Miranda Devine, and sundry acts of whale, shark and NBN bashing ...

(Above: Reservoir Dogs and the ear removal scene).

For dental torture the pond always recommends viewers look no further than Marathon Man - why we even feature Larry in our banner.

For genuine sicko perverted disgusting torture of the most out there kind, see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Of course back in the day Miranda the Devine loved the sicko whipping and the SM and the blood, as she kindly explained in Critics fail to crucify Jesus again, lashing and bashing the dissidents for their wicked response to that uplifting, pious show. Get your thrills where you find them ...

First, the movie was slammed as anti-Semitic. Then, after people saw the movie for themselves, the anti-Semitic line became difficult to sustain, unless one were to damn all Christianity. Then it was too violent (from critics who appreciate the violence of a Tarantino film).

You see, nothing wrong with splattering blood, if it's in a good cause.

But what's this? Has the Devine lost her taste for tickle and gore? Is it time for her and the commentariat to harden the fuck up or what?

Here's a distressed Miranda the Devine forced to leave the cinema, as reported in Iron Lady's leaden premise:

The last movie I walked out of was a Reservoir Dogs video, during the dental torture scene. But I was pregnant at the time and squeamish.

Dental torture?

This time it was Iron Lady, though I stayed too long.

It turns out that the Devine wanted a worshipful, heroic movie, perhaps more along the lines of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a sure fire way to upset the luvvies, and embarrass and reproach the left for their wicked ways ...

Meanwhile, bizarrely, the Devine yesterday featured the scribbles of her father in Quadrant (Flashback: the origins of the Green rot) to expose the source of the green rot, and naturally joined in the whale bashing (Bob's heroes should catch next whale home), along with expert whale basher Paul Sheehan (Eco pirates deserve a long haul, not a free trip home).

Oh it was a bloody day of flensing, but by the end of it, the world had been made safe for the sperm oil and whalebone corset trade, and scientific research and whale meat nosh ups ...

And yet blow the pond down, what's the featured splash in the Daily Terror today?

"My five-year-old daughter was in tears. It was horrible, with this guy beating the shark to death with a long metal pole," one of the witnesses, who asked not to be named, said yesterday.

"There were dozens of people there and people were pleading with the men to stop it, but they just killed it in front of everyone." (here)

Frank Devine would be rolling in his grave, at all the greenie blather about the fines, and the jail sentences and quoting a department of primary industries spokesperson about how ignorance of the shark's species is no excuse.

Let's face it, all the man wanted was a little flake with his chips, and okay it might have been a protected species, but where's the harm in culling, unless of course you're part of the greenie rot that's ruining this country. As if this land will ever be great, until we've chopped down the very last tree, and killed off all the sharks, the snakes and mammalian rivals.

Funny how it's hard to deal with the death of a creature up close, but closing the mind to the death of whales is easy peasy.

Was it only a couple of days ago the Daily Terror was explaining how sharks were dangerous predators, intent on robbing Australians of Tony Abbott's glorious prime ministership? How times change when the greenies take over editorial ...

Come on Miranda, show the rage, do the right thing, resign from the wretched hand-wringing greenie rag this instant!

Meanwhile, can we just offer a technical correction to Piers 'AC/DC' Akerman's vital piece We all pay the penalties for a casual attitude to work reality.

Judging by Akker Dakker's physique - which seems a testament to a fine expense account, or perhaps a fine pay cheque for scribbling foaming columns of fury, which allows for a lifestyle involving nosh ups in quality eateries - shouldn't the header have read We all pay the penalties for restaurant penalty rates, but why should I keep on paying even more for my nosh ups when the peasants can get fast takeaway food any day of the week?

Meanwhile, The Australian's anonymous editorialist maintains the NBN rage:

No link, if you must embrace the counter-revolutionary spirit, it's best to do it by googling the text (okay, the anon edit is free access, but why not practice on ways to evade the paywall?)

It seems as good a time as any to report on the pond's progress into the twenty first century, which saw the installation of Apple TV as a streaming device. The result was an ability to sit in the lounge and watch a streamed image as good as DVD on a sixty inch screen. The sound wasn't up to the mark, but a firmware hack and a streaming of the original mkv file will fix that.

The side-benefit? We watched an indie flick Margin Call, written and directed by J. C. Chandor, and what a well written, directed and performed drama it was, as a group of employees go about the business of dealing with their firm's financial collapse.

Agreed, it was alarming leftist propaganda, because somehow it thought financiers might be a tad short in the ethics department, except when burying their pets, and it had no advice to offer on the matter of whales, except the fine sight of a whale financial institution copping a flensing, but still it was good fun and very well made ...

Its streaming was more a technical experiment than anything naughty - we also ran some 700 mb and 1.4 gb files, and it was surprising how well a H264 file held up on a big screen. It was quite distracting to see Paul Newman and the Hanson brothers go around again in George Roy Hill's great ice hockey comedy Slap Shot - transcoded from the pond's DVD copy - and we stopped technical experiments to watch the Charlestown Chiefs do their thing ... while the bouffant hair styles are amazingly quaint, the movie held up quite well.

More to the point for the movie industry, the future had at last arrived in the lounge room for the pond. If movies can be streamed within the house, then they can be streamed to the house, especially with benefit of NBN.

So why does The Australian and the rest of the Murdoch press in Australia maintain the NBN rage?

Do they think that technology is there to be defeated, resisted, deflected, so that the old business of territorial restrictions, windows and such like can be maintained - by vigilant lawyers - for all eternity? Do they somehow think this will assist the likes of Fox News and Foxtel and Twentieth Century Fox going forward?

Do they think it's only about movies, newspapers, and music? And this is a luxury we can do without, and anyone who thinks differently should be sent out into the snow, Sparta-style?

Do they think putting the intertubes infrastructure into private hands will ensure that the sheep can be clipped in the way they're shorn each time they hop into a car and head out on to a motorway?

Do they think having a decent broadband infrastructure is pointless? In much the same way as flooding the entire continent with copper cable was completely useless, and retrograde, back in the old days when no one blanched at words like infrastructure and nation building, and Ming the Merciless was at the head of the nation building pack?

Who knows, but beneath all the allegedly rational arguments against the NBN, there is a deeply irrational fear and a failure to adjust.

It's old news that Google and the browsers have already got together to make sure that the provisions of SOPA can be circumvented, if need be (Stay on top of the fight against SOPA/PIPA with these tools). And it's even older news that the old media is fighting a rearguard action against broadband that it will inevitably lose ...

So here's the thing. The pond understands the need to support suppliers of product. That's why we subscribe to magazines, that's why we'll keep heading off to rent DVDs.

But equally the pond is happy to boycott suppliers of drivel, maintainers of rage, and natterers who love negativity, which is why hell will freeze over before a shekel heads the way of the NBN- denying Murdoch press ...

(Below: Slap Shot, a movie featuring shocking dental torture).