In which the pond recovers from a wind turbine induced crisis to build a wall with the Donald and the reptiles of Oz ...

(Above: the memes keep flowing, and anything involving the pond's favourite American painter has to catch the eye).

Well that was interesting. 

The moment the pond woke and discovered that the power had gone off, and taken out the full to overflowing intertubes, it knew exactly what had gone wrong ... the reliance on wind turbines, the rejection of easy, cheap, glorious black coal (or even grand Victorian brown),  the over-reliance on the sun - what has it ever done for us? - and filthy socialism had produced the inevitable consequences, and now the pond had to suffer ...

Some might think this unhealthy paranoid delusional thinking, but hey, that's what happens when there's too much reptile reading matter in the diet, corrupting the noggin and turning it fetid with foolishness ...(though we still have a problem with Lee Rhiannon) ...

Meanwhile, some parts of the world are slowly waking up to the notion that there might be a sociopath, a psychotic, or at least a mad man (not in advertising) in residence at the White House, to add to the already certifiable narcissism, grandiosity and Napoleonic delusionalism ...

Just look at this latest flurry of NY Times' floozies ...

That poor sap Spicer. How long will he last in the revolving door of sycophants?

The pond only asks the question and pays any attention because the reptiles of Oz, slow to hop in their tree-killer mode, had penned a mighty editorial endorsing the Donald, despite the equally mighty sarcasm of Jack the insider ...

Lo, see how they contend ...

Of course the idea of walls goes a long way back, and not just to China. It also includes Hadrian's effort, and the Berlin wall and sundry other attempts to do a Canute and hold back the tide ... like the lesser known but still pretty huugggeee great wall of India, the Israelis trying to build their own little gulag, and so on ...

The only thing guaranteed about walls is that they're expensive to build, expensive to maintain, expensive to police and enforce, and ultimately fail and are swept away by history, though they routinely exercise a powerful hold on the imagination ...

By golly, wasn't that Maginot Line a classic routine ...

The Romans instinctively knew this about walls, and for the better part of the empire's life, took immigrants and turned them into useful cogs in the Roman machine ...until the Scots went rogue ...

Other empires followed the Roman lead .. ...

And so to the reptiles, because someone must ...

Now the enormous stupidity of all this goes without saying, though Jack the Insider had plenty to say about the way Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes swept around the great wall of China in a doddle, before taking a look at the way the Donald is going to sort out all the Mexicans with his wall ...

So much irony, so much sarcasm dripping from the ceiling, but the pond found the Oz editorial much, much funnier ...

Just look at the opening line of the second par in the final gobbet ...

US visa vetting will ban anyone engaging in bigotry? Oppression on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation?

Do they start deporting all the fundamentalist Xians now?

Well gosh gee, gosh darn it, there goes any chance for Bill Leak, the Bolter, Cory, and many other reptiles scoring a visa into the good old USA ...

And what's the bet that tomorrow there'll be something in the Oz berating people for being too politically correct?

And now, please stand by for an explanation of how the full to overflowing intertubes is a nation with borders ...

Standing by ... the pond has arranged for this transmission to terminate about ten kms off shore, well within the fishing zone ...

Well, everything went wrong this day - damn you wind and solar energy, oh coal, how sorry the pond is, even if it had not much of anything to do with you - but at least the pond survived Australia Day, and left it behind clutching a wondrous cartoon, and more splendid David Rowe cartoons can be found here ...

Take it away, Tamworth boy, doing his best to sound as eccentric as the Donald ...