In which the pond returns to the major Mitchell dinner party with the Bolter as companion ...

Prattling Polonius has hit on a simple trick these last few Saturdays to avoid the pond's attention.

Deplore Mao - what, the pond should attempt to redeem the Chairman? - and now deplore Richard Neville - what, the pond should celebrate a hippie flake now that he's gone, albeit in cruel circumstances?

The pond can't help but take it personally and attribute Polonius with a level of unseemly cunning. Why can't he simply join the Donald and a generous amount of Republicans in celebrating the achievements of Putin? After all at one point he seemed quite smitten by the Donald ... and that'd give the pond something to write about ...

As a result, and reluctantly, the pond has had to turn to the Bolter for column filler. 

Now the Bolter is the premiere exponent of the art of blogging filler, which is a bit like hunting out the perfect stocking filler ... we all just love stocking fillers, especially when they're pink ...

You take something printed in another part of the empire, and you publish large chunks, embroidering it with your own prejudices ...

Now never mind the strange punctuation of media.critics.

This breah of typos goes with blogging and the pond has always been dedicated to following the Bolter's lead (damn you NZ subs, damn you to Fairfax hell). The pond and the Bolter are busy people, too busy to care about the grandma nazis ...

And never mind all the righteous hesitations and the sublime hypocrisy of the idle chit chat about breahs of confidence because the Bolter is always up for a good bitchy gossip ... except, of course, when it comes to his man love for the onion muncher, which leads to the plaintive bleat "is this fair?"

The answer of course is that the only fair way is to recycle all that Mitchell said about former chairman Rudd from Queensland ... but sssh, don't go into the details about the onion muncher ...

And so in the noble tradition of stocking filler, the pond reflexively and post-ironically recycles the Bolter recycling the major Mitchell in the approved snake devouring its tail manner ... though at least it's not from the pieces previously quoted by the pond ...

At the very end of this extended reprint came this heartfelt note ...

Only the Bolter ...but in for a penny, in for a pound, the pond always says ... and this is what Jamie Walker thought was the juiciest way to open his yarn about the major Mitchell's yarns ...

Yes, there's nothing for the Bolter to see or write about here. There's stocking filler, and then there's just vast empty plains of silence ...

And that's not even including the pond's favourite anecdote ...

Oh the derriere. The pond knew it would get another joke out of that bum rush.

And in a curious way, it actually somehow leads into a wonderful anecdote about John Howard ...

But of course being a racist is a plus in the world of the Bolter. 

While being an addled onion-munching, chardonnay-swilling policy failure is just what the country needs... because as usual the Bolter is still moaning and keening and carrying on about the loss of a man who was leading the Liberal party to electoral oblivion ...

And now the Bolter wants the onion muncher to return, so that endless pundits can type endless columns headed "What have the Liberals done?"

Because it turned out that you could have put either the onion muncher or Malware into this Wilcox cartoon and it would have made perfect sense ... and sad to say, the next one to come after Malware will probably fit just as well ... but at least there's more Wilcox here ...