In which a mortified pond sneaks in a belated Major Mitchell ...

Every Monday, as reliable as a clock operating on reptile safe handling time, the pond relaxes with the Oreo and the Major Mitchell.

That's the rule, and yet this day the pond was mortified to see the Major Mitchell swept aside by the onion muncher, Moorice and the Oz editorialist.

This cannot, this will not, stand ... and so the pond has snuck in a late treat, hopefully offering yet another example of safe reptile handling ...

The Major gets off to a great start this day with talk of delicious ironies.

The pond is always watchful, wanting to note the point when the Major reveals himself to be up himself in a major deliciously ironic way.

For that, there's no point reading beyond the first par, because it turns out that while nobody knows nothing, the Major Mitchell understands everything ... thereby explaining how the Major Mitchell managed to run the lizard Oz at a significant loss for any number of years ...

One of the things that delights the pond is the way that the Major Mitchell doesn't deign to look at the world around him when scribbling about his ironical perspectives ...

Take that slap-down of suburban free newspapers. The pond's local - Murdoch-owned - Inner West Courier clocked in at 104 pages in a recent issue. On glossy tree killing paper at that. It's true that the Fairfaxians were a risible 44 pages with a four page wrap around this day, while the Terror managed 48 pages with a 16 page wraparound dedicated to thugby league, which doesn't qualify as news, but rather produces the usual thugby Terror. The Oz managed only 32 pages, which even allowing for it remaining broadsheet, doesn't amount to much.

It's also true the local rag is a weekly, though the pond thought we were talking size, not how many times it came ...

But even size is an unreliable measure, it being an old maxim that it's not the size that counts, it's what's done with it, and any paper that puts the Oreo and Moorice in print has less going for it than the Courier's latest warnings about local disasters (so many, not least the road build from hell).

But what delight to see Major Mitchell mock the Fairfaxians demonising the ABC, as a "very old line" used by the reptiles ... so that's how seriously it should be taken.

With that one, the pond had to pause for a cup of tea ...

And then it was back to the Major, still clinging with all his might to the right to kill trees ...

It's funny really. The pond happens to have an SEO guru in the family, and he happens to be in the direct marketing business. It's a tough business - many are the happy jokes about David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and ABC - not that ABC but the desire to be closing - but when the guru compares and contrasts traditional free to air television to Facebook as a way of generating leads, he can usually be heard shouting that FTA is fucking useless and deserves to be dead in five years  (even though a hearty chunk of FTA contra air time is being sunk into the business).

As for brands, it's as if Aldi's penetration in the marketplace has zoomed right past the Major. Aldi is the brand - about the only other brands to be found in-store are a few classic must-haves of the Milo and Vegemite kind.

Here the pond might wander off down another path, which ironically it discovered the other day in the reptile Oz ...

Put it another way. If all your shitty brand produces is the lizard Oz and a bunch of crappy tabloids, beware the future when talking about value-for-money propositions and brands.

You'd have to be as blind as a Major Mitchell not to notice the way young things roam the streets these days, terrorising motorists, or themselves, by having their eyes glued to screens, unless they're in cars terrorising pedestrians and motorists by having their eyes glued to screens ...

This might change sometime in the future, but the pond very much doubts it ...and then where goes the tree killer brands of yore? 

All this thinking made the pond thirsty ...

... because one thing's obvious enough from reading the Major Mitchell.

It's clear enough why he managed to drive the reptile business into the ground ...

The bit before the update here, but what a dropkick and a doofus ... boasting about how he was being gouged and somehow this was good for business. By golly that's as good as the Donald using bankruptcies as a model for the American economy.

Well thankfully the last gobbet of the Major is brief - he really does know how to ramble on at length, a price that's paid because of the endless capacity of the full-to-overflowing intertubes to absorb gibberish ...

Talk about out of the mouths of babes. Not the first fucking clue about the way that the likes of TPG works ...

Check out the unholy fuss surrounding TPG and Caesars ...heck, just google up TPG and asset-stripping ...

Fairfax better placed? That's secret Major Mitchell code for totally fucked, though the Major is probably cheerful in the faint hope that as a result, the reptiles of Oz might finally score a profit ...

Well it's just another day with the all-seeing Major Mitchell, which as expected turned out to be about as useful as a day with that all-seeing bankrupt The Donald ...