The Kraken awakes ... and likes to go surfing ...

Ever since a childhood of sci fi reading, the pond has been on alert for news of the kraken waking ...

Right now it seems the beast many thought had been defeated is rising again on the north shore of Sydney.

The evidence continues to mount - Fairfax picked up on the story with Tony Abbott confident his time as PM will be 'well appreciated' as time goes by (with forced video).

That was a rip from a story in the local Murdoch rag, Exclusive: Former prime minister Tony Abbott talks Brookvale Oval, Bronwyn Bishop and his future.

And after a prolonged silence, there was a breaking of the drought on Facebook, with Abbott turning up at Seaforth Public School to torture innocent children ...

There was an unfortunate juxtaposition in the Manly story which highlighted the need for a high alert level, and it wasn't just a snap of the beast emerging from the water:

Now it's true not all the reaction was positive ...

Hmm, the pond must get around to patenting "loony" under the TPP, but what if people want to spell it looney?

But there's a definite yearning for the Messiah, and though the pond was slow to respond to the cries of pain at The Spectator,  as always, the reliable Rowan Dean's rag provided a most excellent editorial...

Oh indeed, indeed. Just look at that shameless Niki Savva scribbling this very day at the lizard Oz:

But back to the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the sackcloth and ashes because right at the end, things get a little weird:

Dear sweet long absent lord, more talk of the love media and the twitter rabble, because these days why use a three word slogan when two will do ... and what a weird time to invoke the mad "Lord" ...

Sadly only three people bothered to comment on the mourning, but one was quite fine:

What if Tony and Monkton hit the road, sort of Priscilla meets Hitler in spring time. Do a warm up in the leagues clubs before venturing further a field. Just imagine, summertime blues, ol man river, if I were a carpenter and of course I did my way. Yes some witty repartee, a soft shoe shuffle and of course an encode. Yes Tony has a big future.

Hmm, even those who've earned the right to comment at the Spectator find the kraken a figure of fun ...

What else? Well there's a few other bits of business.

There's the magic water man banging on yet again this morning about the right to be offensive, and coming out with this:

The classic liberal ideal of Voltaire - that he may be offended by your views but will defend your freedom to express them – is alien to this government. 

Wouldn't it have been more to the point if he'd scribbled The classic liberal ideal of Voltaire, as interpreted by Evelyn Beatrice Hall ...?

Evelyn Beatrice Hall (28 September 1868 – 13 April 1956), who wrote under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre, was an English writer best known for her biography of Voltaire entitled The Life of Voltaire, first published in 1903. 
She also wrote The Friends of Voltaire, which she completed in 1906. In The Friends of Voltaire Hall wrote the phrase: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"which is often misattributed to Voltaire himself) as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs. (Greg Hunt it here).

There's nothing wrong with pedantry.

And the doofus Donnelly was out and about amongst the Terrorists this morning:

The question is, of course, which western values to learn, and no doubt the blatherer produces plenty of insights, and quite possibly, includes the western value of bombing the shit out of a hospital despite having been warned precisely where the hospital was located ...

Now the pond has no time for fundamentalists of any kind, but there's something about an old white man blathering about western values that quite radicalises the pond ... a

Are we talking of the western values that produced the chaos of the Iraq war, or the chaos of Afghanistan, or any of the other half-arsed fuck ups produced in recent times by western values? Or are we just talking about ongoing bigotry against gays and women's rights ...

Which brings the pond to one in an occasional series ... the ongoing tragedy of Bill Leak ...

And the magic water man reckons there's no room to be offensive in Australia ...