In which the pond forsakes prattling Polonius and uses "Ned" Kelly to teach RN a lesson ...

The pond is deeply disturbed, distressed and agitated and so, despite its deep conservatism, is going to break a long standing tradition of meditating with prattling Polonius on a Saturday ...

The pond has its own bone to pick with the ABC, in the matter of the RN makeover, as it finally comes to terms with the reality that it will in the future rarely listen to the station. And it certainly won't be podding or downloading content, not when it has Ms Torrent as its able helper ...

That online solution was the nonsense peddled about the dismantling of community television, as if it would somehow turn up on YouTube and all would be well...

The pond took to watching the logarithms alright, but the Australian community content turned out to be zilch, zero, nada, nihil, nothing ...

And so it will be with RN. These days about the only program the pond tunes in to on a regular basis is Paul Gough's The Inside Sleeve, and that's going the way of the dodo. It's not that the pond shares all his musical tastes, but the pond likes the way he likes music, and gives it his devotion, and most days he'd turn up a track or two the pond really liked and warranted further exploration ...

Instead the grandees have decided to go talk and give lightweight blatherer Tom Switzer more time. There's a guaranteed turn off, in the same way that the pond turns off, if it mistakenly forgets that Scott Stephens will turn up on a Thursday to spew pretension and drip portentous stupidity in super-sized doses with Waleed Aly ...

Talk about a minefield. The only reason the pond still occasionally listens to millionaire socialist Adams is to wait for his celebration of how he and his mate Julian Assange helped get the Donald elected and so saved the world.

The pond has taken to listening to News Radio - at least they replay the BBC world service, and parliament reminds the pond of why so many love totalitarian dictatorships. There's also classical music, and then - up against Scott Stephens - there's the bliss of silence, and if AM or PM are a worry, there's always local radio ...

It's always sad to see a radio station wither and die, actively killed by the people making a wage and tasked with the ostensible purpose of saving it.

For all prattling Polonius's nonsense, not everyone wears a tin-foil hat leftie detector or wants to waste their time listening to unendurable fools like Polonius talk incessantly of politics ...

So bye bye Australian RN pie

Drove the old Morris Minor to the levee, but the inside sleeve was dry

Them good old bureaucrats thought the punters would settle for political hooch and rye

But something touched the pond inside

The day the music on the inside sleeve died ...

Now when the pond develops an anger and a hating, the hating can go on for a long, long time ...

How to punish the world, the way the ABC bureaucrats had punished the pond?

Of course there were obvious ways ...

But would an expert climate scientist and energy expert such as the bouffant one, in thrall to the Donald, be enough?

Clean coal? So all we learn is that the bouffant one is as stupid as the Donald? Around that point the pond had to stop reading. Anyone who peddles talk of clean coal is a charlatan and a fraud.

Thanks to the fraud, we already know that climate science is a Chinese conspiracy, and what a bloody good and clever conspiracy it is too ...

Well there's more here, and even the AFR felt the need to step outside the paywall to scribble 'Scary' Arctic warmth triggers climate change warnings ...

But that wasn't enough for the pond. It was a just a minor skirmish with reptile idiocy. 

The pond wanted the grandees at RN - more senior management than ruminating goats, and no one to do the goats' bidding - to realise that if it wanted the shit bored out of it, as opposed to a little enjoyably Goughian music, it had plenty of reptiles on stand-by to handle the job ...

Perfect! "Ned" Kelly could bore the shit out of anyone with one hand tied behind his keyboard, and make both Scott Stephens and Tom Switzer seem like rank amateurs ... though perhaps, because he's not on radio, "Ned" doesn't have Adams' perfectly mastered skill of interrupting guests just when they start to say something interesting ...

Luckily with Ned, there won't be a single interesting thing to read, a killer if the pond was interested in beating RN at ratings, but fine if you want to drive the reptile Oz's business model, and with it the pond's, into the ground ...

There's  going to be more hate and bigotry and this is a cause for celebration? 

Don't we already have enough by way of grievance politics, thanks to the grieving reptiles, suffering, and sighing and moaning ...

Oh fuck, the pond promised never to repeat a joke, but that's such a good one Hedders ...  

And now to resume punishing the world ... and RN management, if they manage to read this far, because they can't manage much of anything else ...

Now there's a slow burner buried in there, and it's going to take an unendurable amount of time to get to it, in much the same way as expecting Scott Stephens to make sense involves cultivating a sense of infinity or eternity ...

Let us keep ploughing diligently through the harumphing horse manure ...

Slowly, ever so slowly, the slow burning fuse is coming to the point ...

And there it is: "questionable character and standards of hygiene."

Now that might not be racist. But it's surely ethnicist and phobic in a way that's distilled essence of bigotry, and while it's presented as the opinion of others, it also seems to stand for "Ned" bog Irish Kelly's views ...

Of course back in the day, the pond was routinely told that the Irish were of questionable character and standards of hygiene, unskilled, illiterate and superstitious and destined for eternal hell for worshipping the whore of Babylon. And so, as with Catholics generally, they were a blot on Australia and incapable of integrating into Australia. Later it was the Greeks - the pond's Greek friend at school was routinely reduced to tears by the prejudice and bigotry - and then the Vietnamese and the Chinese, and when any of those wells ran dry, there were always gays and complimentary women ...

Now in some individual cases, perhaps this might be true. 

The pond has seen very little evidence that Paul Kelly has made a single useful contribution to Australia, and perhaps he should be urged to return to Ireland to bond with his Celtic and Catholic ancestors ...

But the pond can remember all those jokes about the smelly Poms and their weekly bath, a joke that could be applied to all ages and nations ...

Kelly's such a senile, tone deaf old fart - if one might speak of him in endearing terms - that likely enough he's forgotten all the ethnic stereotypes, and the jokes about garlic wogs and strange noodle-smelling slant-eyed chinks and others with dubious hygiene ... a slur routinely directed at Aboriginal people too ...

And yet, this sort of idle bigotry is what turns up in the lizard Oz as a result of Dutton, and we are expected to turn a blind eye, or grieve for the suffering of old white men?

Had enough yet, RN management execs? 

Still reckon you can take it? Well at least you can admit that your attempt to make RN even duller and sillier and more outrageous than the reptiles of Oz is a quixotic quest, and now you must take your final dose of medicine ...

You see, now the Irish git is going to try to claw things back a little, on the principle that to return is as tedious as to go o'er ... but that's only the first par. Soon enough in the second par the Irish blunderer will return to thundering away ...

Indeed, indeed. The reality is that letting in the Irish was a significant blunder in our immigration history and as a result there is today a serious problem in the culture of scribblers at the lizard Oz (and perhaps at the pond too, given the taint). 

This blunder shows the unintended consequences of getting migration policy wrong. The dumbing down of the lizard Oz is hugely problematic, and the idea that as a nation, we cannot discuss the many ways the Irish strain in Murdochian publications is ruining the country is frankly and simply ludicrous ...

Well the pond promised never to tell the same joke twice, or publish the same cartoon twice, but really, isn't this Rowe a perfect summary of how the country has been ruined by angry old white men?

And more Rowe here ...

For balance, here's the mutton Dutton's inspiration ...

Yeah, and make him eat some clean coal too ... it's good for him ...