What to do? What to do?

What to do? What to do?

The pond scoured the excellent First Dog for advice, and came up with this:

More First Dog here, but in the meantime, the pond has decided, if not to live overseas, then at least to head OS on a junket and a jaunt, scarper the joint, do a bunk, and leave the festering stewing country sticky in its new mess ...

Of course it's craven and cowardly. 

Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: ‘'fore God I am no coward; 
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear, 
And half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick. 
We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty three?' 

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: ‘I know you are no coward; 
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again. 
But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore. 
I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard, 
To those Inquisition Pellist dogs and the devildoms of Abbott's pain. (apologies to Lord Alfred Tennyson, the rest here)

But before going we have prepared a sacred oath:

In the old days, the Phantom was big in Tamworth ...

But you can't expect a sexist racist comic that began to run in the 1930s to have the right sort of relevant modern wording.

So the pond has a modest proposal to correct a few of the errors and right the gender imbalance.

The new sacred oath goes something like this:

I swear to devote my life to the embrace of all forms of piracy, greed and cruelty, including but not limited to purloining as much intellectual property from News Corp and Sydney Fairfax as is humanly possible, and never paying a cent for it, not a red cent or a nickel or dime or a ha'penny, and otherwise denigrating, downgrading, contributing and playing a humble part in the disintegration of these evil empires. 

My daughters and my daughters' daughters shall follow me. The pond swears this oath on the ashes of a Murdoch rag burned for the occasion, and pummelled into a heady broth of fillet of fenny snake, eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, adder's fork and blind worm's string, lizard's leg and owlet's wing. (You know the rest but for heaven's sake don't forget the scale of dragon, and tooth of wolf, as you have to omit the liver of blaspheming Jew, nose of Turk and Tartar's lips). 

She was the second Dorothy Parker - never forget the first and the very best Dorothy Parker - and the eldest child - preferably female, but hey what the heck, any sex will do, let's stretch the gender boundaries - of each succeeding generation of Dorothy's family carried on! 

So with the curse and the oath in place, what to do?

Well we could celebrate other comic book heroes:

(Wonder Woman appearing in December 1941, click to enlarge)

With truly weird creation myths:

Sad to say, these days Wonder Woman is really just a chance for submissive ten year old boys to get their knickers in a knot, as they get excited about very skimpy fancy costumes and Amazons giving them a hard time (and nothing wrong with that) ...

Still, it's not a bad angle:

At last, in a world torn by the hatreds and wars of men, Murdochians and Sydney Fairfaxians, appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child's play ...

Would it were so ...

Of course as well as the Murdochians and the Fairfaxians, the pond blames it all on Queensland and Queenslanders ...

… it is, after all, all their fault, the Brisbane Broncos, the Ruddster, the cane toads, blackbirding, too much sugar in the diet, Bundaberg Rum, the reef in peril, star fish, global warming, the swing to Tony Abbott, Clive Palmer,  the Titanic, Bob Katter, dinosaurs, large hats, pineapples, bananas, Campell Newman, Joh, the whole damn thing ... the list is enormous and endless ...

Is there any good news at all on the loon front? Well the rough Brough and Sophie "Nasty" Mirabella were given a fright, though perhaps not the fright they deserve, and the consternation of ace reporter Hedley Thomas, it seems his constant blather about Clive Palmer might have helped the PUP to get over the line, thereby ensuring the next three years will continue as a comedy.

And with any luck Kevin Rudd will do the honourable thing and POQ, but such is his narcissism and ego, this is no sure thing.

So the pond is packing up and fleeing the country. Like any coward, the pond knows how to get when the getting's good.

We might occasionally break our silence with travel advisories and unseemly gloating, but first of all, we're adopting the Paul Keating solution, and we're flying over Queensland and Darwin without pausing to look down, on our way to Paris

How does the pond feel about leaving everybody trapped in a brand new nightmare?

Pretty, pretty good.

Enjoy, and the pond promises to enjoy Europe on your behalf, and flying apartment blocks permitting - there's always the possibility of becoming an episode in Air Crash Investigations - the pond will be back in a couple of weeks …

Oh sure, it might get rough OS.

Obama and the French might bomb Syria, the Syrians might drop sarin gas into the Metro - with the pond's luck at the very moment we use our Paris Visite Pass to go to the Musée d'Orsay - the Israelis might bomb Syria, the Syrians might bomb Israel, and world war III might erupt, but hey look on the bright side, at least we won't be copping the first few weeks of the reign of the mad Monk ...

And then on return, there'll be work to be done, the same sort of work daily, routinely faced by Wonder Woman.

Just as she battled evil, so the pond will return to tend to the reptiles at the lizard Oz and the rest of Murdoch la la land, and their wretched, deviant Abbottian, reptilian spawn: