As always, the pond presents a cornucopia of commentariat musings, or how you too can learn to live with the reptiles ...

Naturally the Bolter was startled, shocked and ashamed. Those ratbag cardigan wearers at the ABC had dared to treat the mauler from Manly's showdown with Vlad the Moscow king hitter as some cheap, tawdry sporting contest.

Indeed. The pond doesn't have a shirt-fronting clue where they got the idea from.

And as usual the ABC provided the indignant Bolter with a lot of cheap copy and blog filler, but let's cut to the chase:

... in the briefest of postscripts, Sales then wipes the smirk from her face and adds the actual news - that despite the ABC’s mockery and the ABC’s sneers Abbott did indeed shirtfront Putin ...

Yes, he did, he did, he deployed a cheap, illegal, thuggish, boofhead AFL move, and if they hadn't been sitting down, likely enough he would have kneed Vlad in the groin for good measure. And it wasn't just the ABC:

Many Canberra journalists seemed to determined to believe the worst of Tony Abbott even when evidence directly contradicts their prejudices. For instance, Channel 10 news last night falsely reported that Abbott had shirked the shirtfront, preferring to wave to the TV cameras.

Oh no, not Gina's mob, not the hosts to the Bolter's show. Is he resigning in protest?

As usual, the pond turned to the Murdochians for accurate reporting:

Say what Currish Snail? No shirt front? Just a hip and shoulder? Have you been infiltrated by cardigan wearers?

Come on HUN, sock it to us:

Shirty, but no shirtfront? Expect a resignation letter from the outraged Bolter today. How dare you conform to the blinkered ABC cardigan-wearing mindset.

Moving quickly along - in the company of the Bolter, the pond often feels like it's inhaled too much helium - the reptiles were in fine form today welcoming Antony Fisher to the helm of Sydney, and in the process, showing deep sensitivity and awareness of the inner west:

His real-world experience and broad education in history, law, bioethics and theology will stand him in good stead. So will four years as a bishop in western Sydney, getting “the smell of the sheep’’ and “mud on the boots’’ that Pope Francis rates highly in his bishops.

Yes, yes, because the first thing anyone notices standing in the mall in Parramatta is the smell of the sheep. And as for the mud on the boots, when will they get around to paving Parramatta road? Just look at it:

Damn it,  sorry, that's Johnston street in Annandale, and it still hasn't been paved. A little rain and the whole inner west turns to mud. (more Annandale here)

Like the Oz reptiles, the pond welcomes the arrival of Fisher:

His predecessor, Cardinal George Pell, was Australia’s most influential churchman for decades and a strong advocate for Christianity. Like him, Archbishop Fisher should speak up and not shy away from controversy. He has much to offer our wider community as well as his own flock.

Indeed, indeed. Let's hope his real-world experience of Sydney sheep - ripe for the shearing - and mud on boots, and his broad education as prepared him for the onerous duties required when doffing the mantle of the world's leading, expert climate scientist. Now don't shy away from controversy Archbishop Fisher, speak to the hearts of the reptiles ... keep reminding us of that climate fraud ... and make sure the kool aid is loaded into St. Mary's water cooler ...

Moving right along, today the reptiles have provided a cornucopia of distractions, and so bewildering are the delights, that the pond was so overwhelmed by choice that it didn't know where to start.

Let's take them in the fickle digital carousel of doom at the top of the page. First there's the forelock tugger diligently doing his knob polishing for the day:

And there's Dame Slap getting agitated, and only poseurs and ponces would prefer to read that Fairfax turncoat Richard Ackland scribbling for the Graudian that the best is yet to come, or deploring the desire of lawyers to again become Queens 

And where would the world be without a heart-starter coffee, and a dose of Labor bashing from the prelate of pompous portentousness?

Because direct action is such a success! For an issue that doesn't exist ...

On the digital carousel rolled, and on the next turn of the lands above the faraway tree, up popped a feather duster scribbling:

Uh huh. Back to the past to tackle the future, but say, what chance for Campbell Newman in the now looming Queensland election?

ELEANOR HALL: Queensland's Liberal National Party (LNP) is denying that a succession plan is being formulated in case the Premier, Campbell Newman, loses his seat in next year's election. But the Government MP Bruce Flegg, who was blocked from pre-selection last week, says the LNP is concerned that Mr Newman will be beaten, and recent opinion polls suggest Mr Newman could lose his inner Brisbane seat, as Stephanie Smail reports. 
STEPHANIE SMAIL: Political pundits say the odds are against Queensland's Premier Campbell Newman to win back the seat of Ashgrove. Commentator Paul Williams says there's little doubt the Liberal National Party is assessing its leadership options. 
PAUL WILLIAMS: They can do the maths like anyone. They can see that 5.7 per cent is too small a margin probably to hold a seat in what are expected to be an eight to 10, or even 12 per cent swing in some seats across greater metropolitan Brisbane. And a lot of seats, not just Ashgrove, are expected to be swallowed up in an anti-LNP swing. (and more here)

Hmm, seems like it might be tricky for the bantam from the north to single-handedly and heroically fix federal-state relationships, and wind the clock back to 1901, when railway gauges showed the way that the states could really get their shit together ...

Which in a funny way reminded the pond that soon Queensland was about to descend into full-scale anarchy, chaos cranked up to eleven:

And then, like a breath of fresh air, came a bolt from the blue.

