Thumbs up or down, a grand Mal Friday multi-sector multi-technology mix of mayhem ...

(Above: more David Rowe here)

Talk about a disaster.

No, not Bob Carr, courtesy Rowe, not even the news that a nine month old baby viciously assaulted the police with stones and was charged with attempted murder (here).

It's the pond's experience that babies are accomplished criminals and by the time they reach the terrible twos have transitioned to serial killing, and it's a tribute to the Pakistani police and the excellent justice system in that country that this is finally being recognised ...

All the mockery and ridicule the police are enduring is vicious and unsustainable. Killer babies roam the world like killer grannies ... and only Pythons and Pakistani police know the terrible truth.

No, none of that.

The real disaster news is the tragedy that Stephen Colbert is replacing David Letterman as the host of The Late Show and that he will not stay in character while doing the gig (here, forced video at end of link). So that's it, in eight months, the real true, if a tad fictional, Colbert will be dead.

Artists must move on and progress and grow, yadda yadda, and turn into fucking David Letterman doing inane top ten lists, and all we'll be left with is memories ...

Speaking of disappointments, the pond recently looked at Errol Morris's portrait of Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known.

Sadly, it's a dull film, and Rumsfeld emerges relatively unscathed, and Morris knows it. If you want a better look at Rumsfeld, curiously you're better off reading Morris's four part piece on the Cheshire cat in the New York Times - part one here, and follow the links to the other parts. Morris spends his time trying to work out how Rumsfeld became the one that got away ...

Not that the pond was expecting a trial by interview on film, but Morris's trademark open approach failed to lure Rumsfeld into any confessions, or admissions, or more to the point in terms of watchability, into saying anything interesting that hadn't already been said before to anyone awake during the last decade of political reporting.

Instead the film is swamped by a deluge of Rumsfeldian verbiage and snowflakes, and dubious metaphors can't deal with the downpour, whether it's a repeated image involving a Citizen Kane style warehouse of memos, or an ocean of water standing in for an ocean of words.

The articles feature the best image of Rumsfeld, one you won't find in the film:

Meanwhile, the NSW Labor party continues to display skills that can only be called Rumsfeldian.

Joe Tripodi explained how he headed off to meet Tony Kelly armed with burgers and coffee, to discuss an export deal to send hay off to China. As you do, what with Joe being an expert Collins street farmer, and an importer and exporter up there with Arthur Daley ...

Geoff Watson SC: You know hay costs about $12 a bale? 
Joe Tripodi: I worked it out. 
GW: Hay is uneconomic to move from Wellington to Orange so why would somebody be exporting it to Shanghai?

Indeed. There's an unknown unknown right there.

And then came some rich comedy about Tripodi's phone:

GW: We’ve got some evidence that your telephone was turned off on the day you went to Wellington on March 10, 2013 and it was turned off at 8:04am and then it was turned back on again just on the Sydney side of Blue Mountains at 6:25pm. Had you found it on the back seat of the car had you? 
JT: Yeah I had actually. I pulled into a service station and found it there. (here)

Because before losing your phone, you always switch it off!

Wouldn't want the battery to run down while it was lost, would you? How could you make a call then when you found it?

No doubt many find this Python world amusing, but what happens if you've made a joke about Pakistan being a circus and a farce? Where does that leave New South Wales?

Now how could the day get any more surreal?

You can read the folly of the union in question, here, but talk of compounding folly with folly. Take it away Humpty Dumpty, show how to shout into the breeze, long after the stable door was opened, or more to the point, dodo deals were done behind closed stable doors. And now they find they've got an ass rather than a horse?

Meanwhile, the Bolter and other loons on the far right fringe have been having great fun with a Labor hereditary peer, one Viscount Simon, asking a silly question about the Cameron government taking into account the flatulence caused by baked beans in their climate-change calculations. (here)

According to the Bolter, this is a clear sign that global warmism is driving true believers mad. (here)

The trouble, of course, is that Simon is at one with the Bolter, but the Bolter's such a dunderhead, and so reliant on useless third party American sources of the lowest kind, that he doesn't have the wit to pick it.

For those interested in Lord Simon, however, there is an excellent guide to Viscount Simon's voting record here, in which the noble Viscount routinely plays the role of eccentric "rebel", and who on the matter of stopping climate change, scores an heroic 0% voting record. Is every day of the year April 1st for the Bolter?

No wonder the pond is finding it hard to settle this TGIF.

Part of the problem is that all the reliable sources are off with the hounds, barking furiously at Bob Carr.

Akker Dakker's at it, naturally, thumb relentlessly down, because it's such easy sport and because Akker Dakker wouldn't know how to hold his thumb up, so adept at pollice verso is he.

What's that you say? Thumbs down is just a cheap, misleading Hollywood gesture?

Thumbs up might be thumbs down, and vice versa, in ancient Roman times? Or so you might be led to believe by doing a Greg Hunt here, or by reading here ...

Never mind, the pond would like to give a thumbs down, or a thumbs up, whichever one means the worst - is there a member of the Pakistan justice system in the house? - to Malcolm Turnbull.

The big Mal (which as everybody knows is just a short-hand way to conjure up a deep seated malaise or Grand Malaise or Grand Mal or tonic-clonic seizure) has in recent days locked in a "multi-technology NBN".

Can meaningless gibberish get any more meaningless or any more gibberish?

You can read about it in the Fairfaxians here, and in The Graudian here, where "multi" transforms into a "mixed-technology model".

Remember all those years that the Abbott opposition rabbited on about the Labor party announcing and doing things without benefit of reports or analysis?

"The government has considered the NBN Co Strategic Review’s report of December 12, 2013 and agrees that the NBN rollout should transition from a primarily fibre-to-the-premises model to the 'optimised multi-technology mix' model the review recommends," the statement of expectations says. The new instructions were issued before key reviews are completed. A strategic review into the fixed-wireless and satellite parts of the network is still under consideration by the NBN Co board, as is a cost-benefit analysis and the Vertigan Committee report into the regulations of the NBN. These will be delivered mid year.
Tuesday's orders also prescribe that download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second be available to all Australians, and download speeds of at least 50 megabits per second be available to 90 per cent of Australians, "as soon as possible". 
Before the election the government said a minimum 25 Mbps download speeds would be available to everyone by 2016.

Is there any reason for Malcolm Turnbull to exist?

Well the pond is glad you asked, because there's an obvious reason. It's so David Pope can earn an honest living as a cartoonist.

Yes, others have already assembled plenty of images spoofing Tony Abbott attempting to look solemn, here, and here (forced video at end of link), following in the great tradition of spoofing that solemn prat David Cameron:

The pond is proud that Tony Abbott can show those colonialist British a thing or two about how to look like a sombre, solemn, prime ministerial prat.

So all that's left for the pond is a collection of David Pope's big Mal hits and memories.

Here's the latest, followed by other classic hits and memories in no particular order, and more Pope here.

Now if you'll excuse the pond, we have important business today multi-tasking the multi-technology in a mixed technology way using multi-skills acquired in multi-ways and deployed with multi-adeptness. TG it's a multi-plex F ...