A colonoscopy a day is your lot ...

You know, the pond just had to snigger at this little flourish in the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia.

It was a flashback to days of long ago when a Sunday night movie meant something. These days, if you cared about this sort of telemovie titillation, you'd just run the PVR over both of them, and then forget about it, and not watch either of them ... (or download them, and then have them clutter the Drobo for weeks before finally despatching them to the trash can).

No doubt it means something to the FTA networks and the programmers, and no doubt it helps explain why nobody really wants decent broadband, not when there are old business models to protect, but it says more than the pond cares to know about the dinosaurs still running Murdoch la la land.

Which reminds us of a few words we'd really love to have written.

After celebrating the B. A. Santamaria clip on YouTube (noted here with great fun and relish thanks to a correspondent), Mike Carlton came up with this:

The Oz's sermons on journalistic ethics and the importance of facts are always a hoot, coming as they do from an organ that got it so crashingly wrong about the entire Iraq war from go to whoa. Under its combative editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell, this once-proud newspaper has prostituted itself to become a propaganda sheet for the Liberal Party and a megaphone for Rupert Murdoch's commercial ambitions and increasingly erratic political and economic nostrums. 
Reading this stuff is akin to getting a lecture on bushwalking from Ivan Milat.  (and the rest here)

And he didn't break Godwin's Law, because surely referencing a psychopathic killer is a nicely understated metaphor.

Speaking of increasingly erratic, devotees of the Chairman are distraught. He's stopped Twittering - at time of writing, his last tweet was on January 24th, and the anxious hordes have taken to scribbling Where In the World Is Rupert Murdoch?

But if the chairman is turning into Howard Hughes (has he taken to storing his piss in jars, the pond wonders, and refused to cut his hair or toenails and donned Kleenex boxes as shoes?), his minions remain hard at work doing his bidding ... in much the same way as L. Ron Hubbard proved irrelevant in his final days to the money-making Scientological machine.

Which brings us to the second piece of admirable writing where art seizes on the harshness of life:

Waiting to have a colonoscopy is bad enough. Waiting to have a colonoscopy and reading Andrew Bolt approaches a definition of existential horror.

Amen Mr, Flanagan, and good luck, and thanks for Rupert Murdoch's attack on 'our ABC' like a mediaevel siege.

And so to the unutterable tedium of the pond's daily duty, which is to read the crazed thoughts of the Murdochian commentariat.

Happily we've already pissed away half the space allowance, so we can keep it brief (and we promise to store the piss in a jar, hopefully one day joined by the Bolter, stuffed and mounted like the creatures at Sydney University's Macleay Museum).

First up, and you there, stifle that giant yawn, is Akker Dakker:

Ah the pond loves those Daily Terror juxatapositions. There's a reason it's the least trusted newspaper in Australia. A blonde in pink and Akker Dakker with blonde froth on the mouth ..

As for Akker Dakker, there's no need to read the actual piece. You could write it in your sleep. Just keep repeating lies and abuse over and over again ...

Pace Mike Carlton, we should just enjoy the splendid hubris and sight of a raving far right wing loon using a rabid far right wing loon, one Joseph McCarthy, as a club to hit the ABC. Ivan Milat? Well we said it was an under-stated metaphor ...

Next up, Miranda the Devine, in the least trusted newspaper in Australia:

Ah the pond just loves the ironies. You see there's the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia, promoting Kelly Osbourne, when any idiot with half a clue would know about the Osbournes and drugs, and might even have read Kelly Osbourne Talks Drug Past, Reveals Her Mother Once Put Her In a Padded Cell To Kick Addiction.

So, pace Mike Carlton, there's the Devine ranting on about the need to end the drug culture, and there's the Daily Terror celebrating a one time drug fiend from a family of drug fiends, who've had a second career life by celebrating their youthful excesses.

There is of course no need to actually read the Devine, cluck clucking and tut tutting, though it should be noted that she starts out berating Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street because it glamourises drug taking.

