A Sunday meditation in which the pond is derailed, and loses faith in Jon Stewart and the Fairfaxians ...

(Above: yes, why?)

Talk about devastated.

The pond finally got to sit down and watch the Judd Apatow directed, Amy Schumer starring Trainwreck, and what a derailment that was.

The sports guys had fun - John Cena handled his cameo in good style, and LeBron James was acceptable enough, though without any apparent reason to be in the show, and amongst the few professional actors on view, Tilda Swinton showed yet again that she knew how to produce a triple decker ham sandwich.

But the mix of improv stand-up comedy stylings with an attempt at a 'girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy back' plot was interminable and unendurable, and worst of all, not very funny.

Now the pond knows the film has attracted notoriety for unfortunate reasons, but the pond came to the show under the delusion that Schumer was some sort of bold, brave, cutting edge American comedian comfortable with the mention of blow jobs and cunnilingus and all the rest of the paraphernalia of modern American life...

So that's why she dresses up as a cheerleader to dance her way back into the heart of her top notch sports medicine surgeon, and incidentally scores a job at Vanity Fair.

It's about as modern and incisive as Cinderella or a 1930s sitcom.

Scrub that. In those days we had His Girl Friday, if you want journalism as a theme, and a whole swag of Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy comedies.

The pond has loved liquorice guns ever since ...

... and Judd Apatow now has the pond's full unfettered loathing, and sadly, Schumer isn't far behind.

American reviewers lapped this sort of twaddle up, which helps explain a more significant matter worth mentioning this meditative Sunday.

The complaisance of the American press when it comes to Hollywood.

A complaisance shared by Tony Abbott, Andrew Robb and the TPP.

And then comes Tom Cruise, out to flog another movie, likely as unendurable as the last one, unless heart-stopping salt and oil saturated popcorn is your pleasure.

Which leads the pond to another gripe.

The Fairfaxians picked up a story about Cruise's latest press blitz for Mission Unendurable from The Washington Post.

No harm in that, though many might wonder why they don't just start reading The Washington Post instead of the Fairfaxians.

Here's the problem: the Fairfaxians stripped out all the links in the story.

This is how it looks at The Washington Post here:

Now that's a screen cap, but at the original, you could head off to the Washington Post HBO link here, or leave the site and visit the story about the 'church' nee cult denying everything here, or The Wrap reporting on Tom Cruise banning scientology and dating questions, here, featuring Jon Stewart falling into line and not raising a peep, or Sarah Gilbert in The Atlantic scribbling Cruise Controlled.

And so on. There's a lot more links in the story, and that shows respect for the readership and a willingness to acknowledge what's out there on the full to overflowing intertubes.

So why did the Fairfaxians do what they did?

It's not because of a willingness to ignore what Gilbert had to say. The Fairfaxians were happy to quote her - without any link:

Gilbert points out the strangeness of The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, a master at calling out hypocrisy, interviewing Cruise this week and completely gliding over the topic, instead bantering about workout routines. That puzzle, of course, is quickly solved by the fact that Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures (which produces Mission: Impossible) are both owned by Viacom. It's the same reason why embattled NBC Universal stars want to stick to the NBC's Today show - shared corporate overlords make these situations much easier.

This is how the story ended in the Wapo:

Yep, plenty of links and further reading, to ensure some stickability, and an acknowledgment of Gilbert as a source of much of the story, with the provision of a link or three.

It's a common courtesy that even that notorious shark Huffpo does, or sometimes apparently the Daily Mail, not the pond can confirm this because it never visits the Daily Mail site ..

And this is how the story ended in the Fairfaxians:

Oh fuck, not Tamworth again.

Let's just say TripAdvisor that you might think you've got the pond's number but it'll be a blowfly laden day in hell's top paddock before the pond spends 97 smackeroos to stay in the heart of the known universe.

But here's the real problem arising from the laziness and moral turpitude of the Fairfaxians. (No wonder Stan has been such a gigantic flop).

What was going to be yet another diatribe against Tom Cruise and Scientology - okay, it's been done before but where's the harm in another outing - was derailed by the Fairfaxians' behaviour in relation to links.

In short, and to draw the strands together, the Fairfaxians are the Judd Apatow of down under journalism, and just as Apatow has delivered a sickening blow to rom coms, the Fairfaxians have dealt an outrageous link-free blow to their readership ...

So no, the pond won't be linking to their scientology story, no matter the way it provides a potent shame file moment for Jon Stewart ... because you can see the original doing it with links elsewhere on the full to overflowing intertubes ...

But hey, to show the pond's heart is in the right place, here's another story in Salon, What does Jon Stewart have to lose by asking real questions?": Scientology watchdog explains Tom Cruise's media blackout.

Read it and weep Judd and Amy ...

(Below: Jon Stewart, the cult compliant, complicit feet of clay man)