A busy day for the pond, with Barners, Westies, Newman, Sir Robert Askin, Pearson, Downer, the BBC and Maggie all vying for attention ...

(Above: the heart at the heart of the known universe, exuding style and class).



It is of course too much to expect Barners to get rolled at the voting underway today at the West Tamworth Leagues club.

Tamworth is, as noted countless times on the pond, the epicentre of the known universe, and Westies the epicentre of Tamworth, but even this wonderful recreation of Greek democracy occasionally stumbles, much like Greece in the age of Solon.

It's also too much to expect the spineless conformist cardigan wearers at the BBC to show a bit of spine when it comes to a jolly jape amongst chums, and play in its entirety an entirely harmless song which has been successfully revived because it features a cheerful Dorothy - much like the gormless twits failed when it came to playing the Sex Pistols, who merely made an impassioned plea for god to save the Queen.

The one thing that helps you identify a pompous pathetic conservative twit at ten paces is their complete  lack of a sensa huma. The pond first observed this in school days, and it's stayed true ever since.

As soon as someone says that someone else should be mature and grown up and solemn and behave with dignity, the next thing you know they'll be bunging on an illegal war in a foreign country ...

But while we're observing fatuity up close, let's pause to honour the lead digital "exclusive" in today's lizard Oz:

Yes, yes, duckies on the pond, what a fine and thoughtful exclusive.

It moved the pond to trawl through the notorious years of the notoriously corrupt Sir Robert Askin for a few relevant headlines. And what you do you know, tin pot local dictators like Newman have been running the same comedy routine for years (in order Sydney Morning Herald June 13th 1973, June 19 1973 and June 12 1973):

The big difference?

In those days nobody labelled their beat-ups of petty state dictators strutting their stuff and complaining about Canberra as "exclusives", and they didn't even hit the front page.

Now the pond could have done exactly the same exercise in relation to that notoriously corrupt chook-feeder Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but why bother?

The point - the complete deterioration of the standard of journalism at the lizard Oz - is so obvious, it's like spotting a line dancer at Westies.

Meanwhile, the pond continues to be outraged at the way the lizard Oz is downgrading Christopher Pearson from the whirling lazy Susan of luscious choices at the top of the page to a position as an ordinary member of the commentariat rank and file.

This man is an expert in Latin rituals, and therefore must be immensely qualified to speak on matters such as the NBN:

No doubt Pearson is making the point that, as a result of his extraordinary attention to Latin rites, the rapture is just around the corner, and as a result the future is exceedingly foggy, except for high church Catholics, who will certainly not be needing the capacity offered by the NBN because heaven is wired for 4K streaming. Maybe even 12K ... who knows ...

Now Pearson probably hasn't caught up on the news from NAB this year, but what caught everyone's eye was the way 4K products were being rolled out, and if Sony is anything to go by, at a friendly price: see NAB 2013 wrap-up: Sony 4K TVs, Red, Blackmagic, Thunderbolt and more!

You could just imagine Pearson's foggy eyes glazing, and him ducking into the church for a quick puff on a Latin rite.

But you see Christopher, that's what they do. Upsize us and upscale us and make us crave speed and size and access at anytime anywhere on any device we feel inclined to do so ... and at the high end with bigger files and bigger capacity and that's why the pond finally had to splash out on a Drobo for domestic work use (and what a fine device it is too) ...

Not having a clue helps explains the complete fatuity of Pearson's line - we may need ... but then again we may not ... which explains his complete absence of understanding of development of the Internet over the past few decades. And why he's not much use as a climate scientist either. But okay, the pond will bite.

And yes, you've guessed it, Pearson doesn't have a clue, right down to the meaning of rolled gold:

Like all initiatives of the Rudd government, it meandered along for a while. Finally, Conroy scrapped the fibre-to-the-node plan and announced a new rolled-gold plan to deliver fibre to the premises in most cities.

Rolled gold? Perhaps he's being meta-ironic, because rolled gold is gold bonded to a cheap-arsed base metal such as brass. If you want a rolled gold plan for the NBN, why not try hooking up fibre to a half-arsed base metal such as copper ...

But as for the rest, it's really fatuity piled on fatuity, though strangely in places Pearson manages to sound like Stilgherrian. Fancy that. How does Stilgherrian feel, being amongst such fatuous company?

Pearson's high tech response is to shrug his shoulders, and perhaps say a few Latin words:

The Coalition plan is based on realism. The copper network that will carry bandwidth from the node to premises is good for the foreseeable future. But there's really no point second-guessing technologies decades ahead. We simply don't know where broadband will be in 2030. It's not that long ago that we marvelled at handheld mobile phones that didn't need to be accompanied by a suitcase. YouTube is not even a decade old. What makes Conroy, of all people, feel he is qualified to forecast the future of IT? 