Says it all really. You see if you make a film that observes, in right wing ranter land, that means you're endorsing or encouraging. Never mind that the film might actually be an acute evoker of the worst excesses of capitalism - the pond's favourite site at the moment, given all the reality based movies doing the rounds, is History vs Hollywood:

Did Jordan Belfort really abuse cocaine and other drugs? 
Yes. In The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is shown snorting cocaine off a prostitute's backside and nearly crashing his private helicopter while high on a cocktail of prescription drugs, including Quaaludes, morphine and Xanax. In researching The Wolf of Wall Street true story, it quickly became clear that Belfort used drugs heavily in real life too. In his memoir, he states that at times he had enough "running through my circulatory system to sedate Guatemala."
Did Belfort and his colleagues really have drug-addled nights and sexcapades with prostitutes on a near daily basis? 
Though the movie and Belfort's memoir might seem like gross exaggerations of the truth, depicting heavy drug use and sexcapades in the office during trading hours, they're not exaggerations at all says the F.B.I. agent who finally took Belfort into custody, "I tracked this guy for ten years, and everything he wrote is true." Kyle Chandler portrays the agent in the Martin Scorsese movie. -NYTimes.com 
 Was Belfort really arrested for crashing his Lamborghini while high on expired Quaaludes? 
Yes, but according to Belfort the car wasn't a Lamborghini like in the movie, it was a Mercedes. He was so high in a drug daze that he couldn't remember causing several different accidents as he tried to make his way home. In real life, one of the accidents was a head-on collision that actually sent a woman to the hospital. -TheDailyBeast.com

And so on. It's actually Scorsese's best movie since Goodfellas, and you'd have to be a really weird capitalist lover of excess to emerge from it thinking that the drug abuse and the screwing of people is portrayed as admirable or glamourous.

What does that say about the deepest desires of Miranda the Devine?

As Scorsese explained about Goodfellas, while admitting he didn't understand the drug culture of the 1960s:

The Seventies drug thing was important because I wanted to get the impression of that craziness. Especially that last day, he starts at six in the morning. The first thing he does is gets the guns, takes a hit of coke, gets in the car. I mean, you're already wired, you're wired for the day. And his day is like crazy. Everything is at the same importance. The sauce is just as important as the guns, is as important as Jimmy, the drugs, the helicopter.
The idea was to stylistically try to give the impression - people watching the film who have taken drugs will recognize it - of the anxiety and the thought processes. And the way the mind races when you're taking drugs, really doing it as a lifestyle.

Here's the thing. You can watch Wolf and think it glamourises stuff, like the Devine. Or you can see how a clever director works.

It used to be a standard riff by neocon commentariat scribblers to mock people who wanted to teach students how to "read" a movie, so they'd have a more sophisticated understanding of it.

And then someone like the Devine comes along and shows she doesn't have a fucking clue ... and never learned how to "read" a movie. Why even The Lego Movie might be a bit beyond her ..

Finally we just have time to fit in one colonoscopy, though truth to tell, everyday is colonoscopy day at the HUN:

Uh huh. What to say?

Except fuck the Bolter, and fuck Kevin Williamson while we're at it ...

There's no need to link to the click bait trolling Bolter, but if you want to reward another troll, you can head off to Williamson getting agitated about The Feminist Mystique at the National Review.

Pace Mike Carlton, years after B. A. Santamaria left this world, you can find his fearful hated of women, gays, sexuality, feminism and the rest of the whole damned thing alive and well in the addled brain of the Bolter.

What's really amusing is that the Bolter's link in that screen cap above is to Instapundit.

Instapundit!

Why that scans handsomely. Andrew "Instapundit" Bolter, click baiting and trolling his way to opera and a nice little Grange ...

And so to a final update. The pond once used to dip in to Menzies House, a blog designed to express the fine and nuanced thoughts of Cory Bernardi and others.

It has now been taken over by the loons, genuine, certifiable loons, and within it you will find all the meandering rabid nonsense of the most right wing American Tea party, militia, libertarian, gun nut lovers doing the rounds.

Let's do a little micro examination. in the context of a post about climate change which led off with this conservative meme:

"Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever." Notable quote from Vladimir Lenin

Uh huh. It turns out that the key source for this is 100 Things You Should Know About Communism, prepared by the Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives (1951). House Doc. Yes, it's unverified and attributed, and if you can stand the pain, you can find the full text of the 100 Things You Should Know About Communism series, including the unverified, unsubstantiated quote, here at the Internet Archive.

What sweet joy to find yet another irony, what with Akker Dakker claiming that the ABC functions like Senator Joe McCarthy.

The point surely is that there are any number of ways to hang Lenin and even more to hang Stalin, so why do this half-baked quote, which obviously takes as its reference point the equally fabulist quote (never sourced, always attributed) about Jesuits taking a child at the age of seven and having him for life).

And if it's so sinister, what are we to make of Proverbs 22:6?

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. (King James version)

Eek, Lenin is voicing a Judaeo-Christian international conspiracy designed to ruin children.

You can certainly come away from Menzies House positive that Andy gets one thing right:

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

So many fools, so little time. And a colonoscopy a day if you read the Murdochians ...

(Below: the blog that did this one seems to be offline so let's keep the meme going)