The Bolter, Akker Dakker, and the grey cauliflower of matter that courses through the brains of the Team Australia coaches ...

(Above: well is it, and is that how the Abbott government will get through the year? More New Yorker cartoons here).

It being a meditative Sunday - and with Optus delivering the slowest broadband in what was once called Christendom - the pond decided to head back into the archives.

Here's a question for competitive souls.

Who wrote this?

Put me in a particularly fine service or particularly beautiful cathedral and I will get that sensation of the heart and the tears bursting free. I felt it, for instance, listening to a Mozart mass for Epiphany in Vienna’s magnificent Stephansdom cathedral. 
But other great acts of creation also suggest a mysteriously great force. Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel or the glorious Transfiguration of Raphael hanging outside likewise seem works which come from some other place than that grey cauliflower of matter between the artists’ ears.

Yes, it's the Bolter, at one with suggestions of a mysteriously great force, furiously scribbling in Christmas, artists and the celebration of creation.

With the Bolter concluding that, like himself, artists have grey cauliflower of matter between the ears, and so need a mysterious great force ...

Which puts him right on side with Eric Metaxas and his "something" or "somebody" celebrated in the lizard Oz and yesterday in the pond. Metaxas, it will be remembered, ended his advice to Oz business readers this way ...

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something — or Someone — beyond itself.

What it points to is the notion of humbug, of course, as celebrated by John Quiggin in his blog posting, The Oz melts down in the contest of ideas.

But what's the guarantee of humbug?

Well here's how the Bolter started his pitch:

I’m no Christian, but was admiring a painting of Christ in a Melbourne gallery when the artist popped in to see how it was all hanging.

Ah, it's the old I'm no Christian line, followed by exemplary piety ...

It's the sort of silliness which leads immediately to a Monty Python sketch:

I'm no tram conductor, but was admiring a painting of a Number 6 Malvern tram by Albert Tucker, or I'm no carpenter, but I was admiring Vincent van Gogh's portrait of a chair.

Of course the pond is no philosopher, but the Bolter's bit of humbug blather in a postprandial attempt to join in the Xmas spirit is as rich as an Aldi pudding, made in New Zealand and only a couple of bucks a few days after the season was over:

That’s the miracle of creation – and maybe part of what we celebrate at Christmas Day. 
Richard Crichton didn’t know how he’d been inspired as a teenager to create. 
But I’m guessing that he felt when painting it what I feel when I now see it on my wall – that, yes, there is something bigger than we can comprehend, which makes us feel part of something mysteriously larger than ourselves. 
For me, Christianity is just a powerful metaphor for this sensation – an attempt to explain it and summon it, as well as to comfort and to guide.

That's the miracle of stupidity, and maybe why we celebrate stupidity in the days after Christmas ...

What's truly astonishing is that any genuine Christian would sit still for a moment and listen to this humbug man blather on about Christ being a "powerful metaphor" and the religion a "powerful metaphor", as if somehow the Bolter is in sympathy and at one with Christians and Christianity.

As opposed to a mere humbug, seizing on art as a way of reaching out to the mysteriously large ...

It's not meant to be a bloody metaphor, you humbug mystical goose with your loose silly pantheism ...

Still, with this sort of sublime mystical thinking, it's easy to see why some acclaim the Bolter as one of the world's great climate scientists.

They'd swallow anything, even wafers and transubstantiation, and they'd also swallow a pathetic, risible attempt at a form of theism that shouldn't pass muster with anyone interested in the arts or religion ...

Infusing art with a mealy-mouthed, diffuse sort of spirituality is to defuse and defang it and its possibilities for protest, rage and many other forms of insight; while to blather on about something or someone or mysteriously large forces is merely to dodge and evade the challenges of Christianity and other religions.

It's a reminder of the middenklasse smaak that lurks in the mind of the Bolter, and how mediations on Christmas and creation and art and artists can be as shallow as the children's play area of the pond ...

And no doubt with that bit of mindlessness out of the way, the Bolter and his commenters can turn, refreshed, in the New Year to kicking the shit out of all sorts of people in the usual way ...

Like stablemate Akker Dakker ...

But what do you know, these days all the reptiles are attempting to be team coach for Team Australia ...

They've all got heaps of advice for Team Abbott, heaps and heaps of it:

Yep, it's Akker Dakker going into chicken little, full blown national emergency mode, even if the Chinese scholars don't have the first fucking clue about the meaning of the ideograms ...

Just embrace the sentiment ...

What follows is a classic example of tabloid Terror hysteria.

First Akker Dakker recounts all the many dangers, not least the depravity of Labor, and then he issues a clarion call to arms:

He must explain how his government fucked up its budget numbers in just one short year, having spent many years in opposition proposing that such fuckery is completely inexcusable?

And to do that he must turn into Ronnie Raygun or King George V, and without knighting himself?

After that sort of nonsense from the bloated, pompous fat owl of the remove, it's easy to see why Abbott is on a path to nowhere ... impossible role models for impossible dreams, while all the time, the conservative commentariat berate Abbott for being someone or something he can never become ...

And embedded in the Akker Dakker team play manual is an interesting line: without the presence of his staffers ...

Akker Dakker, and many others in the Murdoch commentariat, are gunning for Credlin. Only a few weeks ago, Akker Dakker himself penned a column proving that Credlin was, and will remain, an issue.

The question then, is how long can Abbott afford to hang on to Credlin? How long will she last? And if she falls, will Brian Loughnane go with her?

And what will that do for the great communicator doing a Ronnie Raygun?

Oh it's going to be a great year, what with the team coaches only up to being the fat owl of the remove (and surely the family resemblance is obvious to all):

Never mind,  the fat owl's desperate pleas remind the pond of some jokes doing the rounds late last year:

Which is why, in its wander through the archives, the pond offers the following tributes to 1930s thinking. 

Now they might be a bit advanced for the Abbott government, and the conservative commentariat, but it seems that washboards spring readily to mind for a government that routinely perspires rather than sweats ...