In which the pond shares a laugh with the Major Mitchell ...

Speaking of facts, the pond immediately worried about the Major Mitchell's dating techniques ...

Did he use carbon to arrive at 1958? Isn't the media the massage? Like that particular typo and much of the fuzziness surrounding McLuhan, the pond was confused and wary.

"The medium is the message" has its own wiki here, which suggests The phrase was introduced in McLuhan's book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.

That's the way it turns up in the "common questions" page of the author's eponymous website here ... that's the way it turns up in a pdf  excerpt from the book here, also dated to 1964.

Now the pond understands that a close follower of wikis might think the great southern walri were in danger of extinction,  but as we're invited to put facts before feelings, did it turn up in The Mechanical Bridge in 1951 or perhaps The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962?

It's true that McLuhan's wiki here makes reference to a source for McLuhan's invention of the phrase, in 1957, but the last time the pond checked, 1957 wasn't 1958 ...nor was it the actual phrase ...

The phrase "the medium is the message" may be better understood in light of Bernard Lonergan's further articulation of related ideas: at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message. This sentence uses Lonergan's terminology from Insight: A Study of Human Understanding to clarify the meaning of McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message"; McLuhan read this when it was first published in 1957 and found "much sense" in it—in his letter of September 21, 1957, to his former student and friend, Walter J. Ong, S.J., McLuhan says, "Find much sense in Bern. Lonergan's Insight" (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987: 251). Lonergan's Insight is an extended guide to "making the inward turn": attending ever more carefully to one's own consciousness, reflecting on it ever more carefully, and monitoring one's articulations ever more carefully. When McLuhan declares that he is more interested in percepts than concepts, he is declaring in effect that he is more interested in what Lonergan refers to as the empirical level of consciousness than in what Lonergan refers to as the intelligent level of consciousness in which concepts are formed, which Lonergan distinguishes from the rational level of consciousness in which the adequacy of concepts and of predications is adjudicated. This inward turn to attending to percepts and to the cultural conditioning of the empirical level of consciousness through the effect of communication media sets him apart from more outward-oriented studies of sociological influences and the outward presentation of self carried out by George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Berger and Luckmann, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Duncan, and others. 

Wikiquotes here doesn't manage anything earlier than 1964 and the pond began to think it might waste the entire day pinning down 1958, which just goes to show that a Major Mitchell "fact" is another way of saying a major waste of time and effort, the pond long ago having given up thinking about McLuhan.

After all, anyone who thought that the Virgin Mary spoke to him directly was surely in the grip of a delusion almost as potent as the Major's 'look at me' narcissism, now even more pathetic in its day to day irrelevance ...

So it was time to get cracking on the Major's message for the day ...

Say what? The pond wasted all that time worrying about 1958, and the Major Mitchell thinks that Understanding Media was published that year? Sorry, by carefully avoiding the walri, it's possible to establish that the book came out in 1964 ...

This is what happens when the pond wastes its time with a fuckwit obsessed with social media ...the Major might look bright eyed, but in reality he's just a galah, a cocky in his master's cage ...

Never mind, the pond understands that it will take all the Major Mitchell's skill to redeem this ...

(Images courtesy of social media).

Imagine if someone at the ABC had scribbled:

Life isn't fair and death less so. Had there been a shred of justice, that blast would have detonated in the Surry Hills bunker of the News Corp empire. Unlike those young girls in Manchester, snuffed out before they could begin, none of the reptiles' likely casualties would have represented the slightest reduction in humanity's intelligence, decency, empathy or honesty. Especially the Major Mitchell, on whose gravestone it will be written, "He never did find that fucking Order of Lenin" medal ...

Indeed, indeed, it would have been dismissed as tasteless, gratuitously offensive, a form of vile hate speech, encouraging violence ...

But in the land of the Major Mitchell such language, it seems, is merely "silly"...

He'd add Hollywood? Can we add the Chairman?

By the end of it all, the pond had to resist a sentimental sense of pity at an irrelevant old fart wandering in the outback like John Meillon in Walkabout ... and some of us remember how that ended ...

And so to the last Major Mitchell gobbet ...

Privilege facts over feelings? In a reptile tree-killing rag dedicated to rabid Oreo style Islamophobia and relentless Catholic Boys' Daily rhetoric?

Privilege 1958 as the date that sent the pond haring off down the rabbit hole with Alice?

The pond could feel a Sierra Madre moment coming on ...

Luckily there are some genuine comedians who know how to tell a joke, like the immortal Rowe, with more Rowe here ...

Well that's worth another movie quote ...