The pond goes all day sucker with the bromancer ...

The pond decided to award itself a treat, a special indulgence for being a mug punter who regularly falls for click bait.

What was the latest effort to lure the pond into a news void?

Well the reptiles had this at the top of the digital page ...

Move along, nothing to see here.

As sure as night follows day, or day follows an eternal dullness of night, the knights and the dames were goners ...

No one would dare follow Captain Stupid down that path again.

But hang on, what's that EXCLUSIVE: Why Philip was knighted?

Sucker.

It's a link to the bromancer, scribbling way back when on the 16th September 2015, though strangely his name has fallen off the story in the digital edition.

And this is all he had to say:

The inside story of the knighthood has not been revealed before and this information does not come from Abbott. But Abbott gave Philip a knighthood because he learned the Queen wanted her husband to have one. 
The Queen’s son, Prince Charles, had a number of Australian honours but Philip had not been so richly rewarded by Australia. 
The Queen is immensely well regarded in Australia, and rightly so. Prince Philip, like Prince Charles, is much less popular. 
Abbott is a constitutional monarchist, the position a majority of Australians endorsed when the republic was put to a referendum in 1999. But most Australians are at best small-m monarchists like John Howard. They don’t want Australia to march backwards to old-style titles and regal pomp and circumstance. 
That Abbott unilaterally ­restored knighthoods at all is an example of how poor his tactical judgment on political management sometimes was as prime minister. 
But for Queen to make a ­request of Abbott meant that all that was honourable and generous in Abbott — loyalty, chivalry, romance — was lined up against the pragmatic political judgment that should have guided him. 
Not only did Abbott endure enormous personal damage ­because of his loyalty to the Queen, he never leaked the ­exculpatory explanation, which does not excuse his error in judgment but gives it context, humanises it and may have made it a less toxic political issue.

The pond remembers mocking it at the time.

It was of course a perfect non-sequitur as a story and as a reveal.

The story wasn't from Abbott - who surely, if he's so loyal, wouldn't reveal private conversations with the Queen not just to Sheridan, but to everyone - and the story wasn't from the Queen, surely, because she is a stiff-upper lip monarchist with a stern eye on protocols and private conversations.

It is therefore irrefutable, designed to make Abbott look good - starry-eyed, and full of loyalty, chivalry and romance as he eagerly goes about the business of pandering to the doddery old biddie who just wants another gong for her hubbie, because frankly you can never have enough and Phil the Greek was grouchy at Prince Chuck scoring so many antipodean gongs ...

Or some such gibberish.

The pond hardly knows what was worse. To fall for the story again like a mug punter having a splurge on the nags one day a year, or for the reptiles to have linked to it as if some exclusive revelatory new insight was on offer, or for Sheridan to have scribbled the nonsense in the first place ...

Oh wait, please excuse the pond, we have to send off for an exciting new scientific experiment ...

Yes, we watched the second season of True Detective and that monumental turkey Fantastic Four, average demographic age of five, and there's a sucker born every minute of the livelong day ...