Uh huh. What on earth makes Pearson, of all people, feel he's qualified to say anything at all about the future of IT, which it should be noted is shorthand for Information Technology, not all of it to do with broadband ...

Since all it seems he can do is shrug his shoulders and say he's continually surprised. Which isn't exactly the response of clever folk at Google or other wired people ...

The internet and how it works change with lightning speed in ways that continually surprise. I remember when big-screen televisions were the height of domestic electrical aspirations. People paid thousands of dollars for enormous rear-projection TVs whose picture quality seems embarrassing in retrospect.

Yep, that's Christopher 'bobs and bytes' Pearson at his most penetrating, except when he's remembering the early days of mobile phone bricks But do ramble on:

Now you can buy a huge flat screen for a few hundred dollars. Even more intriguing to me, the smartphone revolution is completely changing the way media is consumed. For one who witnessed the big screen and home theatre obsession, it feels odd to see teenagers watching videos online on tiny handheld phones with earphones. 
My point is not to take a ramble through the changes of past decades, though it is always a temptation ...

But of course that's all Pearson can do. Ramble, because he really doesn't have a clue ...

...but to highlight that we cannot foresee the future of technology and media. I'm old enough to remember when the fax machine was pretty revolutionary, slithery paper and all. Who knows where the tech-heads will take us?

Actually the tech-heads with half a clue want to take us to fibre, and not back to the slithery world of Edwardian copper ...

Naturally Pearson comes up with the most fatuous canard of all, which is that wireless is competitive rather than complementary, and with nary a mention of the limitations of wireless as more people put more demands on it for data:

But one trend is obvious: people want portability - fast, no-fuss wireless access wherever they are. Yet Julia Gillard's government is determined to waste billions of dollars, and disrupt lives immensely, to deliver fibre to every house in metro areas. It is foolish to lock in such massive spending so far in advance on technology that may be overtaken. 

Let's hear that one again:

It is foolish to lock in such massive spending so far in advance on technology that may be overtaken.

Roll that one around, savour it. Because you see, copper has already been overtaken, and yet the coalition proposes to embark on massive spending on a technology that's already been overtaken.

Of course if you're a dunderhead, you can't manage to grasp that the very same argument applies to the Coalition's new found love of off-budget broadband, which is at the moment a few billion dollars cheaper, but which will suffer the same roll-out and cost blow-out risks. And why have they come up with it?

Well actually people like the idea of fast connectivity and what it promises, and not just for entertainment, and the Coalition knows it, and just wants to defuse the issue, and hope memories of Tony 'let's destroy the NBN' Abbott go away with their current half-arsed plan.

As you'd expect, the rest of Pearson is just pure, empty Abbott puffery:

The Coalition's broadband policy is a promising sign of what is to come in policy development by the alternative government. It takes a difficult area of policy and delivers an affordable, pragmatic outcome. It is not the sort of fairy story we have come to expect from the Gillard government. It doesn't promise the earth or pretend there is no cost. 
Labor likes to assure us that Tony Abbott is all about slogans. But it is the government that is besotted with clunky slogans. Fibre to the premises is Conroy's mantra, regardless of the real mechanics, or cost, of running high-speed broadband across a continent. The release of a report into high-speed rail, projecting decades and $114bn for such an undertaking, gives the government another frightening opportunity to commit to "nation building" in a reckless, spendthrift way. 

That would be as opposed to pissing some thirty billion dollars against the wall on a network which will still use copper ... talk about a reckless folly, which will need upgrading even as it rolls its rolled-gold, rolled-copper way into the world ... disrupting lives immensely for diddly squat.

Enough already.

The question deep down to be asked is why the lizard Oz persists in running the thoughts of a Latin-loving luddite on technology when really he doesn't have a clue, and keeps on hitting himself in the foot in the way that makes Conroy seem like a visionary?

Oh wait, the rag has been doing exactly the same thing these past few years.

And Crikey has Stilgherrian, sounding exactly like Pearson, so perhaps it's fair enough ...

*

Meanwhile, politicians with a bad case of relevance deprivation syndrome continue to bob up all over the place, but none more prolific or of less use than ", aka Alexander Downer:

By golly she must have given ", aka Alexander Downer, a good pants thrashing and made him ever so grateful grateful for the privilege, such is the gushing. Thank you ma'am, can I please have another:

When will these prats from Adelaide ever shut up? Or get a subbie who can deliver a header that makes some sort of sense?

It left the pond with only one respectful choice, which shoves it up the BBC and Downer, and how can that be wrong? Get up and dance along ...

After all Tony Abbott and his tea party mob made it respectable to talk about female Prime Ministers as witches. And who could argue with Tony Abbott?