In which the pond conducts more cobweb experiments in reptile land ...

The pond knew it would be delicious when the Pope returned to bless his true believers:

Prompt!

The pond especially loves the door-slamming French farce going on in the background, while the southern gentleman and his vexatious belle stand clueless at centre stage ...

Ah, we've all been there, eh big Mal? How you'd love to give that southern gentleman a good whacking ...

Meanwhile, the monkey hammers at the keyboard of an exotic machine, an image that puts succinctly what Tony Wright laboured long and hard to say in A script! My kingdom for a script. Here's one, PM. And some more ...

It reminded the pond of that classic Jean Renoir film, La Règle du jeu. There's an appreciation of that film in the NY Times here, which inter alia included these notes:

All these amorous tensions reach their breaking points simultaneously, on the last night of the party, sending the characters -- many of them still in their ridiculous revue costumes -- spinning off in every direction through the magnificent rooms and superbly tended gardens of the château. Although the action is unmistakably farcical, classicism has by this point been left far behind: the movie has, in a manner so graceful as to seem utterly casual, shown us the panic and desolation that lie beneath the surface of the characters' behavior. As in the final act of any farce, people run around like mad, slamming doors and taking pratfalls, coupling and uncoupling and recoupling. But the farceurs of ''The Rules of the Game,'' Renoir has made us understand, are not going through their paces simply for our amusement. They're all, in their different ways, running for their lives. 
And not one of them manages to get away clean. In the end, most of the survivors of the farce, who have assembled outside in the aftermath of what the Marquis calls ''a deplorable accident,'' file back into the château; the last shot shows them as shadows on the wall. One character, Octave, an amiable, self-described failure who is the confidant of both Jurieu and Christine, wanders off alone into the night, going nowhere in particular. That character is played by Jean Renoir -- who would, as it turned out, himself walk away from the society he portrays in ''The Rules of the Game'' not long after its Paris premiere. The audience and most of the critics hated the picture, and rather than pretend, as the Marquis's guests do, that nothing significant has happened, Renoir ''resolved,'' he said, ''either to give up the cinema or to leave France.'' Fortunately, he chose the latter course, settling in Hollywood in 1941. He wouldn't make another film in France for 15 years.

It seems that we are back in those Fin de siècle days, if we may think of the end of the century as the beginning of the great carnage of the second world war.

And now we have a new war declared, this one against environmentalists - which is to say a war against caring for the environment:

Vigilantes? People who take a matter to court and win are vigilantes?

If that's the criterion, there's only one sharp-shooting, rooting and tooting, dry-gulching, back-stabbing, ornery and desperate varmint in town, and it ain't a stray, caring environmentalist using the halls of justice and actual government legislation to win a case.

It's the Abbott office, coming up with a yet another form of fear and loathing and demonisation and nattering negativity, as that typewriter's keyboard cops another pounding.

Naturally, as the pond has already noted, the reptiles were on side, at least in the tree killer edition, with triumphant talk of 'coal, coal, coal for Australia and the wooorrrld', and never you mind what the world might be thinking about coal these days ...

Wedge? Is that the same as a Simpsons' wedgie?

It seems that's the level that policy now operates on. Greg Hunt and his department fuck up, and suddenly it's all the fault of 'vigilantes'.

We've been down this path endlessly before, the simple-minded chatter about goodies and baddies, the rhetoric of a not too bright mind brought up in a fundamentalist, black and white, hell and heaven (and purgatory and limbo) faith, and the pond has already drawn attention to the way the strain is beginning to show in its pet reptiles, with idle chatter about cobwebs:

Sadly there doesn't seem to be an illustration for a spider web devised under the influence of kool aid, but we do have a splendid example, courtesy of Dame Slap, of what it feels like when the reptiles swear off the kool aid for a day or two.

Oh and look, and there's that very strange man stuck in the middle of a crazy cobweb:

What an astonishing insight: Voters are not happy with the Prime Minister or the Abbott government.

You see, if you gaze lovingly at your reptile for long enough, they'll do an amazingly cute trick.

Why who knows, next you might be reading about the angry old (or older) white men who daily rant in the lizard Oz, and wonder why their demographic is a failing, flailing, fading one, and why circulation keeps slipping:

From the best the pond can work out, it seems that Dame Slap is suggesting that Tony Abbott do a Bugs Bunny and begin cross-dressing ...

So he can stride forth, a Margaret Thatcher in a skirt ...

Channeling Margie ...

No, that's not going to work, though you can find Margie visiting Tone in his coal dreaming at Tony Abbott's responses to climate change are not conservative.

And there's something else odd going on here.

Dame Slap kicked off the second half of her piece by saying that Cabinet had a fusty old smell, and full of cobwebs.

And then she spends the rest of the piece explaining how the fearless leader was a flop and a failure, a slow learner that's lost so much skin, it's getting bloody.

Not another name is mentioned! Just the bloody, skin-less one ...

A stray reader with a linear sense of the obvious and the rational might come to the conclusion that Dame Slap's advocating a simple solution ... give Abbott the boot.

Has it come to this in reptile la la land?

And another rhetorical question: is it possible to use the Simpsons and Bugs Bunny to deliver a policy analysis as deep as Dame Slap's?

Well yes ...

And what hope can we have for the monkey as he pounds at the typewriter and rages at the vigilantes with yet another mindless sound bite, that will, in due course, head off to parliament and troubled times?

Perhaps not much ... (and more Petty here).