The pond spends some more time in room 237 with Murdoch and Blairite reptiles ...

(Above: this portrait of the federal opposition caught the pond's eye. You have to love the NT News, not even up to the class of the old Melbourne Truth).

What's up Doc, or what's news, if you will?

Well today is Miranda the Devine day, and no news there, because she hoes into former Chairman Rudd and blames him for boat people, deaths at sea, and possibly the extensive use of kitchen sinks ... as you can read in Rudd's credibility is lost at sea.

Hang on, there is one interesting thing. The pond clicked on the click bait, and went straight through to the text.

What happened to News +√±×÷∉∑0?

Isn't the Devine the jewel in the crown the punters are supposed to scramble over broken glass to read, depositing precious subscriptions in the laps of management as rich reward for the rag having such a fine commentariat team ...

Not to worry, no doubt the Devine was pleased to read of the treatment of gays in Russia. So right, so proper, so Pellist ...

And dammit, the brekkie wrap was outside the paywall too, or at least it was the last time we clicked here. Turns out you can read about Devine the impaler and Vlad the impaler for free ...

Never mind, irregular readers of the pond might at some point have come across the pond's thesis that the reptiles in the lizard Oz swoop, soar and swirl together in unison, like birds flocking in the air. 

A flight or a gulp of swallows, a kettle of circling vultures, a host of sparrows, or given the noise of most of them, a pandemonium of parrots or a screech of mynah birds.

Now here's all the proof you need:

Yep, there's Dame Slap scribbling Rudd's home: be very afraid, but instead of corpses floating in the ocean, her chosen text is Kubrick's The Shining ...

Well the pond frequently thinks it spends way too much time in room 237 with the reptiles of the lizard Oz, and there's nothing in the story to distract - just the usual slapping around the head of the Labor party, the sort of thing that Dame Slap does in her sleep - until we come to the very last par:

Indeed, whatever happens with the leadership, Rudd will be roaming around the empty house of Labor after the election much longer than Nicholson's character, who mercifully was killed off by a fierce North Atlantic snowstorm.

Say what? North Atlantic?

Now as room 237 lovers know, The Shining was shot mainly at Elstree studios in Hertfordshire England, but let's go with the gloss proposed by Kubrick, which is that it's set at the Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood, in the Hood River area of northern Oregon, a mere 45 miles east of Portlandia (that's Portland for the lentil hip).

Now it's true that the North Atlantic generates a lot of activity over the United States, but the odds are that Oregon weather is likely to be dominated by systems over the Pacific, or sweeping down from the north or up from the south ...

Let's take the great 2012 Pacific Northwest snowstorm as a model - yes it has its own wiki here - which cranked up on the coast of British Columbia, and then swept down to dump a huge amount of snow on Oregon and sundry other north west states ... a long bloody way from the North Atlantic ...

Oh okay, you guessed it, got it, nailed it in one.

The pond is bored batshit crazy by reading Dame Slap doing her usual tirade, and besides, she really doesn't know what she's talking about.

Why any of the crazies who featured in Room 237 would eat her alive (and don't start talking about how the film was really made at the Stanley hotel, Estes Park in Colorado where King stayed and was inspired to write the original story, or the interior was based on the Ahwahnee hotel in Yosemite Park in California, in both cases the west coast principle still applies, and Dame Slap doesn't have a bloody clue where her metaphors might lead her).

Okay so what have we established so far? Well it's just another slow news day where the batshit crazy spend their time writing about the batshit crazies, you know, like Peter van Onselen scribbling furiously as lizard oz reptiles are wont to do:

At last, someone willing to call it as it is!

Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen, with her Shining routine, and Miranda the Devine with her corpses in the sea are nothing but political terrorists!

Now you can read Emotional blackmail follows political terror if you like, and if you avoid the paywall, but it's the purest gossamer, fairy floss so thin the average showground shyster would fear selling because it might be judged too lightweight, but yes van Onselen really does say these things:

... as Gerald Seymour wrote in 1975, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Rudd is a freedom fighter seeking to reclaim a prime ministership the public regards as rightly his... 
The number of pre-emptive attacks on Rudd's character by the likes of Miranda Devine and Janet Albrechtsen are more akin to political terrorism - not to mention character assassination - than Rudd's understandable interest in reclaiming the job voters awarded him with in 2007.

Or some such thing - the pond suspects he might have been referring to Wayne Swan rather than the Devine and Dame Slap - but you catch the drift, and really... freedom fighter?! Freedom fighter v the terrorists?!!?

Van Onselen used to like to pretend he was one of the more sensible reptiles at the lizard Oz, but what a pathetic sight it is to see a mind o'erthrown by drinking way too much kool aid ...

Why the resemblance between Jack Nicholson, Kevin Rudd and van Onselen might be enough to send Janet Albrechtsen into a north Atlantic panic ...

Never mind, the pond was looking for a dose of nausea, and who better to offer it than Tony Blair.

Yep, Blair is today presented as one of the lizard Oz's commentariat reptiles:

But what's this?

Blair's piece has been dug up, exhumed, from the MailOnline where it was first published back on 2nd June 2013 under the header The ideology behind Lee Rigby's murder is profound and dangerous. Why don't we admit it?: Tony Blair launches a brave assault on Muslim extremism after Woolwich attack.

And what's more, it's outside the lizard Oz paywall, and freely available, yet the hacks at Oz want to charge you for your daily dose of nausea.

There's something profoundly nauseating to read Blair talking about killing, as if his behaviour in conducting a crusade and turning Iraq into a killing field (even worse than Saddam Hussein managed) somehow should be overlooked, rather than see him brought up on charges of being a war criminal.

All the more so as the news from Iraq continues deadly, with the latest car bombs, suicide blasts and gun battles killing more than 70 people, and there's ongoing talk of civil war and Iraq getting tangled in the mess that is Syria (Bombs and battles hit northern Iraq, more than 70 dead, Car bombings in Iraq kill at least 57).

Talk of Iraq has long drifted off the front pages down under but the mess that was left behind shouldn't be ignored.

For the moment, let's just put it this way and leave it at that. The ideology behind Tony Blair's career as a war criminal is profound and dangerous. Why don't we admit it?

And at the least, his scribbling shouldn't be hidden behind a paywall. It should be out in the world, ready to perform the useful task of mopping up cocky shit ...

As always, when thinking of Blair, the thinking person immediately thinks Steve Bell, and so let's wrap it up with a Steve Bell festival. Talk about The Shining ...

You can find more Steve Bell here, and don't forget to drop in on the down under edition of The Guardian ... and please pardon the pond for hoping the reptiles at the lizard Oz get trapped in a north Atlantic snowstorm ... or at least room 237 ...