In which the pond enjoys a slow, leisurely start with the Major Mitchell ...

Every so often, the pond likes to slip into a Monday easy, quietly, with a minimum of fuss, and what better way this rain-sodden Sydney day, than to don slippers and spend a moment with the Major Mitchell, leading off with a greenie slogan ...

It's a long time since the pond was sitting down listening to puns about standing up for what batters - if only the dog botherer had disappeared in the way his master managed - and the google splash at least got the Major out of a tight batter spot ...

... though it sounds like the Major might be getting himself into another pit of boiling oil, because the Major surely provides evidence that bad journalists and editors don't necessarily make good businessmen and might not have the first clue about how to turn a profit, balance the books or work to a budget ...

Google Major Mitchell at the Oz and the pond is pleased to say all sorts of images pop up in the search ...

Some are simple illustrations ...

Others turn to the matter of the Major as a profit centre ...

There's more at Mumbrella here,  including working links and that update, which provides some kind of capper on the dissembling, disinformation, fatuous outright lies, and refusal to honestly acknowledge the truth of the commercial matter ... which is that the lizard Oz is a vanity project for the Chairman, doing remarkable damage to climate science and many other matters in the process, while losing coin each year ...

If they can't lie straight in bed on this matter, what hope of lying straight on other matters, as opposed to lying crooked?

Indeed, once upon a time not so long ago, Neil Chenoweth did an amusing post, trying to work out exactly how much the reptile rag had lost, beginning with his own first calculation ...

On the other hand, when civil war broke out between the Major and the Bolter, the Bolter provided a different figure, as reported in the New Daily's Andrew Bolt Rages Against The Australian. 

That war - so many reptile wars, so little time - started when the Bolter suggested the reptiles of Oz should be slow to insist others should fall dutifully and loyally behind Malware:

Hey, the pond will accept that the Major Mitchell dropped a casual, lazy 20 mill a year on a rag which depended on subsidy, courtesy the power-seeking vanity and patronage of the Chairman ...

But around this point it will surely be noticed that the pond has yet to indulge in a single fresh thought from the Major Mitchell, so enrapturing and beguiling is all the talk of the deluded Major as a drop kick loser and loss centre.

The point is that the ironies then begin to leap out in the read right from the get go ...

Editorial is the glue that creates revenues? 

QED, the Major doesn't even have the sticking power of fish paste ...

Speaking of quotes, around this time, the pond thought of reverting to some old lines about doing what you preach and all that sort of stuff, and looked to the wisdom of the crowds ...

Put it another way. Why blather about KPIs in private media business, when the simplest measure - the ability to turn a profit - proves that you're a dropkick loser of the first water. A

t this point, a blunter, more Anglo-Saxon imperative of a Miranda the Devine kind becomes relevant ...

But no, the one thing that's certain is that the Major loves the sound of his own screeching, and never picks up the multiple rich ironies in his squawking, and never shuts the fuck up ...

The Major Mitchell routinely produces inanities and stupidities, but that doozy about people wanting to seem better educated by nominating the ABC as their most trusted source is pure comedy gold.

The Major doesn't seem to understand that this implies that anyone wanting to seem better educated would never nominate the lizard Oz, or the rest of the Murdochian press, because to do so would make them sound illiterate, ill-informed, and a climate-denialist, coal loving right wing fanatical loon of the first water Oreo gibberish, Bolter ratbag kind...

Why would that be? Well the evidence comes in that final par, where the Major Mitchell indulges in pure speculation and personal opinion verging on nonsense. 

How did Seven and Nine smash the ABC out of the park? Was it the content? How then did the Major reach that conclusion? Does he have examples? Can he do a compare and contrast? Is the Major talking ratings? But then the ABC always loses in the ratings ...does he have some other way of measuring it, as opposed to us simply listening to an embittered, proven commercial failure of the most inept right wing loon kind.

Was it merely the stupid talk of an idle bird, a passing judgement plucked from the cloud?

Who knows, because at the very moment he should have got going, the Major Mitchell reverted to the comfort and safety of silence, leaving only one thing certain. 

Nobody with half a noggin would turn to the reptile Oz for coverage of a national disaster. The paper is an ongoing national disaster, which directly affects a few unfortunates trapped in a bunker in Surry Hills but which indirectly has contributed to increasing the chances of the country being laid to waste by many more natural disasters in the future ...

Well as we've been speaking of budgets, and the Major Mitchell's inability to run a rag to budget, why not a joke about the country's budget, thanks to Rowe, with more Rowe here ...