In which the pond finally achieves Seinfeldian nothingness ...

It goes without saying that it's adolescent humour ...

But when you're confronted with a fop of the first water, how else to proceed?

Oh sure, you can purport a little balance:

But being dumped in a Hopper painting is an honour. Bleak, existential, hipster, Jimmy Dean at the five and dime.

However you cut it, and however correctly Grant Wood might protest about American Gothic, it's always been seen as an evocation of pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers - or in this case, defender of conservative Catholicism ...

The great thing is that Henderson is likely to seethe and brood for months at the slight.

Never mind, here's the pond's theory on this sort of humour.

First you need a spark of visual truth, an uncanny resemblance, perhaps a reminder of Steve Buscemi:

Yes, that's enough of a match. And that'll help you remember that what Steve Buscemi did in Fargo is pretty much what Greg Hunt is doing to climate science:

Hey, you're there in 30 minutes, Jerry, or I find you, Jerry, and I shoot you and I shoot your fuckin' wife and I shoot all your fuckin' children and I shoot them all in the back of their little fuckin' heads! You got it?

Put it another way:

Oh okay, there's more of Shaun Micallef here at iView, at least while the link holds up, and it's pretty much hit and miss, but when the show hits, it helps the pond advance another thesis.

Confronted with abject fools, and personal powerlessness in the face of fools doing foolish things - nominally called policies, but easily dubbed walruses - all the average punter has got left is laughter ...

Well there's also idle abuse ...

The delicious thing about that bout of bashing was that it came from an MP ostensibly on the same side of the fence as Andrews.

Now there's actually nothing more to be said about the story than that gobbet of verbal assault, though the Graudian tries to whip up Kevin Andrews slammed by NT politician for comments on de factos into a serious news story, while solemnly explaining the mechanism for castrating young bulls.

But the original Facebook outing said it all, and in typical "stay on our  turf" fashion, the Graudian didn't provide a link to the Facebook posting, here.

Yep, that conveys the original flavour - the opening deep north thrust - "from down south", way beyond the Berrimah Line - and the rich, fed-up with it all, and especially Kevin Andrews, line of abuse ...

Now who can argue with pasty faced?  In fact if you were going to line up anyone as an Australian Gothic, it would be Andrews:

But the pond was immediately traumatised.

Should piss ant be separated in this way? Surely it should be pissant, or at worst, piss-ant? (go on, Greg Hunt it here).

What's this "pooncy"? The Oxford assures the pond that it's poncy, or perhaps poncey. And why wasn't "git" used? Or if you want to start slowly, twit, or idiot, and then move up the scale, to obtuse wanker ...

This is the lot of the impotent pedant.

Another example: yesterday the pond was tooling around on the north shore, like a Tamworth lout on a day pass, listening to the tributes to Gough, and on came John Faulkner, with this line:

His prodigious gifts would have guaranteed success in any career he chose – but they were perhaps most uniquely suited to the occupation he made so completely his own. (here for the whole tribute)

Most uniquely? It haunted the pond for the rest of the day.

Oh sure there was Noel Pearson with his Roman routine - and why not Monty Python - and Gough himself, taken away from the vile diatribes of the Murdochians for just a moment, but all the pond could think was how outraged Gough would have been at this most unique use of unique.

Usage Note: For many grammarians, unique is the paradigmatic absolute term, a shibboleth that distinguishes between those who understand that such a term cannot be modified by an adverb of degree or a comparative adverb and those who do not. These grammarians would say that a thing is either unique or not unique and that it is therefore incorrect to say that something is very unique or more unique than something else. (and more here, which Faulkner could use in his defence).

Around this time it's appropriate to bemoan the standards of the day, and sure enough, Shaun Micallef's comedy team contributed a tidy sketch about Fairfax downsizing rural newspapers where even mis-spelling the banner could be seen as a virtue ...

Now you might think that a feeble comedy sketch, but the pond took it for a documentary.

Some days it gets too much for the pond. There's not much point worrying about anything.

The Sydney Minister for Epic Road Building has been out and about in his valiant bid to turn Sydney into LA - or a Dallas full of cloverleafs at a pinch - and the reptiles have taken time off from bashing that other clover, Clover Moore, and her deviant, wicked, perverted bicycles, and her filthy, vile, disruptive bicycle paths, to get wildly excited:

Oh sure, it's ostensibly about the second airport - a vision built on a dream - but actually it's all about roads, roads, roads for Sydney, just as it's coal, coal, coal for the world ... and it's all about Abbott as a visionary, when the only certainty is that Bradfield would be rolling in his grave in a most unique fashion ...

What to do about this relentless hagiography?

Well the pond can only deploy the Micallef Defence (why not try f3 e5?)

There's no point arguing, there's no point in debating, and finally the pond can achieve a Seinfeldian nirvana, and have a blog about nothing, except a few images:

Yes, there's your visionary. A nattering nabob of negativity who'd pose with a banana if he thought it would get him into power and keep him there ...

Meanwhile, the pond can't escape the haunted feeling that this is the future which Tony Abbott is helping pave the way for ...