In lieu of a meditative Sunday ... a way to kill an hour, which is infinitely better than killing people ...

After the great Optus melt-down yesterday - which happened to coincide with the pond intending to upload a substantial amount of data - the pond went about the house doing system checks, and came across a long forgotten gem ...

This is just as well, because watching conventional news services is likely to lead to news of Donald Trump's latest extravagant racist outburst, or the latest fundamentalist psycho killer raging through a clinic killing people ...

The pond might also have begun to brood again about that AFR story, outside the paywall here ...

Make no mistake, the purchase of Optus' aging network has been shown to be a costly error, made necessary by the need to realise the vision of Turnbull's MTM NBN. Whereas the $800 million Optus was getting from the former Labor government was an undoubtedly hefty price to pay for retiring a network and getting its customers onto Labor's fibre, the idea of over-building the network now to make it fit for purpose smacks of throwing more good money after bad. 
NBN and the former NBN Co has paid top dollar for a clapped out old Datsun, and is now going to pay to put in a brand new engine and probably add some shiny mag wheels as well. 
The rollout will be delayed as a result of the necessary upgrades, and some consumers on Optus' HFC will have the cold comfort of knowing they are simply waiting to hitch a ride to the digital future on board a tricked up second hand bomb. 
It is worth posing the question of whether the government was ever misled by Optus and should be demanding some money back for its shoddy network. If this is not the case, it means that the government knew the HFC network couldn't be used and ploughed on with its plan regardless, or simply didn't do its due diligence properly before agreeing the new deal. 
What is clear is that this leaves the NBN in a depressing place. The documents also showed that a switch to the old Labor plan and upgrading to the fastest fibre-to-the-premise technology would cost an extra $600 million in peak funding. 
So we are seemingly locked into the plan of incremental upgrade of old technology, which is a million miles away from the grand idea when the NBN first emerged as a concept. 
The government is talking a great game on innovation policy and plotting a tech future for Australia, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that these plans are being built on shaky infrastructure foundations.

There's a limit to the humour that fundamentalists can generate on a meditative Sunday, or even the clapped out Datsun 120Y the Optus the, though the latter truly is a cosmic joke.

Fortunately the pond's latest, much beloved toy, the Nividia Shield, has a bar which selects random popular audio visual treats and presents them as ducks in a row for delectation ...

Purely to check that the system, the pond clicked on one about Life of Brian and was swept back in time as if caught up in a Back to the Future sequel ...

First a little background for those who have never heard of the ineffably pompous Malcolm Muggeridge.

He has his own wiki here, and back in the 1960s and 1970s, he became an insufferable Christian bore, doing much to promote the piety of Mother Teresa, along with many other follies ... such as getting together with that other wonderful period clown, Mary Whitehouse, to produce the Festival of Light movement ... ah Cliff, what a tormented and tragic figure you became ...

Now the pond hasn't thought of Muggeridge in many years - by the time of his senior, senile years, he had become a figure of comedy and an irrelevance, a bit like others who shifted from socialism to fundamentalism thinking of a different kind. A bit like Christopher Pearson, another name the pond has largely forgotten ...

Next we need a tragic figure ... an Anglican Bishop of Southwark, one Arthur Mervyn Stockwood, willing to make a fool of himself in public ...

For Greg Hunters, he too has a wiki here, but it's best to see Stockwood in action.  His contradictions and his situation are then immediately apparent, though many will only see a stock Anglican figure of a pompous kind, a man who might settle down to a cheese and cucumber sandwich in a BBC sitcom ... though even Arthur Lowe might face challenges playing him ... and Derek Nimmo was far too modern ...

Now we need a TV show that only the BBC could invent, Friday Night Saturday Morning ... hosted by the extremely unlikely, some would say preposterous Tim Rice ...

Throw in a couple of Pythons and mix it altogether and the result kept the pond up until well after midnight.

Now lest it be argued that the pond, as a secular atheist, saw Life of Brian as an anti-Christ romp, can the pond just say in its own, and the film's defence, that its favourite moments involve the Romans and Latin, and a discussion of splitters, which applies much more to Bill Shorten and the comrades than a few mild jokes about the cheesemakers being blessed ...

Anyhoo, in lieu of a Sunday meditation, here's a way to waste an hour ... for those who never saw it, or who, like the pond, only ever knew it as a matter of brief notoriety, before it and its characters were swept away by time ...

At the end, an irony will be apparent. All that Muggeridge and Stockwood said and did has been relegated to the dustbin of history ... Muggeridge is these days virtually unknown, and largely forgotten. The pond has several of his books in the house, unreferenced and unloved, but then the pond also has several books by Frank Sheed in the house ... while out in the wider world, Life of Brian still has a cult following and many pages devoted to it on the full to overflowing intertubes, and if Muggeridge and Stockwood are likely to be remembered, it is in the reflected glow of their television appearance to discuss the film ...

Such are the rich ironies of life and time, or as Ned might have said, such is life ... and such is Tim's preposterous gear ...