Day 54 of MUC and day 7 of MOC, and Polonius shows how disunity can lead to peaceful slumber ...

Naturally the pond couldn't resist reporting the conflict between prattling Polonius - insisting disunity doesn't mean death - and tribal follower Terry Barnes scribbling furiously for The Drum only three days before that Disunity is death, and our leaders are in trouble ...

It's this sort of disunity about disunity and death that provides the pond with a united sense of deathly fun.

But before we move on to our usual history lesson about glorious Ming the Merciless, the pond was troubled by a reader wondering why the pond wasted its time contemplating and marvelling at these disunited wretches who can't even get united about the value of disunity ...

The pond had a simple answer.  In days of yore, the answer might have been 'plastics', but these days the answer's Sparta ...

Thanks to the reptiles, the pond is as hardened as croc leather, and while there's no evidence that Spartan children were put out in the snow to see if they survived, there's little doubt that they were put through the paces, as any popular digital history can tell you ...

Unlike the other Greek city-states, Sparta provided training for girls that went beyond the domestic arts. The girls were not forced to leave home, but otherwise their training was similar to that of the boys. They too learned to run, jump, throw the javelin and discus, and wrestle mightiest strangle a bull. Girls also went to school at age 6 or 7. They lived, slept and trained in their sisterhood's barracks. No one knows if their school was as cruel or as rugged as the boys school, but the girls were taught wrestling, gymnastics and combat skills. (and more here)

Wrestle mightiest strangle a bull ...

By golly that's good botspeak and reminds the pond of Computer generates all possible ideas to beat patent trolls ...

Alex Reben came up with 2.5 million ideas in just three days. Nearly all of them are terrible – but he doesn’t mind. He thinks he has found a way to thwart patent trolls by putting their speculative ideas in the public domain before they can make a claim. 
In his project, called All Prior Art, Reben, an artist and engineer, uses software to rummage through the US patent database, which is freely available online. The software extracts sentences from patent documents and splices them into phrases that describe new inventions. The result is a bizarre array of contraptions that don’t quite make sense. 
A robotic phone book. A nasal plug adorned with magnetic jewellery. 3D-printed soap that kills pests on strawberry plants. And one of Reben’s favourites – a temperature-regulating adult nappy with a built-in hood.

Indeed, indeed, but back to wrestling mightiest strangle a bull - note, must patent the concept - and it's clear that the only way to toughen up and get prepared to make it through life is to be forced to read prattling Polonius on a Saturday...

If a girl can do that, a girl can do anything ...

Hmm, this is going to be tougher than the pond thought, what with that gratuitous plug for Polonius's book, and the suggestion that Abbott is right behind the harbourside mansion man ...

But good on Polonius for suggesting that, while disunity isn't death, there also actually isn't any disunity to speak of, certainly when compared to the UK and US, and so as a result, it might fairly be said that down under disunity is actually a demonstration of the strength of the unity ... a form rather similar to the lukewarm affinity that might arise from tepid bathwater ...

Move along people, the 'droid you seek is not here, the bankers and the real estate agents have made their choice and Malware lives and whatever happens, nothing will change, and the agile innovative country can keep on slumbering in its elysian field, a land where in the drowsy hours the drowsy poppies nod, a drowsy numbness from the dull opiate in the brain ...

Strange, that this should be the message explaining why there will be a rush of excited voters ready to support the agile, innovative harbourside mansion man ...

And so Polonius has worked his magic once again, the Spartan work has been done, and the pond can  slumber on ... something in the manner of an Oberon working his magic with Titania ...

...mark'd I where the bolt of Polonius fell: 
It fell upon a little western flower, 
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, 
And maidens call it united-in-idleness,
Because some might think 
It's never been more exciting to be
An Australian or a millionaire,
But exciting is always elsewhere
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew'd thee once: 
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid 
Will make or man or woman madly slumber 
Ignoring the next live politician that it sees. 
Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again 
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

And once the herb has been fetched?

I pray thee, give it me. 
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, 
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, 
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, 
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: 
There sleeps Polonius's readership sometime of the night, 
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight; 
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin, 
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in: 
And with the juice of this I'll streak their eyes, 
And make them full of torpid, dull, only slightly disunited fantasies
So that they might understand
It's never been a duller time to be a Polonius reader ...

Mmm, just time to wake up and sample a First Dog cartoon, with the Dog's full version here ...