Yes, even Neil Sedaka is better than Miranda the Devine ...

(Above: the Stepford Wives in 1975)

So the pond used the internet radio yesterday to catch up on Paul Harris's Film Buff's Forecast on RRR ...

Why? Well the internet radio is there, and it's closer than Everest.

Lordy, lordy, and dear long absent lord, it turned out not a single movie was discussed, and instead the theme was the music of Neil Sedaka.

Apparently the music of Burt Bacharach had been given similar treatment in previous weeks, but oh how the mighty have fallen. The pond learned nothing new, but was reminded how, along with a couple of hits, Sedaka had been responsible for some very bad music, and that Carole King's riposte Oh Neil to Sedaka's genuine hit Oh Carol possibly rated as her worst moment in pop music ...

Is this what the internet is for? Listening to Neil Sedaka tunes, courtesy of Melbourne community radio? Is this the demographic for Film Buff's Forecast?

The pond immediately resolved to go out and buy a pair of slippers to prepare for winter ...

But there was something to be said for the experience - it was a temporary lull to all the hate, and anger, and fear and loathing, and strutting, and peacocking, and harden the fuck up fuckery, and get off my lawnery crap that saturates the Murdoch rags these days ...

Yes, a bloated reprobate and self-confessed drug user, who's only exercise is to pound the keyboard in anger and loathing is on side with jolly Joe Hockey about the need to get tough.

How about the need to shed a few pounds?

As usual, News Limited is befuddled about its paywall. The Sunday Terror will tell you you've used your free limit, and yet the news.com.au site will serve up jolly Piers for free here.

It made the pond realise that "free" is a double edged sword. You mean there are people who'd actually click on this hagiographic nonsense because it's free?

It reached the height of existential absurdity down towards the end. Akerman is aware that the federal government is about to screw local students even more than in the past - lord knows the poor buggers have been given a right royal screwing in recent times, without benefit of KY or prophylactic and now have to spend 25 hours a day in casual work to spend the other eight hours in the day studying ...

But of course Akker Dakker must also maintain the line that they're a mob of deviant, incipient bludgers.

Here's how that's done:

University students should be expected to assist with the cost of their education (beyond racking up HECS debts which many will never pay) and universities should be able to price their courses without a fee cap if they are going to compete for the best students and provide the best tuition.

American tertiary education is already well and truly fucked, and Australia has now embarked on that path ... and the best Akker Dakker can do is explain how fees must be raised, and even more debt incurred by students, simply so he can have the pleasure of berating the bludgers and ne'er do wells for not repaying insurmountable debts ...

Talk about coming and going ...

Oh for the love of the long absent lord, Paul Harris, play some more Neil Sedaka ...

And then the pond went looking for Miranda the Devine, usually a reliable source of foaming, frothing rage and anger about something or other. Usually greenies or MAMILS - fearless leader excepted - or bicycles - or anyone to the left of Genghis Khan ...

You know, hang a greenie from the nearest lamp post, that sort of stuff ...

But the Devine has another mode. It's the mind boggling, simpering, fawning, forelock tugging mode.

The pond could feel the gorge, the overwhelming nausea, rising before even daring to click on the folly.

You see, for a rag that pretends it's on side with the western suburbs, it's actually a paper full of a commentariat who fear and loathe and dislike the bogan. Hence the talk of putting class back into sexy, and the tut tutting about slut walks and anything else that might offend an eastern suburbs princess ...

It's not just the Devine of course - the entire media indulged in a bout of arse-licking and butt kissing before the royals rolled out of town. The pond often imagines the sort of conversation they must have in the pampered first class plane as they leave the dust of the antipodes and the arse-licking behind ... "Dear, did you see that dreadful woman curtesy so low you'd swear she was fishing for your fly", and so on ...

Now if you want to read this folderol, which is to say trivial and nonsensical and absolutely meaningless fluff - second thoughts, scrub that, it reveals more about the Devine than you ever need to know - why not click on it at the HUN, instead of giving the Sunday Terror a hit?

Whatever you do, don't read it. Just teach the buggers a lesson with a wayward click.

If you actually read Kate the queen of new class of style, it's likely you might be struck blind on the spot, as you encounter this sort of abject stupidity:

In this era of butt selfies and slut walks, Kate Middleton, aka the Duchess of Cambridge, is a revolutionary. 
The royal couple flew out of Australia with baby George on Friday after a flawless tour that owed much of its success to the young mother. 
Kate’s grace and elegance is a welcome change from the desperate self-loathing exhibitionism of most celebrity ­females of her generation. 
It’s why she is raising ­hackles among snarky feminists. They have called her variously “plastic princess”, “painfully thin”, a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung” and even “dangerous for our daughters.” 
Sunny Kate represents a threat to the pornification ­industry, which has somehow duped feminism into the belief that dressing like a stripper and acting like a hooker equals emancipation. 
Nothing could be further from the truth. You only have to look at Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan to see what the end game is.

Oh for fuck's sake, is there a Neil Sedaka record in the house?

No, we dumped all the 45s? We'll have to make do with that double CD homage to the songs of Jackson Browne that also featured on RRR?

Kate is the anti-slut, the antidote to everything wrong with Western culture. She has put class back into sexy, made modesty cool, and added ­cachet to marriage and motherhood. No wonder she has become a role model to a generation of young women, despite scornful feminists.

Actually there's a fair argument that the Murdochians, the Devine, Faux Noise, and all the rest of it is actually everything that's wrong with Western culture.

