The pond presents so many bold, capped exclusives you'll beg for mercy, but be warned, there's a test at the end of it ...

(Above: the pond gets wired).

By now there's probably not a person on the planet, or at least on the full to overflowing intertubes, who hasn't been given a ink to the sad and sorry story of Amy's Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona.

There, the pond's work is done, recycling common gossip, hapless moths caught in Facebook and Gordon Ramsey's flame, inclined to invoke God and worst of all to shout in capitals.

Now everybody knows that shouting in caps is guaranteed to set people off.

But what happens when you saunter across to the wretched reptiles at the lizard Oz?

Say what?

Peter Reith rabbiting on about industrial relations is an "exclusive", or should that be "EXCLUSIVE" in bold, reprehensible, eye-ravaging red?

Reith will demand that business pressure Tony Abbott?

Can the reptiles at the lizard Oz get any sillier?

Reith of course has turned the ABC's The Drum in to his own personal fiefdom, routinely attempting to stop one of three innocent passers-by on their way to a wedding, and berating them up hill and down dale about IR and anything else that upsets the "let loose the hounds" man.

Look:

Now that's a screen cap, but if you want to frolic in the fields of REITH-ness (yes you too can let loose the hunds with the style of our besten hundetrainer), why simply click here (may be slow to load) and you can spend hours absorbed in eye-glazing reading.

Have you thought about masturbation as an alternative? Oh it's a solitary activity, but it can be more pleasurable than reading Reith.

The main point however is that a man who routinely arms himself with a megaphone and shouts from the ABC's publicly funded steeple about the joys of the private sector, is incapable of giving an "EXCLUSIVE".

Shame, lizards, shame. You're as bad as a bakery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Naturally that lazy reptile, Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan is in on the game too. In Fantasy figures and bungles mean election gambit must be rejected (what a clunker of a header) he exhorts Tony Abbott to grasp the mantle of no, and embrace nattering negativity - something Abbott is unlikely to do - but even worse, he puts everything that Wayne Swan is quoted as saying in Bold.

It's a childish device, for an increasingly childish mind, and hovering in the pond's mind throughout was that hapless bakery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Meanwhile, the pond has been taking an interest in Tim "Bleagh" Blair ever since he time-warped himself back to 2003 in pursuit of satire.

"Bleagh" you say with a raised eyebrow? Isn't that unkind?

Not really, because in the post-Godwin's Law world we all inhabit thanks to News Ltd, Scottsdale bakery abuse is all the go ...

Here's how Bleagh opens a typical snippet - it's hard to think beyond two hundred words if you're a muppet link freak:

Climate wailer John Connor believes I've misrepresented his religion ...

The point isn't the debate over 400ppm, or 350ppm as a mark of doom, the point is that Blair is routinely offensive because ... well because he's routinely offensive.

The only good news is that because of the way things are working at the Terror these days the thing was posted at 4.43 am - such a tragic life, the life of a reptile blogger - and no one had clocked in to process the comments:

There's no point in rising to the bait, there's no point in debating anything at all with Blair.

After two hundred words, he tends to get confused, and he's inclined to put key points into bold ... when he's not filling up space with his links ...

Confusing religion and science is just another day's hacking for the hacks in the world of Murdoch la la land ... it's the passing it off as some form of mutant wit that's the real piss-off.

And now, if we may just go haring off in a completely different direction, it's NAPLAN week, and already there are mumbles and grumbles surfacing.

Why it must be time to do a Tim "Bleagh" Blair!

There was Peter Job's NAPLAN is driving our students backwards, and Alan Stokes' whimsical Spare play time and grill the child, and NAPLAN results used as entry criteria for private schools, and so on and so forth, but as always in times of stress, the pond turns to the deep north for guidance.

Sure enough, there it is today, and never mind the verbosity of the header, in A teacher has been sacked over cheating as Queensland tops list of NAPLAN breaches.

Oh Queensland, look you've done it again:

Figures provided by education authorities this week reveal 24 school staff - including seven principals, a deputy principal, 15 teachers and a teacher aide - were involved in cheating, security and general "incidents" during the 2012 NAPLAN exams in Queensland.

And that's just the ones they caught. In the pond's day, cheating was an elevated art form, but likely it's early days for teachers, and hopefully they'll learn.

Naturally the incidents were down-played by the relevant authorities, they were self-reported, of a minor nature, yadda yadda, but how pleasing is it that, thanks to NAPLAN, teachers are at last learning to cheat. Or spend minor school fortunes on trial tests and trial answers ...

For too long, the world has had to put up with prissy poncy exhortations to just do your best, and be true to yourself, and  just try, tri-tri-triantiwontigongolope, and now they're in the real world, training their students for a lifetime of cheating, or perhaps a career in finance or a merchant bank ... and all because of NAPLAN tests!

Or perhaps a life in Britain, post-Margaret Thatcher.

Yes it's yet another gratuitous Monty Python throw to something completely different.

In this Bleagh mess, please allow the pond one decent link, to Andrew O'Hagan's sound spanking of Margaret Thatcher, in Maggie, for The New York Review of Books, outside the paywall at the moment, so rush on over.

Now any man who would walk outside a bar rather than shake Margaret Thatcher's hand immediately has the pond's attention, and it turns out O'Hagan grew up in one of the towns her policies comprehensively ruined, and by golly does he return the compliment with both barrels.

The pond was reading it in the foyer of the Opera House, waiting to hear Ashkenazy conduct Walton's first symphony (that's just to reassure people the pond is 'leet, and what a rousing piece it is), and the cackles resulted in a number of people moving away from what they thought was a demented bag lady ...

What's even more amazing, there's no talk of an O'Hagan "exclusive", nothing in caps, nothing in bold, just the odd flamboyant letter to start a paragraph, along with a vicious, venomous dissection which is a joy to read.

Oh and it runs longer than two hundred words, so Tim Blair can't read it, let alone link to it ...

It's enough to restore the pond's faith in the intertubes.

At least until we make the essay the subject of a NAPLAN question ...

Answer to that hidden question: William Walton was sent down from Oxford without a degree ... and yes, there's more to life than a test or Margaret Thatcher or Tim Bleagh.