Off with beauty and his reptilian beasts providing yet another egg beater EXCLUSIVE ...

Oh dear, please pass another Rowe here, but naturally this day when everybody is obsessed with a sport the pond doesn't give a fig, a whit or a jot for, the pond trotted off to see what beauty's reptiles were up to down under ...

There was Ziggy being agile in a way he never managed while at Telstra...

And there was the Oreo biscuit being predictable ...

It was at this point that the pond made a fatal mistake and discovered that the ancient art of the order of the egg beater wasn't dead in the beauty's rags ...

Trouble at mill! Moderates on the march! Scones and lamingtons thrown in factional brawl! EXCLUSIVE!

It seemed to offer everything that the pond usually demanded of the reptile commentariat on a mid-week morning ... oh come back Dame Slap, don't leave us with the lightweight Oreo biscuit - so the pond plunged in ...

It was around the point that the pond reached "factional posturing is expected to see challenges against Bronwyn Bishop in Mackeller, Philip Ruddock in Berowra ..." that the pond realised it had been had, dudded, done like a goose for beauty's dinner ...

Bishop, aged 73 or so, according to Greg Hunting here, if she'd had the slightest sense of grace and dignity, would have announced her intention to retire at the next election ...

Instead she produced a flurry of low comedy items, as you can Greg Hunt here ...

As for Philip Ruddock, alleged father of the house, he's 72 (or so Greg Hunt found here), and his best days of hypocritically wearing an Amnesty badge are long behind him ... why, even he thinks he's a joke ...

That came with a story back in August 2015 headed Philip Ruddock chases down Billy Hughes' 51 year reign ...

Perhaps it is our own advancing age, but we are horrified by recent attacks on the nation's parliamentary elders. 
Politicians who were there when the dollar was floated, who lived through stagflation, who saw (with their admittedly now rheumy eyes) the Depression-era queues on the fetid ports of 1930s Sydney, who wished Charles Sturt well as he set off to discover the "inland sea" and who haven't just learned about the Second Fleet but were on it – they are politicians to be cherished, not hounded out office.

Indeed, indeed, there's nothing like senility to produce a laugh, as the pond knows only too well, but if you want to be Ziggy agile, perhaps it's time to move along and leave Billy's record to Billy ...

As for Ann Sudmalis, please allow the pond to ask Sudmalis who? and head off to do a Greg Hunt here, to discover that her only significant feat was to blame the ABC for closing its Nowra office, as opposed to having a quiet word with the federal government that had cut the ABC's funding ...

And then there's that rising young star Angus Taylor, which is reptilian code for a dickhead in the Tony Abbott mould, renowned for his diligent fight against evil wind machines (no, that's not a reference to pollies in parliament) ...

Taylor is responsible for these kinds of bon mots ...

Mr TAYLOR (Hume) (12:36): Religious belief is based on faith not facts. The new climate religion, recruiting disciples every day, has little basis on fact and everything to do with blind faith. The new theologians of the green Left are not focused on the hilltop at Calvary, but on hills closer to home—many in my electorate, near Lake George, Gunning and Crookwell. And heaven help the heretics who question them. If you listen to Labor and the Greens, an immediate shift to renewable energy is necessary to avoid Armageddon.

That blather here, concluded with a joke about ending the age of entitlement - wind-industry entitlement - which presumably didn't reach jolly Joe before he headed off to Washington and the wall-puncher suggested the Vatican as a retirement home for his apparatchiks ...

Yes, Taylor's in the classic dunderhead Abbott mould.

Craig Kelly belongs to the same school of stupidity, while Concetta Fierravanti-Wells performed spectacular dropkicks in her quest to please Abbott, as here at the ABC, though not its Nowra office ...

The "silent majority" of Australians will reject moves to introduce same-sex marriage, according to the Abbott Government frontbencher responsible for social cohesion.

Silent majority! Social cohesion!

As if you could put Abbott Government, social cohesion, silent majority and wall punching in the one sentence and expect it to make any sense at all ...

The reality is that the pre-selection process is there for a purpose, where dingbats and dodos might be challenged, and their views put to the test, and their performances might be robustly assessed ...

None of this bunch would be missed. The pond has put them on a list ... and it's got little to do with moderate v. dangerous ratbag wall punching conservative radical, at least if intelligence and a capacity to sniff the winds of agile change has got anything to do with it, as the silent majority silently breathed a sigh of relief when the onion-eating wall-puncher was moved along ...

Never mind, the pond decided to plunge on to see if Sarah Martin had anything locked in her egg-beaten locker ...

Well she surely had some rich comedy items, starting in that first par with the notion that Taylor might be considered a future leader of the party ...

Perhaps in his own lunchtime ...

But the minute Alex Hawke was mentioned in support of Taylor, the pond knew deep in its heart that here was a deadhead ripe for the killing ...

As for the rest, it's just the usual jockeying and speculation, and hardly worth a splash of invisible ink, let alone a click baiting EXCLUSIVE designed to trick the pond, especially when we get to the "news" that Bronnie, the Amnesty man and the "barren" Heffernan might face some pressure to retire.

After all, Bill was branded a "man of the past" back in May 2007 here, and there's been a lot of cows' milk under the bridges since then ...

But please, do go on and let's wrap it all up ...

All that to discover that the Amnesty man might be in a spot of bother. W

hat a surprise, that the aged relic might be told it's time to move along ... and that Abbott might decide to hang around like a bad smell, because we can never get enough of bad smells ... and somehow it's all Malware's fault and he must placate the poorly performing loons around him ...

Congratulations, Ms Martin, now please use your prize well ...

Well it provided a distraction, though hardly an engaging or an elegant one, away from all the wailing and moaning and sackcloth and ashes, which could have easily been avoided if that Melbourne football club had done a plea bargain, taken a tepid dose of easily swallowed medicine like a Sydney football club did, and got on with it, instead of indulging in furtive, secretive behaviour and outrageously expensive legalisms up there with Lance Armstrong ...

But that does at least allow the pond to end with a Pope cartoon and more of that papal divinity here ...