All this foolishness in the pond's life ...

(Above: and more David Pope here).

What a great note on which to wrap up the confederacy of dunces for the year ... with the lying, dissembling rough Brough flappity flapping away ...

But first, if it please the chair, the pond has some jokes to recycle ... first can we go to the comrades and as a follow up to yesterday's oh oh Oreo follies ...

And the Fairfaxians had another one ...

And speaking of Ms Bishop, it's a measure of the times that the rough Brough should dominate proceedings where not so long ago a rorts scandal would have been the headlines for the day ...

It's just conservative colleagues taking aim at her? Nobody else cares about a junketeer with her nose deep in the Animal Farm trough?

Now the pond could understand dropping 30k on a flight, if  - after the wall puncher had shirt fronted Putin and Vlad had nuked Perth - there had been a need to render Ms Bishop to safety in Canberra ... but it seems that wasn't the reason for the flight. They really are so insulated these days, these rorters, so full of their self-importance, that they simply don't get it ... or the need to be seemly ...

Meanwhile, is this the most re-circulated tweet of all time?

But enough of frivolity for the day, because as always, the pond has deep infrastructure, policy and philosophical issues to contemplate, thanks to the reptiles of Oz ...

Talk about richness of choice ...

Oh never mind, that's just jolly Bolter one note harping away, and moaning about the good old days of the wall puncher. What about the reptiles, what's top of their opinionator hit parade?

Oh that's tempting, but perversely, the pond first settled on this story ...

Yes the reptiles have the cheek to label as an EXCLUSIVE the news that the decrepit copper network that was purchased was decrepit ... having failed to take up the pond's invitation to have a look at the copper in the street outside the pond's home, an offer made some years ago.

Of course they could have read Fairfax's story These are the muddy and broken copper phone lines NBN Co is buying from Telstra ... back in September ... or the sorry tale of Malware's tribe buying 1800 kilometres of copper to make Malware's scheme work (with forced video) ... back in October ...

The pond could go on and on - the pond frequently does - but as well as being fuckwits, the reptiles are slow learners, and so one must be patient with the sweet little dears ...

Um, that'd be the HFC cables that are just as useless as the copper networks, another story that's been running for yonks but please, do keep going on about the copper ...

Bummer Mitch. Have you been dudded ... and left holding the turkey for Xmas ... Remember to batter it well to keep the moisture in the trenches ...

Never mind, these days the pond is always more-ish, and what better way to round out the morning than to drop in on the current state of climate denialism amongst the reptiles.

These days it's a little more sophisticated than the outright denialism of the GOP. There's nuance and subtlety, even if in the end it's just another tale of Oz coal, coal, coal for the woorrrrlllldddd ...

Who better to go through the various stages than the bromancer?

Indeed, indeed. The pond was only thinking the other day what trivial and inconsequential impact the Potsdam conference had on Europe because after all, trying to negotiate real outcomes would have been calamitous ...

But there you go. No wonder the pond's routinely confused by the reptiles. Why only this week the Caterists were gravely advising that any attempt by governments to fund anything was doomed to failure, and here's the bromancer advising that governments would be well advised to plough massive resources into research ... including international collaboration ...

Provided of course said international collaboration doesn't include any conferences because everyone knows these have no effect on history, and real outcomes are calamitous, as opposed to unreal outcomes, and simple realities enunciated by simpletons will always suffice ...

Enough already. Now we must minimise the problem, take sensible precautions, talk of pure baloney and perhaps throw in Santa Claus as a seasonal gesture ...

It would of course be wrong at this point to note that both the bromancer and the wall puncher happen to believe they drink real blood and eat real flesh each Sunday they attend mass - well, let's hope they do, lest they be damned to hell for all eternity as heretics - but the pond guesses this must in fact make the bromancer an expert on Santa Claus, as well as climate science ...

And so to the final flurry, wherein it will be discovered - to the nation's great relief - that Oz coal is dinkum, and a jolly good thing and likely the world's salvation ... because naturally we must speak of science as a religion ...

He's speaking of Paris and arranging a mass, with all the blood-drinking and the flesh-eating? Paris was worth such a mass?

Oh perhaps he didn't mean quite that, but what a futtock the man is, and how people in future times will look back and marvel at the way digging up Oz coal and shipping it abroad was presented as a kind of charitable international duty and service by the humanitarians of Oz ...

Happily, there's more to life than the reptiles, and how pleasing to see Butch Norton on the kit last night at the Enmore ... the pond last saw him behind Aimee Mann and in his Eels days ... and the other two in the band were equally slick ... the trio have another life as Buick 6 -  and though Lucinda Williams was herself a little slow to warm up, she wisely let the trio out for a couple of gallops to give her voice a rest ...

So here's one of the songs that was featured, though a bit more upbeat on stage than in its album YouTube form. Yes reptiles, you can talk all the trash you like, but thanks to you, there's nothing but foolishness in this blog ...