It's time for watching the media watchers watching the media, aka dog bothering, drivelling nativist navel fluff viewing time ...

(Above: more amazing headlines. Amazing, that is, that the Currish Snail could rustle up 2% and boast about it).

Now at some time or another we will all have our difficulties with the ABC.

On the pond's part, there's the many occasions when the pond has been advised that something is fairly or pretty unique...

And then yesterday as the pond settled in to listening to Gerswhin's Rhapsody in Blue in celebration of ABC FM's fortieth birthday, there came a few notes and then the ABC news crashing through the melody ...

Oh they did their best to apologise after they'd canned the news and allowed the piece to play out, but the damage was done ...

And now to a fresh crisis. In view of recent turbulence involving Miranda the Devine, should the pond keep calling the dog botherer the dog botherer?

The pond would of course like to call the Devine a fright bat, as experienced hands at the Daily Terror are wont to do, but is it fair to draw attention to the way that the Kenny lad keeps sniffing around the ABC like an Adelaide poodle on heat.

In lieu of alternatives, and given the pond's family friendly tone, dog botherer it must be, though no slur is intended for dogs or dog handlers.

Of course the pond could ignore the dog botherer, but it seems there's an insatiable, perhaps unquenchable thirst for the dog botherer's thoughts.

It's easy to understand why. Here, like a devout member of Opus Dei, is a man who willingly dons a hair shirt during the week so that each Monday he might scribble of the pain of the hair, and the blood drawn by cilice wrapped around the thigh ...

In its usual petulant, pedantic way, however, the pond is worried about the branding ...

Yes, in the old days it was "media watch watching", so that in a post-ironic, reflexive, post-modern way the pond could boast of watching the media watch watching the media watchers were watching ... (and so on until ennui sets in quicker than reading an actual dog botherer column)

These days the branding seems more discreet, though the columns remain just as tedious ...

But enough of the pleasantries ... let's get down and figgish ... because once you evade the paywall, you end up in the hallowed halls of the correctly labelled "media watch watch", and so many may watch the media watcher watching the media watchers to their media-watching heart's content. 

Have you thought about the benefits of navel fluff gazing as another way to spend your days?

Yes, as always, and before we go on to appreciate how the stern dog-botherer's comments have occasioned the ABC to change its path, step away from the dark side and lift its game, let us appreciate some of the comedy gems that the dog botherer scattered in this opening burst ...

"As a greenie of old ..."

Strange, that's not quite how he's portrayed here ...

Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s “gender wars”. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as “a friend”.

Oh dear, parent-child things are always tricky ...

Of course the greenie of old routine is just a feint and a ploy. Kenny is as emotional and as sophisticated as the lot of them, singing ain't it good to know that you can pave paradise and put up a parking lot ... dooh do ...

But what really irritates the pond isn't that he pretends he's some kind of faux greenie of old, as that he blames Kelly's response on baby boomer sentimentality.

Now there's nothing necessarily sentimental about baby boomers, or sacred.

The pond was brought up on Seven Little Australians, and has always maintained a healthy wariness about killer gums - recently rewarded when a killer gum in the pond's street wrote off a car by shedding a limb, as gums - an inappropriate species for many urban environments - are wont to do ...

But Kenny, not content with broad presumptions about old farts, compounded his crime with this line ...

Trees are wonderful but not usually individually indispensable. These trees were planted - they are not native ...

Now it just so happens that most - not all - of the trees in question were Moreton Bay figs. One of the great glories of Sydney's constructed landscape ... as distinctive in their own way to Sydney-siders as constructed Central Park is to New Yorkers ...go on, you can Fairfax the reference to them being iconic fig trees at Fairfax here.

Kenny, if he'd bothered to do a Greg Hunt, could have looked up Ficus macrophylla and discovered these immortal words ...

