In which the pond does a cut-up Burroughs style and challenges readers to guess the reptile ...

(Above: an oldie but a goodie Moir, give him a click here).

The pond divides city dwellers into two kinds of people, the New York and the LA kind.

The pond is in the New York camp ...

Driving in New York is a nightmare, but in compensation there's a great subway system.

Getting around in LA is a nightmare, full stop. Taxis are useless, public transport a joke, and perforce everyone still drives. An hour spent on the 101 in peak hour can produce a zen understanding of life, or at least a realisation that the more roads shuffling cars from place to place, the more a city's roads can resemble a gigantic car park.

As a result, the city, as Raymond Chandler once noted, has the personality of a paper cup, though really it should be the personality of an exhaust pipe ...

New York went through a great change in the 1960s with the defeat of Robert Moses, and his Lower Manhattan Expressway  and his Mid-Mahattan Expressway, along with other re-thinking of the city's attitude to transport.

You can still see Moses' vision in the Cross Bronx Expressway, which degutted the south Bronx. Needless to say, driving on it is a nightmare, a very LA experience ...

All the signs are that today NSW will elect a new Moses, and all the signs are that he will do a Moses, but regrettably not of the biblical kind.

No doubt he's an amiable pup - he shows a remarkable enthusiasm - but luckily the pond will be dead before he manages to kill vast swathes of Sydney, while facilitating motorways and the motor car ... turning the town into a large mobile car park ...

Luckily for him, he's opposed by a completely clueless ALP ...

And with those cheerful thoughts out of the way, it's time to get on with reptile watch, and lordy lordy, what do you know?

The reptiles have abandoned the digital whirling commentariat finger of doom, the rotating whirlygig splash at the top of the digital domain.

Yes the reptilian magic faraway tree promising new lizard pleasures each day has gone. Packed its tent and stole into the night, as Longfellow used to say:

Then read from the treasured volume 
The poem of thy choice, 
And lend to the rhyme of the poet 
The beauty of thy voice. 
And the night shall be filled with music, 
And the cares, that infest the day, 
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, 
And as silently steal away. (and the earlier stuff here, from the days when vacuous rhyming really meant something).

Look:

Instead of the whirling digital finger of doom, the reptiles have substituted a 'latest news' feature, and none of these stories carries a gold bar signifying a Murdochian ransom must be paid to access them.

Now it would be cynical of the pond to suggest that the reptiles are hurting and that they badly need some clicks to justify their advertising, or to propose that the reptiles, for all their ratbag ideological zeal, have finally come to understand a commercial reality - you'd have to be a loon to pay to read their rabid reptile commentariat for pleasure, and it's a lot easier to click on free news, just like you can on the click bait, trolling mad, sister publication, the entirely free portal to Murdoch la la land, news.com.au...

You can still get the Oz rotating 'opinions from hel'l feature, but now it's on the opinion pages, where you can, at the same time, see all the opinion pieces laid out in linear fashion, like corpses on display in a mortuary.

At the same time, the opinion pieces on visible offer seem to have lightened a little. There's Jeremy Clarkson - oh how Chairman Rupert loves the man - and Nikki Gemmell and a piece of fluff called P Adams reminiscing about Waggers ... as a kind of artificial sweetener for the punters wanting to avoid ideological rage ... you know, that angry white man thing ...

Yes, he looks Islamic.

Incidentally, the pond's readers are slow to catch on to the Islamic threat.

Didn't they realise Hitler was an Islam lover and wanted to establish a grand caliphate? Or some such thing, if you can be bothered to read Muslim Brotherhood & Hitler.

Of course Stalin was a great supporter of Islam and Sharia law too ... Stalin on Islam. In fact the pond is aware that almost every public figure on the record is somehow tainted by their desire to bring about the caliphate ... look at Mike Baird and his caliphate of motorways ...

So many loons, so little time.

Back the pond scuttles to the safety of the reptiles ...

It seems, pending the day's election results, that there's still a great deal of anxiety in the air. Even if things go well today, there's still that pending budget looming,

Which leads the pond to a challenge.

You see, the pond has always been a lover of the William Burroughs' trick of cut and paste. Well Burroughs called it the "cut-up method" and deemed it a most satisfactory form of divination.

Okay, let's start with a clue. Here's the openings for the dog consorter and the bouffant one, both deeply concerned about the future, worried about the budget, jolly Joe, and determined to read the runes:

Phew, feel like a break?

Okay, the pond has played fair thus far.

But now for the cut-up. Which bits of what follows forms what part of which column?

Eyes starting to blur? Feeling a little dizzy?

Perhaps you need to head off to a diner for a relaxing sandwich?

Oops, that went a little wrong.

And sorry the challenge to scale the everest of words has only just begun. Which party wrote which of these words?

It's cruel isn't it?

If that doesn't cure the most hardened political junkie, the pond frankly doesn't know what will do the trick...

So much blather, and so little time ...

But there is a moral to the story.

And as usual it involves that wise Papist, the Moses Pope, and more Pope here.

You see, you can cut through a swathe of reptilian blather and here it is:

Now remember to wave at everybody if you attend a polling booth in Newtown today. You might be waving to the pond.

After all if the passengers of the Titanic could display a little good cheer ...