In which the pond shares maple syrup with a dual Canuck, and detects a fiendish foreign influence at work in Australia, thanks to sharp-eyed Sharri ...

Friday and the reptiles are in a bloodline frenzy and the pond still isn't certain of the Kenny prize rules, though it knows that the Kenny rulez ...

Is Friday the cut-off for the weekly award? It seems likely, because the best of the reptile contenders have abandoned the field of play this day, and the lesser reptiles worry and gnaw away at the news that pesky furriners might have penetrated to the heart of government ... 

Such is the fuss that the reptiles of Oz were dominating the google dual citizenship logarithm ...

The digital front page also featured the fuss at the top of the page ...

It all seemed so clear  not so long ago, when those silly inept greenies were the only victims. 

But when the best and bravest begin to wobble, and there's talk of heels with Achilles' heels, oh what to do, what to do?

Well why not wheel out a crazed Canuck, a familiar Quadrant voice, a Spectator fave ...

Well a Canuck would say that, wouldn't he, though the pond thinks the situation is now so serious and alarming that the reptiles of Oz should check the passports of anyone proposing to write a column for them, lest they unwittingly publish something unAustralian ...

Now it's true that Canada seems incredibly lax when it comes to dual citizens in parliament but if we were to follow them on this, what next? 

Moose in the street, funnily dressed plods on horses, maple syrup scattered on spinach, an addiction to poutine and nanaimo bars and smoked salmon and butter tarts, and worst of all, a devotion to ice hockey ... 

At this point the pond realised it shouldn't listen to a Canuck, no matter the pleasure it gave in ethnic caricature, stereotyping and simplistic reductionism ...

For that sort of work, the Terror supplies simplistic simpleton Sharri on a Friday ...

Yes, the Terrorists were also agitated about the fuss, all the more so as one of the world's top climate scientists was at the centre of the fuss ...

Sharri wasn't going to listen to any crazy Canuck ...

Oh okay, it's a well-known Friday pond ritual for the discerning elderly gentleman reader, though really, the Terrorists have been getting more and more modest in their Sharri splashes, which forces the pond to look back to the good old days when Sharri knew how to sell a story ...

Now the pond realises that this unseemly detour has entirely interrupted the thought flow of the visiting Canuck, even if that might be simplistically summarised as "Canadians and maple syrup are as Australian as the next ice hockey player" ...

Hmm, that seems far too tolerant and generous a position, not at all Speccie, and so the pond must turn back to sharpish Sharri for a final opinion ...

You see, with diligent application and a studious manner, it's possible to move from a consideration of 44 to discovering treacherous, treasonous foreign, possibly commie or Islamic swine under the bed ...

See how it's done ...

Now the pond has no idea how that thought bubble popped out of the ether ...

Besides, numerous candidates in the 1990s couldn't run for office because they held dual citizenship.

WTF? What on earth does that have to do with anything? They couldn't run in the 1970s and the 1980s either ...

But actually, it's a cunning, artful way of showing how to introduce complete irrelevancies into the conversation ...

First a minor non sequitur and then it's on to a bit of bush track bashing on the road to hell or complete inconsequentiality ... and with it, the ultimate discovery - fiendish, devious foreign agents of influence under the bed - can be produced with a Sharri flourish ...

Oh sorry, the pond didn't mean to imply with that into to the snap of Canavan that the Canavan caravan was a fiendish, devious agent of foreign influence ... 

But heck, isn't it a good way to move from talk of 44 to talk of furriners under the bed, and spies and ASIO and agents of influence and Commies ...

Now around this point some innocent stray reader unused to the simplistic simpleton ways of Sharri might wonder how we've ended up here. 

But the pond knows for a fact that there might be as many as 10,000 Murdochian agents or spies in Australia, employed by a foreigner to create havoc and chaos in the body politic, though the number is impossible to verify ...

Ah, there we go, it was a long journey, but look at those shifty suspects, those agents of foreign influence.

44 + Bob Carr + snappy Sam = the Sharri bleeding paranoid obvious.

Now the pond realises that as far as the average Kenny award prize winner goes, this is a feeble effort, and there are many better jokes doing the rounds ...

But the pond thinks it's a pivot worthy of Silicon Valley, and still the pivot went on, with 44 barely remembered, and the Chinese firmly under the bed, and if the Chinese are there, can the Palestinians be far behind?

Now it's likely even Sharri sensed that she'd rambled far out into right field, and somehow needed to try to tie together the strands of incoherent thought into a fittingly paranoid whole which somehow managed to drag 44 back from the fringes of the paranoia into the heart of it ...

Oh indeed, indeed ... out, out damned spot and foreign influencers breaching the Australian political process ...

And luckily in the hunt for foreign influencers breaching the Australian political process, the always helpful Pope came up with another suggestion, with more papal insights here ...

And here's a stray Leunig ...