Look, it's not as if the pond hasn't warned the reptiles often enough ...
Friday lunchtime is when the pond expects to kick back and relax with a TGIF sort of offering, say a Moorice in full flight climate denial mode, or a bromancer endorsing a war with North Korea ...
Something relaxing, light and cheerful ... and if the reptiles won't deliver, then by golly, the pond will go elsewhere for its frivolity, and sure enough the Speccie is a reliable punt ...
After all, if the sexual reformation has opened up a schism between women and men, what's it likely to lead to?
No sex, no babies, and the entire world over-run by fertile, fecund, fucking Jihadists ...
Why the pond bit into its lunch with all the fear it could manage ... but that wasn't nearly enough fun.
Look who should turn up on the far right at the top of the page this day as the Editor's top Choice pick than Giles Auty, with a publishing date of tomorrow, proving just what a seer and a futurist he is ...
Now there's a fair chance that no one will remember Giles, a legend mainly in his own lunchtime, a failed painter, who turned to scribbling and art criticism, and who ended up, like much other detritus, washed up on the lizard Oz shore, until even the reptiles decided they'd had enough of him ...
Then he started turning up in the local Spectator, as once he'd done long ago in dull old England ...
But don't let this wretched history lead a stray reader astray.
Giles might be ancient, but he's still a class act, and he can discover a world conspiracy at the drop of the ancient hat, which is of course an essential paranoid skill, especially if scribbling for the Spectator ...
It is of course beyond parody ... those lines about sinister international co-ordinating bodies, while at the same time talking of Catholicism, a sinister international co-ordinating body emanating from Rome like the whore of Babylon ...
At this point, it might be just as well to do a little time travel back to a piece in the Baltimore Sun here about Giles in his heyday... Baltimore being the sort of town where a Giles might get a hearing ...
Quaint really, managing to sound irrelevant in 1993, and then striding on, so that complete and total irrelevance might be just around the corner in 2017 ...
Of all the colour in that colour piece, the pond most loved the line "there is nothing of the sour curmudgeon about him" ...
Indeed, indeed, when what we need for these troubled times is a silly old fart blathering about an international conspiracy of teh gaze, in league with da Commies ...
Barking mad, of course, and a paranoid conspiracy theorist to boot, but the pond neglected to finish off that earlier colour piece, and so must now do its duty ...
Life-altering experiences? Oh how the pond misses the days it munched on human flesh and drank human blood, and they called it a modern religion ...
And speaking of the arid, the outdated, and the truly negligible, what better way to do a throw back to the last gobbet of Giles for the day?
Barking mad of course, but really, a top notch read for a TGIF lunch, and a warning to the reptiles ...they really need to work harder at their Holy Wars and they really do need a better class of lunatic ...
How sorry they must be to see a class curmudgeon deliver the paranoid goods for the Spectator ... surely the last outpost of certifiable loons in the land ...
And now, for a few cartoons ...
"The San?" Does he realise it was founded on the principles of the SDA health loons, Ellen White and John Harvey Kellogg? (See 'The Road to Wellsville'). Cold showers, tying boys arms down, eating cornflakes and yoghurt enemas were all recommended to counter the evils of masturbation (which Ellen White thought led to insanity and feeble-mindedness). She even believed in Phrenology and took her son Willie to have his bumps read.
ReplyDelete"Does he realise ...". I'd say he doesn't 'realise' anything that isn't fed to him in mind numbing simplicity by Kengor. After all, he is 82 now.
ReplyDeleteAnd there's nothing wrong with eating cornflakes ... though I have to say I'm all Natures Path Maple Nut Oatmeal these days ... and sometimes Weeties just for old times' sake.
Nor is there anything amiss with believing in phrenology - even Alfred Binet believed in it for a while. But at least he didn't ever believe in that reified nonsense called 'IQ'.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDelete“My wife’s maternal great -grandfather was one of the co-founders of the Sanitarium in Sydney.”
“Shortly before Communism collapsed, the woman who would become future wife and I travelled and worked in countries…”
Just so nobody gets the wrong idea, although I may be a British Public School educated Art Critic, I am married and not only that married to a woman.
DiddyWrote
By my calculations, DW, he married (around the time of the fall of communism) in his late fifties.
DeleteI think people might get the wrong idea.
Giles' ramblings are published by Connor Court, a fine publishing house with a galaxy of star contributors: John Roskam, Cory Bernardi, Gary Johns, Tom Switzer, Alan Moran, Ian Plimer and George Pell. Everything they print is like the Catholic Boys' Daily in hardback.
ReplyDeletePro tip, Giles - if you lie down with dogs, you get up with tiresome old right wing, bigoted, anti-science, tendentious, reactionary god-bothering sophists.
Longing to hear more about Gramsci's (posthumous?) career in American academia. Greg Hunt research shows that Gramsci worked as a journalist, editor and elected politician prior to his imprisonment. It's one thing to be stupid, it's another to be stupid AND ignorant.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Well, Anony, I'd say it just might be possible to be ignorant and not stupid - large percentages of the human race have kinda been so for thousands of years - but so far as I can see, if you are stupid you will definitely be ignorant.
DeleteThe stupid have no epistemic capabilities, so must believe whatever they are, or aren't, told. And I'm not sure that either imbeciles or morons do any better.