles seemed so far away - heck it must be Friday - but today isn't yesterday, and now all your retail troubles are here to stay ... and you missed the boat.

Bricks and mortar retailers have never really understood, never been comfortable with competition via the digital ether, and to some extent Australian retailers have been sheltered from the strong mail order culture on view in the United States (want a steak, where do we ship it?), but all that is changing ...

For example, when looking around for a Blu-ray player we settled on a Kogan for general use, ordered it and it turned up within a couple of days. It isn't the greatest unit, but it's region free, and so can play any discs we might get from the United States ... (and don't get the pond going on region zoning). The result? Zip business for Hardly Normal in hardware and zip business for software retailers ...

So it goes, and so it will keep on going, and if ever the NBN gets fully implemented, say farewell to your local bricks and mortar video store, inner western suburban vinyl loving elites excluded, just as the United States is currently saying a nostalgic farewell to Blockbuster ... In much the same way when acquiring a refrigerator awhile ago, we got a better price ... locally ... by letting the intertubes do the walking and the driving and the negotiating ...

Farewell Hardly Normal, we barely knew you ...

Hang on, hang on, we're supposed to be cutting and pasting.

Well how about this incisive thinking from Cynthia Banham in There can be freedom under the veil:

I don't profess to know much about Islam, or the reasons why some Muslim women choose to wear headscarves, and others face-covering veils or body-covering shrouds.

Uh huh. Ignorance is bliss, and so blissfully Banham delivers up her blissfully ignorant opinion and once again it's the liberal leets who cop it:

... is this debate really about not letting a man, or a religious book or cleric, tell a woman how to dress? Or is it actually about Western liberals decreeing that freedom - including the freedom to dress as one chooses - is a privilege to be granted only to those deemed worthy?

Oh dear, is this a first?

As in first to kick the burqa can in 2011 in search of a cheap easy column, along with a little liberal kicking in the style of The Australian.

Can Banham be thinking of making the jump to that other broadsheet rag?

Yes she can:

The 20th-century liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that "to assume all values can be graded on one scale, so it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents".

The view held by some liberals that humans can grow and thrive only in societies that follow their own political beliefs - including the belief that a woman must dress in a certain way in order to be "free" - is a paradoxical one, to say the least.

Oh it's the paradoxical naughty liberals at it again. If only Banham thought before she wrote:

It's a personal, sometimes very complex, relationship that a woman has with her clothes. Consider another kind of freedom: the freedom to cover one's hair or face or body, if one so chooses, for whatever reason, and not to be judged for it.

Which is of course abject nonsense. Women can dress as they please, and are always judged for it, and so for that matter men can suit up or ship out to hippiedom, and still they are judged for it and the way they look ...

And that's because dress/fashion, call it what you will, has always been a symbol, an indicator of personal and social and cultural meanings as primal as the breast feathers deployed by birds during courtship, or territorial defence ... (don't ask how we landed on Sexually Dimorphic Breast-Feathers in the Kentish Plover, in pdf, we don't recollect or understand either, but somehow dimly think it's all the fault of Gerry Harvey).

I know the National Times section in Fairfax has as much trouble as The Punch or The Australian generating pieces of puffery, but do they have to conjure up this sort of copy and then run it under the header Thought Bubble?

It gives both thoughts and bubbles a bad name ... and brings to mind lyrics about columnists forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.

Sorry, it must be Friday, but you'll be pleased to know that the song was enough of a hit, since compounded by a West Ham United connection, to earn its own wiki page, here.

Well enough with the idle abuse of liberals, as if conservatives don't have a view on the burqa too. Here in the inner west, we're accustomed to sophisticated debates about the burqa, as shown by Anti burqa mural vandalised in Newtown. (which naturally brought Keysar Trad out of the woodwork in Newtown anti-burqa mural sparks protest).

Well I have to confess that - perhaps under the influence of Frederico Fellini - once upon a time I'd tell anyone that would listen that dressing nuns as penguins in stifling hot clothes in the Tamworth heat was anti-human, anti-woman, and anti-Christian, not that I worry to much about Xians these days ... just as the sight of Samoans dressed in jacket and tie Church of Jesus Christ of the Latterday saints style in the humid sweaty noon day sun is surely worthy of comment ... but if Cynthia Banham thinks there's freedom under the veil, let her don one for three months - Eddie Murphy style, Trading Places style - and report back to us on her experiences ...

Now that would be a thought bubble we could all look forward to ...

And finally a big thank you to the barmy army for singing "Camilla Parker Bowles will be your next queen". This splendid outfit has done more for Australian republicanism these past few months than John Howard managed to do for the monarchy and cricket in a decade of rule.

Coming back at ya:

Your next king is the talking tampon man

the talking tampon man

the talking tampon man

Wait a second, he's our king too.

Sob.

Okay, let's put it another way:

Get your shit flag
Get your shit flag
Get your shit flag off our stars.

Ah summer, where even a feminist must be aware of how John Howard must be suffering.

No gloating, puhlease.

(Below: or was it the sight of Julie Andrews as a nun that sent me mad, and so madness has followed me ever since?)

(and now it being Friday and for all those needing a lift and a jaunt in the dress, here's most of the song of Mehitabel, to be sung in a Hardly Normal voice, and more here).

i have had my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell
i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell

do you think that i would change
my present freedom to range
for a castle or moated grange
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

i once was an innocent kit
wotthehell wotthehell
with a ribbon my neck to fit
and bells tied onto it
o wotthehell wotthehell
but a maltese cat came by
with a come hither look in his eye
and a song that soared to the sky
and wotthehell wotthehell
and i followed adown the street
the pad of his rhythmical feet
o permit me again to repeat
wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai

boss sometimes i think
that our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay