In which the pond spends some quality time with Dame Slap and the Bolter in honour of the paper anniversary ...

(Above: and more Rowe here).

A year in, and instead of gifts of paper (traditional) or clocks (modern), it took the Bolter to produce the necessary level of levity ...

Of course being a screen cap there's no working video, but surely there is a wonderful level of anal retentiveness at work in that prim observation about "seeming urbanity". If ever there was a man more up himself than Malware - an heroic ambition - then surely the Bolter is a contender ...

Any parent or teacher will recognise the syndrome. Stop sniffing you dreadful child, use a hankie! It bespeaks of an unhealthy level of obsessive attention being paid to a deeply unloved source of constant and profound irritation.

And the Bolter, in his extreme agitation and hostility and with a sublime unawareness of Freud, has indeed noted it before ...

The damned shifty sniffer looks even shiftier when he sniffs ...

Of course you can't win with this level of unhealthy obsession, getting up there with Glenn Close ...(Michael Douglas? Oh come on, play fair with your female characters).

Which is why yesterday you could sense the Bolter's growing sense of disbelief and irritation ...

Luckily, a little later the Bolter could report better news and that dreadful shifty sniffer was put into his poll box ...

But all that was yesterday, and today we must move on to an even sterner teacher, Dame Slap, never afraid to dish it out to recalcitrant students who dare to make it into her land above the faraway tree ...

Uh oh, sounds like a D for Dunce or F for flunk, or SS for shifty sniffer ...

Yes, you sniffy shifter you ... so there.  Oh it's all very well to talk fine issues, but where's the hard yards ...

Is there just time to set a few awkward questions?

And now, with tricky questions set, please, allow a fond trip back through memory lane to the golden glow of picket fences, when women stayed at home as chief carer and Dame Slap was rightly slaving over a hot stove and a steaming iron rather than delivering steaming lines about the shifty sniffer ...

Unite with Cory and George and Erica and Kevin and impatient leader in exile, the wall punching onion muncher?

Good luck with that. Why it's easier to answer all Dame Slap's tricky questions ...

But that's Dame Slap's teaching style for you. Set impossible homework and then watch the hapless student fail. Well what else to do with useless irritants who goad you beyond any measure of patience?

Whatever, one thing we certainly don't need are questions such as "why is a copper broadband?" and "three climate scientists sat in a cherry tree, how many were climate denialists?" and "why Macquarie Island?"

Never mind, in keeping with the pond's noble tradition of movie mentioning ...

David Pope this day is very speedy, and more speedy papal blessings here ...

What's that, you, at the back of the class? One further question?

Oh you naughty pixies and elves, please talk instead of shifty sniffers. 

It's guaranteed to make you sound so much more urbane ...or else you'll get sent off to Bolter land ...

And perhaps there'll be ...