After his arduous duties advising the poodle's adviser on how to fix up the history curriculum, there came a galumphing Greg Melleuish, an old friend of the pond, strangely quiet and largely absent from the reptiles in recent time,  and what do you know, he was on a Cate Blanchett-bashing mission:

But look, that front page doesn't quite catch the tone. Let's see the real tone, let's catch the whiff of Barry Spurr:

Ah the luvvies ... those filthy perverts ... what they need is a bloody good shirtfronting ...

Now the pond already knows what to think about Blanchett.

Helen Trinca explained everything a good four days ago in her piece for the reptiles, Cate Blanchett's star power wasn't apt for the wonderful Whitlam memorial.

Yes, Trinca put it precisely ... Blanchett was bad casting, she was a woman, and that drew attention to the absence of other women in leading roles, and she was in the y'artz and a star, and that's just too much to bear, all the dazzling light and the gleaming teeth, and she clearly didn't need Gough, and what was needed was some rough feminist, but not too rough, and certainly not divisive, like that cheap Gillard hussy, and ... so on and so forth.

So by the time we came to the good Prof, we knew where things would be heading, as little Sir Echo arrived to repeat what many reptiles had already repeated ad nauseam.

What was interesting was the massive class chip on the good Prof's shoulder. The resentment of all those well-off north shore types, epitomised by that bludger Tony Abbott and his superior, comfortable Manly ways:

...I looked up Blanchett and discovered that she had attended Methodist Ladies College, Melbourne. It was good that people from that sort of background had benefited from Whitlam’s largesse. 
Alas, that was not my case. I attended a government high school where only 20 per cent of those starting high school actually completed it. When I was in the final year of high school there was a teacher shortage that led to the year being taught in only five classes out of every six. The most famous person in my year at high school became an international rugby league player for Australia. 
I began university in 1972 on a commonwealth scholarship. At that time nearly everyone who attended university, at least from my school, had a commonwealth scholarship or a teacher’s college scholarship from the NSW government. To receive a commonwealth scholarship you needed to be pretty good. 

Uh huh. Already the pond was nodding off, but did pick up at that Graudian-like spelling of 'commonwealth'. Where did this fashion, this foible come from? What happened to capital letters? Where did CAPS go wrong? Is it something to do with SHOUTING on the full to overflowing intertubes? Why would a historian bend his knee to this sort of post-modernist Graudian nonsense?

Has Melleuish no originalist leanings? What would the constitution say on this?

Hosannah, actual capital letters for the act constituting the Commonwealth of Australia (and the rest of the original document here).

But do go on, the pond is mortified to have so rudely interrupted the chip on the shoulder routine, and never mind that the year the pond finished at Tamworth High, the only famous people - at least in their lunch time - were rugby league players.

When free tertiary education was introduced I recall being somewhat miffed. After all, I had worked hard during high school and had been rewarded. Now that reward was being extended to those who had not done so well. Even better, it was being extended to the less able students at schools such as MLC. 

Yes indeed. And the next thing you know, like jolly Joe Hockey and the poodle Pyne, the blighters are running the country!

There's free education for you, no wonder the country's fucked, and what's worse those shameless middle class finks had the cheek to denounce the introduction of university fees and defend 'free education'. Outrageous behaviour.

We all know what the consequences of the introduction of free university education were in Australia. It did not lead to a rush of people from the sort of school I attended going to university. If anything, it became more difficult for such people as the effect of free education was to lead to a drying up of scholarships and cadetships. After all, students have to support themselves while studying. 

Actually, the pond didn't have to work thanks to that scholarship. Resident in a college, meals paid, a little spending money, wall to wall education, and all that for a lumpenproletariat piece of white trash from Tamworth ...

But there were all those smarty pants there, clever and pretty, oh how pretty they were, how they laughed so gaily, and there was a genuine Baron there too, and a few black sheep sent out to the colonies to straighten up, and how the pond resented them, and who paid for all this, all these pretty, second rate losers from MLC who'd go on to international stardom getting their free lunch while the pond had to settle for rhubarb pie?

Why it was the pond's very own family ...

With free university education it cre­ated a form of middle-class welfare for which those who received it are eternally grateful. Of course, what they never appreciated is that it was the taxes of the people with whom I went to school, ­people who did not complete high school, who paid for their good time at university.

Yes, because only the poor and the lumpenproletariat paid taxes in Australia! And that's as it should be ... because that's the art of inequality and transferring wealth ...

Hmm, sounds like the good Prof is one of those angry socialists with a working class chip on their shoulder, incipient Marxists ready to tear down the whole damn system, angry about the PPL, outraged by the middle class welfare offered by John Howard, shocked and consternated by the way jolly "free education" Joe's budget punishes the poor, the wretched, the students, the helpless, the pensioners and the unemployed ...

Nope. What a relief to know that Greg Melleuish is a supporter of that noble supporter of working class Australians, the mauler from Manly ... and he only aims selectively at easy marks, like Cate Blanchett ...

At around this time, the pond's irony machine broke down, and rather than import fresh supplies of irony, we decided to look at a cartoon, remembering that soon enough the mauler from Manly would be in Brisbane for round two, and who knows what might show up ...

Like some bloody useless middle class toff beneficiary of a free education you wouldn't send out to repair streets, unless you wanted a very deep hole dug (and more Rowe here):