Ficus macrophylla, commonly known as the Moreton Bay fig, is a large evergreen banyan tree of the family Moraceae that is a native of most of the eastern coast of Australia, from the Atherton Tableland (17° S) in the north to the Illawarra (34° S) in New South Wales, and Lord Howe Island. Its common name is derived from Moreton Bay in Queensland, Australia. It is best known for its beautiful buttress roots.

Yes indeedy, and the buttressed roots show how much Kenny is a greenie, or perhaps more to the point, how much of a crow-eater he remains, no doubt in love with brush fences and bluestone cottages and the orderly development of Colonel Light Gardens ...

You see, just because trees are planted, doesn't mean, if we can follow the convoluted logic, that trees that are native are suddenly not native ...

Now it so happens that the pond, trained by a country mother, will cheerfully chop down or ringbark a tree, just out of habit and as a way of preserving the Tamworth lifestyle, and has no problem with a few trees making way for light rail, provided that more are planted in their place, even if it takes many years for a new ficus to reach the grand state of a mature ficus ...

But the loss of any tree is a moving sight, even that poor old ficus that got chopped down around the corner after a big blow tore down one of its biggest branches ...

To have ambivalence about these things doesn't deserve mealy-mouthed condescension, or uninformed Greg "walri" Huntish statements about Moreton bay figs not being dinky di ...

Never mind, let's get on with the rest of the ignorant, ill-mannered tosh ... because the pond's time at the swill is always limited ...

Well pray tell, who's counselling reptile members of the commentariat about what's a native tree?

And for fuck's sake, who, just after the recent news about the warming of the world, would try to pass themselves off as a greenie and then by ritual and rote, lead off again with idle chatter about "climate alarmism"?

Well at least it provides an answer to that question by Peter Hannam, Rising global temperatures: when will climate change deniers throw in the towel (with forced video).

Sadly Mr Hannam, climate change deniers will go on chattering about climate alarmism until the climate denying cows come home ...

And they'll probably throw in a link to gay marriage, because after all, in the world of the reptiles, mentioning that gay marriage hasn't resulted in the end of the world is something of a thought crime ... at least in the world inhabited by the dog botherer ...

Is it possible to be dopier than David Cameron?

Gay marriage will be David Cameron's enduring legacy ...

Well there's the Pope, and there's the dog botherer, still resplendent in his ABC cilice ... and when the pond is reduced to saying that David Cameron had a vision and a dream, you can bet an entire row of noble figs that the dog botherer has the vision of the sooty mould and leaf spot that sometimes blights a ficus ...

As for Nick Ross, you're better off reading New Matilda and False Balance: the full transcript of the meeting between Nick Ross and Bruce Belsham ... and following the links to the other stories.

The one genuine chance that the dog botherer has to criticise the ABC, and the pandering dog botherer falls into line and sniffs their bums and praises them ... and cheekiness upon cheekiness, then dares to talk about the not-so-trifling issues of cost and affordability... apparently not having done a Greg Hunt on the cost, affordability, and the squillions being pissed agains the wall on broken copper and useless HFC, while Telstra laughs all the way to the Malware bank and Optus no longer takes an interest in maintaining its network...

Not that the pond is bitter. It just has some passing sympathy for the young who will be burdened with the cost of upgrading a third rate system in the forthcoming years.

In the meantime? Why the pond's HFC broadband service is just as fucked today as it was yesterday ... and Malware has effectively ruined broadband in vast swathes of the country and got away with it, and the dog botherer cheers on the ABC for loyally following the News Corp line.

And so the dog botherer and all the rest of the fellow-travelling toadies at News Corp have achieved their impeccable aim ...

Of course it's all because News Corp isn't a native publication. It's owned by a foreigner and it's been planted on these shores ...

Well that makes as much sense, perhaps more, as the dog botherer telling the world that the ficus is a foreigner ...

And so to the trouble now inevitably brewing at mill ...

Any guarantee Abbott gives to stay on the backbench is worthless?

Let's not argue about "is" or "are". Why not just make it a little shorter and say "Any guarantee Tony Abbott gives is worthless"?