In which the pond comes out swinging wildly at Terrorists and Caterists ...

This is an EXCLUSIVE - cry baby Hastie pastie calls up because he can't stand the heat in the kitchen after he lit the fire ...

Of course the reptiles and therefore the pond know the likely culprits ... snobby greenies ...

After Northcote, the pond wondered how long it would be before the reptiles discovered another EXCLUSIVE of the 'greenies are terrible people terribly up themselves' kind...

Perversely the pond was reminded of a recent quote it came across ...

Now ironies of ironies that was in the lizard of Oz - it can be googled by using key words - and reverting to the original online posting, Amis seems to have done a bit of a clean-up or enhancement, because here was a different form of it at The Independent back in 2007...

When it comes to the reptiles and the hive mind and all of the rest of it, the pond is a bit of a snob ...

Never mind, speaking of herd-words, it's time  for the pond to stop its avoidance tactics and confront the day's harsh realities ...

Luckily it can avoid the Terror, for the moment at least ...

These days only the Terror gives comfort to the barking mad armbreaker - celebrating a sporting celebrity driven mad by fundamentalist religious loonery is par for the course - and the pond only stays in touch so it might enjoy Media Watch doing a story such as The Latham vs Faruqi showdown ...

It's a measure of how low the Terror should have sunk that it still gives comfort to a man who has nothing to do, except spend his parliamentary pension while drawing attention to himself ...

And the pond has already celebrated the Bolter, so it was on to the much more dismal task of the day ... dealing with the cash in the paw man ... and what do you know, it brings us back to those devious greenies ...

The real fringe too far is, it goes without saying, the Caterists and the lizard of Oz, a small and declining power in the marketplace, but rewarding for those interested in the way institutions and businesses can slowly slide into irrelevance ...

Now it goes without saying that the pond has a bone to pick with public servants.

After all, somewhere in the anonymous Department of Finance, in anonymous Canberra, some anonymous bunch of public servants were responsible for this ...

... and for years of grants before that.

Is it any wonder that the pond has a dead set on public servants?

As for Ben Chifley, it reminded the pond that he was, before heading into politics, a locomotive engine driver (ADB it here), and the pond's Camperdown house deep in the inner west was once owned by a locomotive engine driver ...

It's a tenuous connection, but in the old days, being a locomotive engine driver was a much esteemed position, and not your usual working class gig - the pond knows this, because one branch of its working class family was a bunch of railway stiffs working in more menial jobs in the shunting yards and on the station up Werris Creek way ...

Those were the days ...

But in turn that leads the pond to that Caterist line "The volume of sweat per hour of work is low."

What, the volume of sweat involved in filling out an application to the Department of Finance for a generous serve of cash in the paw is high? The paperwork is arduous and extreme and the risk of a paper cut is high? Or should that be a joke about the sweat involved in mailing off the pdf of the application form?

What an offensive fuckwit he is, and inclined to much twaddle too ...

The usual way with these mendacious frauds is to purport a great affinity with the unwashed in the outer burgs and a disdain for inner city dwellers, while scribbling for a rag based in Surry Hills and working for an Institute in a public servant city so that access to government funding is just a stroll down the road ...

It reminds the pond of Amis's note that the institution of institutes, like the monarchy, is a sublime wank, so let the wanking continue for another gobbet ... and what's the bet that the wanker with a sociology degree from a second rate British university will make a crack about universities?

You know, there was a time when people realised that there was nothing noble about doing hard yakka for a living. It was hard on body and mind and soul, and poorly paid, and so families dreamed of sending kids to university to escape and get a better life and be able to pay to put decent food on the table.

And now?

"For which food fetishes can be a surprisingly good proxy"?

What a wanker he is, with his talk cardamom poached pear, as if that's all the doing of greenies, and has nothing to do with wankers in the eastern suburbs ...

The pond dined out for years on Paul Sheehan wanking about sourdough bread ...

When the new bakery opened near my home two weeks ago, there was just one product in the window: a row of large, round, dusty sourdough loaves. The miche loaf. They looked so alluring I bought one even though it was a hefty 1.7 kilograms and $13. As I carried it home the loaf was still warm, fresh from the oven. It was immediately obvious this bread was exceptional, with a crunchy, almost caramelised crust. Tasting that loaf, especially the crust, was a spiritual experience. I resolved to do something I had never done before. I wanted to shake the hand of the person who made this possible. (here)

Having marvelled in my 20s at the routine quality of the food in Paris people took for granted, it never occurred that, in my lifetime, the food within my life in Australia would, overall, become superior to the food I found in Paris. That I would have a better miche in my own urban village than the miche from Poilane was not an insignificant cultural marker. (here)

All the links are gone now, Sheehan has been cleansed from Fairfax, disappeared into the digital ether ...

It was too easy to mock him ... and yet, who can imagine that the Caterists are up at 4 am and dining on a lump of coal before heading off to work in mines? Or shovelling coal to keep up the steam for the engine?

The pond doesn't mind good food or good bread either ...

But the pond knows where the Caterist is going with this talk linking food snobbery, gays, homophobia, greenies, the outer burbs and the inner west, and he should stop it ...

Let's locate the homophobia where it has always existed ... deep in the heart of the reptiles of Oz, and Murdochian commentators around the land, encouraging fear and loathing, demonising the other, and then when the results are in acting like tone-deaf spoilsports anxious to ruin the party ...

But as we're speaking of grumpy old men, how about this analysis at Crikey (outside the paywall for the moment)?

..The now notorious Daily Telegraph front page response to the same sex marriage vote last week tells us everything we need to know about News Corp’s strategy in managing down the paper’s structural decline – and how it will end. The admission by Rupert Murdoch at the company’s annual general meeting in the United States later that same day that all bar the company’s national papers are struggling gives us an idea of how successful their strategy is. (Hint: it isn’t.)

...The next day in her column, Markson tried again under the heading: “Seriously, some people just can’t take a joke.” Apparently, she wrote: “The Daily Telegraph’s font page yesterday was a work of creative genius.”

...The conversion of the Tele’s front page to an analogue meme for its audience of grumpy old men is based on understanding how the Tele keeps its readers coming back. Sure, Married…with Children may date you to the 1980s (and been almost deliberately retro even then) but it’s a deliberate back-dating for the Tele’s market...  the Tele’s aging print demographic is not that attractive to advertisers. Most days of the week, it gets by with a handful of displays and about three pages of classifieds – one of those pages for “adult services”. 

... The success of their analogue strategy each day doesn’t translate to digital. In fact, doubling down on the demographic in print hurts them in digital. Grumpy, old men may have liked the Al Bundy cover or the dismissal of Labor’s Bennelong candidate Kristina Keneally the day before as “Bill’s Girl”. But it part mystifies and part repels just about everyone else.

And surely grumpy old Caterists whining about cardamom poached pears and dukkah eggs (oh those Egyptian wogs, remember Suez!) while simultaneously dipping paws in the honey of taxpayer loot so that they might dine out in style on the finest Canberra cuisine (we keed, we keed) is a sight as obnoxious as the Terrorists pandering to the arm breaker and its diminishing market of grumpy old men...

Well enough of that, enough of the Caterists spewing with rage, like ageing rats in a cage, the pond will probably have truffles for lunch, and until that moment arrives, the pond will feast on a truffles-class cartoonist, with more Rowe to be sniffed out here ...

UPDATE: the Caterist trolling produces the result the troll under the bridge always desires ...