Never mind, it is of course impossible to send up the Devine when the Devine so neatly sends up the Devine herself.

There's even more clucking and cooing, and simpering and fawning and forelock tugging, and even the greenies are dragged into the love fest:

Even arch republican and Greens loon Senator Sarah Hanson-Young admires her. She brought her seven-year-old daughter Kora to the Great Hall at Parliament House on Thursday to give a bouquet of flowers to the pretty princess. 
But there is something about Kate’s demure style and dutiful demeanour that grates with certain women. 
Kate, or Catherine, as her adoring husband William now calls her, had barely touched down in Australia when the subterranean griping started. Republicans, with the popularity of their cause plummeting, naturally were irritated at the adulation, and brushed it off as mere celebrity. Female commentators lambasted Kate for being a privileged dress-up doll “defined” by her husband. 

Now as Jon Stewart noted recently it sometimes gets hard for liberals when someone like Gwyneth Paltrow turns up again and again in the press, most recently bragging about a perfectly planned "conscious uncoupling" (yes that's the sort of story the Daily Mail feeds off here)

In fact the pond can be sent into a screaming frenzy just being reminded that Paltrow exists and is offering advice to sundry people on diet, dress and assorted other lifestyle choices.

Are you sure there's no Neil Sedaka anywhere?

But when you look at it in a disinterested way, Paltrow has possibly more chance of sounding like a rocket or a climate scientist than Miranda the Devine in simpering, fawning, arse-licking mode:

In fact, regardless of how easy she makes it seem, Kate is a working mother who treats her role as a job. Her short, sensible fingernails tell you she is no purposeless prima donna. 

In fact her fingernails tell you she's a hard worker? What, she's out sweeping factory floor at 6 am?

In fact it's an abuse of the notion of speaking in facts, rather than speaking in tongues, and sure enough, it isn't long before the charity card is played:

Patron of seven charities, including one for terminally ill children, she has generated a 10-fold increase in donations to the Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry since she married into the royal family three years ago. 
If you watched Kate on this tour you would have seen how hard she worked. It might not be the same as toiling on a factory floor, but the discipline and effort of dressing appropriately, behaving properly and politely enduring endless hours of ceremony and small talk is real. She has a knack for making it look fun. 
In contrast to the troubled marriage of Diana and Charles, she and William evidently are very much in love, exchanging easy smiles and admiring looks. 
They managed a grumpy, teething nine-month-old George with aplomb, and spent only two nights away from him. They work together as a well-drilled team, punctual and smiling. 
Sunny, self-disciplined Kate has been an inspired choice as wife. You can’t imagine her rolling her eyes or affecting a glum face for the cameras, like Diana did. And you can’t ­imagine William shooting his cuffs or being jealous or looking exasperated at his wife like his father did. 

I know, I know, the drooling and the spittle is something to see, even in literary form, and images of the town of Stepford come flooding back, even the dreadful one with Nicole Kidman:

But the Devine is always tone deaf, always unaware of the way she parades a profound air of stupidity:

Good manners are not airs and graces but thoughtfulness and consideration for others, and Kate has these in spades. 

So all that talk of sluts and bogans and sharp-tongued shrewish embittered feminists and finely honed fingernails was just good manners?

On and on she goes, making the pond wonder whether there was some way out of here, as the joker told the thief:

You see it particularly when she is talking to disabled children. She bends down to engage with little people and makes sure the child is not alarmed or embarrassed. It’s a skill many politicians never master. 
Kate was always respectful and engaged during 19 days of public appearances in Australia and New Zealand this month, but she’s also a little bolshie, whether she is beating William in a sailing race or pushing past him to take the front seat of a RAAF jet. And he loves her spirit. 
His wife will never feel ­unloved or disrespected, as his mother felt she was. The success of their marriage is due to the fact they had nine years of dating to get to know each other including their time, out of sight of the media, as relatively normal university students at St Andrews in Scotland. It was a better foundation than Diana’s whirlwind courtship at 20 with a man 13 years older. 
Kate is 32, five months older than her husband, and is as well educated as he is, with a degree in the history of art, and has a dignified self-possession that tells of a steely disposition. Mature, smart and respectful of each other, the marriage is one of equals working together in the family business. 
They are restoring the dignity of the office after decades of tawdry scandal and broken marriages. Far from being ­defined by her husband, Kate is redefining the monarchy.

Now the pond has nothing against this particular Royal, just going about, keeping up appearances and making sure the job stays in the family. Being the drones and the queens in the hive sure beats being the worker bees - at least from some perspectives.

Come to think of it, the pond really doesn't care about Paltrow either.

It's just that neither have anything to say or do about anything whatsoever that has anything to do with the pond, and witnessing this latest media circus and the beat-ups - and now this coda by the Devine - the pond is once more reminded of how everything is fukt.

Except, of course that it does provide an excuse to fill up a column with Miranda the Devine guff.

For which the pond apologises profoundly and profusely.

Except to make the bleeding obvious point.

Next time you read the Devine carrying on about greenies, or feminists, or climate science, or bicycles or the future of the planet, or any of her other pet themes, just remember you've stepped into the royalist loving land of the Stepford Wives ...

And not even Neil Sedaka will get you out of that pickle ...

But at least the pond has mentioned a couple of films. Take that Paul Harris!

Now had enough show business?

Trumpets please and spiffy drum roll. It's time for - big voice please -