Speaking of puritanism and manly seed and the imaginative Brendan O'Neill, as the pond is always wont to do on a meditative Sunday ...

As the debasing of the word EXCLUSIVE continues apace this mediative Sunday...

Only one rag seemed to realise that an EXCLUSIVE shared around the nation might not be an EXCLUSIVE, unless it was understood to be an EXCLUSIVE to the House of Murdoch ... and so preferred to pun ...

What, no EXCLUSIVE? Such are the meditative days of our lives.

Meanwhile, there being very little joy in watching Joy, the pond has decided that it has formed a set against writer-directors and David O. Russell in particular, and anyone else deluded enough to think that it's possible to make a Citizen Kane about selling miracle mops on an infomercial channel ...

After the joys of Jennifer Lawrence and American Hustle, that it should so quickly and tragically come to this - yes, there's even a Rosebud moment, albeit with paper cut-outs - and then the pond realised what had gone wrong.

It was a Fox production, a House of Murdoch show, albeit from the lesser Fox, and so any attempt at post-reflexive irony about the success of miracle mop sellers at Xmas fell as flat as a pancake or a Chairman Rupert tweet ...

But why, you ask, is the pond turning to cultural matters this meditative Sunday?

Well it's because its campaign to get the Bolter working full time on the ABC is gathering momentum ... with this from a few days ago ...

Now if all you want to take away from that is the link to the Puccini, it's here, but others will note that the Bolter is 'so excited' to be on Mornington community radio, and has the wild aspiration to do a Cargher ...

Now the pond spends much of its time listening to ABC Classic FM, but is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. 

Give the Bolter a gig on that radio station, and it's the perfect solution. He'll have to shut up and present the music, perhaps with the odd snipe now and then, but in a very muted way to fit the elevated tone ... and instead of being a common brawler for the House of Murdoch, delivering race hatred to the world, he can instead play lots of Wagner ...

Oh okay, this is all by way of evading the pond's duty, which is to present daily a sampled loon from the vast array of loonishness on parade at the House of Murdoch ...

This day the pond couldn't help but notice that Brendan O'Neill had shifted up to the top of the digital page of the lizard Oz, and that poor old Polonius had disappeared. 

Evidently the trolling O'Neill had delivered the click bait hits required for further exposure ...

Now everyone knows that there's no better Marxist or feminist than O'Neill, provided that workers and women know their place, and pay due respect to the Pope, Anglicans, David Cameron, the House of Lords and the British establishment, all long suffering victims of infamous attacks by ratbags and women ...

But frankly the pond only reads O'Neill to discover when George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four, or 'Orwellian' will be trotted out, like those censers you routinely see featured when child molesters get together to bung on an ad majorem dei gloriam do ...

Well it is a Sunday, so the pond must honour the Pellists before holding nose and plunging for the very last time into yet another gayle of uselessness ....

Oh ay, Brendan, why you're so cute, me bright British lad, so how about a fuck then?

Alternatively, why not go just go and get fucked?

A fucking flirtation tax ... as if getting hit on by entirely useless men in entirely the wrong places at entirely the wrong time should be the burden women must live with for life ...

But the pond understands that readers will be devastated, because there seems to be no sign of Orwell ... a truly sinister outcome for much time and effort wasted getting this far ...

Well please allow the pond to pre-empt Mr O'Neill by noting that there's a much more interesting read at The New Yorker on the question of prohibition, Kelefa Sanneh's Drunk with Power What was Prohibition really about?, which happily, for the moment, is outside the paywall ...

Sensible folk will abandon Mr O'Neill and head off there, perhaps with a morning cocktail in hand, and will have a perfectly good Sunday, and might even end up with sheets scattered all over the place.

Now for those who've already read the Sanneh, the pond supposes we must continue on with Brendan, but it's a painful job, there being not a shred of joy in this joyless task ... except of course, for catching a glimpse of Orwell ...

Now the pond knows what you're thinking. Just the usual blather about the secular priesthood, and the willingness to conflate all sorts of nonsense about a puritanical age, which is code for O'Neill's urgent desire to be able to go on molesting women in the way that men have routinely molested women for centuries ...

Aye, the Daesh is strong in this one ...

Yet there's not a sign of Orwell, and surely this must be an elaborate pond tease or hoax, designed to confirm that O'Neill isn't just mentally unstable and weird, he's self-confessedly sexually unstable, and perhaps, uncertain in his sexuality, is seeking to join the pond's friends in the TG community ...

They must also be astonished that O'Neill is such a fuckwit, he doesn't seem to understand the simple concept of time and place. 

What's the bet when he goes in to an office and stumbles up against a receptionist or secretary and gives the woman's bottom or breasts a jolly good feel up - as the pond's infamous uncle was wont to do - he's bewildered and astonished when the objection of attention isn't pleased by it, and perhaps he's even a little hurt when he's given a knee to the groin, or a slap to the chops, or perhaps a ten thousand dollar fine for being an abject goose ...

Well he can of course head off to live in Italy or perhaps work on a building site where wolf whistling can still be heard because after all, that's what any lad does when confronted by boobs and wants a little articulate sensual banter to advance his cause when seeking a fuck ...

But wait, the pond always plays fair ... and anyone who has lasted this far can enter the House of Orwell triumphant ...

You see, the pond and Brendan O'Neill always delivers ... and that's how you move from a goose making a fool of himself on television and copping a fine to some epic conclusion that the incident shows that the world has gone to puritanical hell in a secularist handbasket ...

Because hysteria - perhaps a form of sexually inspired hysteria, suggesting young Brendan isn't getting enough - is the stock in trade of the O'Neills and Bolters of the world ...

How else to interpret O'Neill's suggestion that all he can do is imagine such things, and suggest to others that their imagination should do the rest?

Clearly O'Neill fails to understand that asking a woman out for a drink on national television and calling her baby and telling her to stop blushing is about the last way on earth you might manage to get your oar wet ...

The pond can imagine O'Neill's own brand of trying it on. You know, inviting a 'lady' up to the loft to look at his collection of Zoo magazines and all the page three girls he pasted into his exercise book ... and then hinting to his pick-up that they should go primate ...

Oh come on ... 

Hopefully, there won't be many desperate souls who've made it this far ... instead they might have just rolled over and indulged in a little canoodling or a wild fuck, and left Orwell's own contorted brand of weirdly hung up sexuality filed on the book shelf for later reference (yes, Orwell had his difficulties with Mary Anns and an obsession with toughness inversely proportional to his actual frailty, as well as a generous amount of misogyny which shows whenever he tried to write a female character ...)

Enough already, even if you do have to wonder at anyone who could imagine that sex has somehow been restrained, reined in, by a "new expert class", a "chattering class", that's cold and severe ... and then all he's able to offer is imagination ...

Well, there's one guaranteed safe way to deal with Brendan O'Neill, and it requires no imagination at all  ...

Only in a metaphorical way of course ... though no doubt if you're an imaginative O'Neill,  exercising your imagination, you might see that image as men wantonly fertilising the kerbing with their manly seed ... and then you went on national television to explain to an interviewer anxious to talk about cricket that you too had some manly seed and didn't mind having a drink to discuss what to do with it ...

In which case the pond is happy to book you into a room next to O'Neill for your therapy ...