Time to roger a few gerbils ...

(Above: Jeffrey Smart evoking the Cahill expressway. But where are the cars Jeffrey, where are the cars?)

Blow after blow is pummeling the pond ...

For years, we've maintained the rage by singing along to the monorail song on the Simpsons, wondering what Laurie Brereton thought if he ever saw Lyle Langley do his spiel (you can still catch the monorail number on YouTube here).

But soon, it seems, the joke and the pleasure will be lost. What a blow, what a crisis for humanity ...

Laurie Brereton? Wow, that name's a blast from the past. Thanks to the wonders of modern reference tools, let's transport ourselves back to a Brereton profile in The Age on August 29th 1986:

The biggest of his monumental building responsibilities is the Darling Harbour project, with its controversial casino and monorail.

"It was (ex-premier Neville) Wran's concept, my responsibility. The credit for Darling Habour must be given to Wran. It was his vision. It's a project which will change the focus of this City and turn it around to face the west," said Brereton.

Some fear that it will do more than turn Sydney around, that it is going to turn Sydney into a gigantic Luna Park. Laurie Brereton argues that these people have no idea of what Darling Harbour is really about.

"No one understands it yet. They just don't understand that it is two-thirds the size of the CBD." (and you can read the rest of the Brereton comedy routine here at Google newspapers around page 51).

Credit where credit is due then. The hideous vision of Sydney can be pegged to Wran and Brereton.

Okay, so all these years later, the pond understands Darling Harbour is big - a big ongoing mess - but also contends that it's impossible to understand what Wran and Brereton were on when they made this mega tourist slum.

Do you need a vision to build a huge tourist slum with a down at heels low rent casino full of all the usual vices and corruption, and even now causing grief to dazzling Barry?

If only it had turned into a gigantic Luna Park. At least the tourists would have had something to do. Oh okay, the Chinese garden is a nice idea, but does one nice idea redeem a mall that got mated with a restaurant strip and water? And yes, it follows the golden rule, the better the view the crappier the food.

So now they're tearing down the monorail, and what a pity it's too expensive to tear down the rest of the Wran-Brereton vision. Labor apparatchiks, delivering myopia for decades, have been part of the eternal comedy of state government.

Yes it was a Labor government that tore up the Sydney trams, thanks to a motoring lobby headed by the NRMA and a flock of British engineering experts who'd done the same thing in the UK in the name of transport efficiency. And it was Joe Cahill who gave Sydney that other visual blight, the Cahill Expressway ... while in the Carr years, the solution to infrastructure issues was more buses, and not even environmentally more advanced buses, while the yowling molochs of Murdoch somehow thought that Sydney central could cope with huge masses of motor cars. And still thinks it ...

The result? Well it's roughly like having Murdoch blogger and motorhead Tim Blair plan a city. A complete mess ...

To break Godwin's law just a little, you can almost begin to yearn for Napoleon tearing up Paris or Hitler commissioning Albert Speer to do his thing to Berlin ...

Enough already, next thing we'll be shedding a tear at the way the bulldozers at night have torn down the Capitol theatre in Tamworth, the Belle Vue Hotel at George and Alice Streets in Brisbane, or the fine old South Australian hotel on North Terrace (and more listed here in pdf form, the stuff of genuine conservatism).

But stay, you say, what's this about caring about urban environments? Isn't the pond devoted to matters of loonacy?

Oh okay, you're right, so come on down Miranda Devine.

A while ago, eternal bitch Devine put the high heel into Germaine Greer for Greer putting the boot into Julia Gillard's bum and dress sense. Not a good look Germaine, read the header, and it allowed the Devine to lead with the usual sort of mendacious tropes, stupidities and sillinesses for which she's renowned:

If Q and A has a raison d’être it is reflexive antagonism to Tony Abbott and John Howard.

Therefore it is fervently pro-Malcolm Turnbull. Whenever he appears, which is often, he gets applause when he just leans back in his chair.

Uh huh, so what has Gillard's bum size and Germaine Greer got to do with all of that? It's just so pitifully pathetic ...

Could it be that the Devine, who is at best a tepid, nervous and mediocre performer, especially on Q&A, where she's usually hesitant and insipid, is irritated by a program which she endorses by appearing on? Why doesn't she just ban it because of its pro-Turnbull leaning?

Never mind, because next, in typically prudish, should we mention it Catholic, fashion, the Devine's off like a hare chasing a joke about fisting gloves.

Why is that sort of rancid vulgarity acceptable on the taxpayer-funded broadcaster, anyway? Not just acceptable, but actively sought out and published.

And this from a woman who tweeted a joke about rogering gerbils, and did so of her own free will.

It took the rest of the week before anyone rose to the bait. Come on down Wendy Squires, scribbling Two words, feminists: lighten up for The Age, wherein she proposes a gibber test and suggests a ratio of 80/20 of sense to gibber as reasonable. As the Devine produces ninety per cent gibberish on any given day, Squires knew she was on a winner.

Of course where it's just a matter of noting that Gillard has a big bum (let those without a big bum or a big tum cast the first stone), it's all harmless fun, but then occasionally it turns vile, as in the Devine's incredibly cheap point scoring about the murderous rampage in France, which she headlined with Suspected murderer of French Jewish school children cornered, and you'll NEVER guess his name.

Yep, you'd almost swear that the Devine was pleased that the killer was named Mohammed, and you'd NEVER guess his name, because it stuck it to lefties and to some initial claims that the man might have been a racist white European.

Does anyone at any point ever find it tasteless that the likes of the Devine wants to make a political point out of mass murder, along the lines of "hah, he's more your sort of mass murderer than our sort of Norwegian Anders Behing Breivik mass murderer"?

Routinely now these eruptions get seized on, and celebrated along ideological lines, and usually in initial forays of half-baked misinformation. The Devine for example, quotes the murderer at his word about belonging to Al Qaeda, and only days later do we get an alternative with the story French gunman had 'no ties to al-Qaeda'.

Why does the commentariat always go off half-cocked?

About the only time there are valid political considerations, as opposed to a crazed loner going off the rails, is when it's soldiers pissing on the Qur'an or a crazed soldier taking out women and children, thereby severely undercutting the point and the trust in a military operation already in dire trouble.

But did you notice a word from the Devine on the matter of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales?

What you might have noticed, if you'd bothered to plunge into the cesspool of comments attached to the Devine column, were remarks like this:

Thank Allah our Muslims are different. We can thank Jooliar and Chris Bowen that the ones we take from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan are well adjusted after their sea cruise from Indonesia and aren’t suffering from PTSD etc.

That's precisely the sort of comment you get when you trawl with a tee hee header that shouts "and you'll NEVER guess his name."

And the Devine has the cheek to reprimand Greer for stating the bleeding obvious about Gillard's bum (and let he or she without a fat bum or tum throw the first stone).

What a stupid woman. Yes, you can say that about someone and mention their sex. Stupid and offensive.

Why doesn't she just go roger some gerbils.

(Below: okay, time to go down memory lane with First Dog, and roger those gerbils. Click to enlarge, find more First Dog here).