In which the pond ends up in the company of dangerous 'leets, a reptile columnist and a former High Court judge ...

(Above: the pond felt the need for a Pope sweetener, because this one is an epic doozy, and many will prefer to look at other sweet Popish pleasures here).

Before beginning with today's usual reptilian nonsense, the pond would like to travel a little way down the movie yellow brick road to a relatively recent posting in the Daily Review, Eleven years of David and Margaret Disappear From ABC Website ...

The pond's partner was moaning about this, and on one level it doesn't concern the pond, because it remains deeply convinced that David Stratton was a pompous bore of unreliable taste, and Margaret Pomeranz was too often forced to adopt the look of someone at a party where her partner starts droning on in his usual pompous way and someone looks to her to stop him, or at least talk some sense into him ...

But what evidence can the pond provide of this, now that the ABC in its infinite capacity for cultural vandalism, has taken down the reviews from 2004 to 2014, and sent them into the digital wilderness, supposedly for only a time, but who knows for how long and in what form some might return in due course?

These are the bureaucratic heirs to the stupid folk who in their infinite stupidity destroyed much of Countdown so that they could recycle tapes ... and now spend their time recycling "classic Countdown" on a Sunday ...

That's the classics that managed to survive.

Meanwhile, the excuse for the latest act of cultural vandalism ...

“While the site that hosted the content had a very low number of visits, the ABC values the content produced by At The Movies and looks forward to sharing it with fans in the future.”

This is the way it will go in the future, culture doled out by stupid people counting their stupid clicks.

The pond pities the poor mug who diligently put together a list of What Margaret and David say about 500 Oz Movies, and must now forward punters to the Wayback Machine to see what they can find ...

Update: As of sometime in 2017, the ABC website removed their At The Movies archive, and the links below for movies released between 2004 and 2014, no longer function. To read/see the ABC reviews, copy the link and paste it in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive.

The point of course is that the ABC is now so beleaguered that it doesn't value its cultural legacy, nor fight to sustain it, nor to service its past works ... though that's a vandalising attitude it has managed to sustain over the generations ...

You won't find any of this reported by the reptiles, whose own attitude to retrieving past cultural memories is infested by pretty much the same short-sighted cultural vandalism ... and so the internet becomes a vast morass of lost memories, only available if you have a URL and get lucky with the Wayback Machine ...

And now, the ABC chastised and hopefully the partner mollified that rage was expressed, so to the usual, this time featuring a reptile the pond fails to appreciate far too often ...

What is it with paranoid fundamentalist Xians? Always persecuted, under siege? Wasn't that good for business in Roman times? Don't we need a few more long-suffering martyrs so that the faithful can mouth off platitudes and prayers to? Wasn't it the church itself that excommunicated St Mary of Penola?

Well it turns out that the angelic one is simply in the recycling business, drawing attention to other reptile endeavours ...

Yes, you can be a former member of the High Court and still sound barking mad, howling like a reptile at the paranoid conspiracy moon, dominated by elites ... because, when you think about it, the very last place you'd expect to find the 'leets is sitting on a bench in the High Court ...

But first to the lesser Shanners doing her own predictable form of howling ...

By golly, it's as tedious as a David Stratton review, and as full of as many errors ...but you have to hand it to the tykes, they have long and intolerant memories. Damn that Henry - weren't the popes of his day at one with Jesus in their behaviour? - and it goes without saying that these damned modern 'leets are just Henry VIII in drag ...

But the pond will hesitate over that point, "my view is as good as yours." 

Well yes, that's actually the nature of opinion. The pond's view of a movie is as good as David Stratton's and the pond's view of history is as good as someone as silly as silly old Angelia ...

That's the democratic dinkum Aussie spirit. If an officer's going to tell you to go over the top and charge a machine gun, you can reserve as your opinion that you're going to get your arse shot off ...

That's what views are, that's what opinions are for. Now these can be argued and debated, and ground might be given, and facts might be marshalled, but here's an insight. 

Everybody has opinions, and only vastly silly people call this some sort of relativist credo ... though it does help explain why, when Luther put out his theses and asked for them to be debated, he got the same sort of tone-deaf hysterical response from the church that Angela now offers ...

We must consider specific legal protection of religion? 

We all know what that dogwhistle means ... use the cloak of the SSM debate to entrench bigotry and homophobia, and dismiss any regrets as a form of relativism ... because in the good old days you could drown witches and burn gays at the stake for heresy, and it was all ruined by those bloody protestants protesting away ...

And so to the main course ... and lordy lordy what a feast it is ...

Now as noted before, it takes a peculiar form of braying for a former member of the High Court to drone on about 'leets, and when the pond says drone on, it thanks the long absent lord that David Stratton's movie show format necessarily involved a form of brevity ... because Heydon speechifying is like forty days and nights in the wilderness of ripe, fruity loonacy ...

Now it would be unseemly for the pond to demand a handsome payment into the pond's Godwin's Law swear jar at this point - indeed, it's probably unwise for the pond to demand anything at this point, because Dyson Heydon, born in 1943, has clearly gone a little old and odd... and possibly knows nothing about the propriety of banging on about the Nazis as a way of discussing issues ... why it might even be a little too modern for him to talk about soup Nazis ...

Never mind, the pond has much to cover, as ancient elite brays about modern elites and once more relativism rears its ugly head ...

What's interesting to any student of paranoia and conspiracy theories is the way that there's a nameless mass of modern elitism threatening everything held sacred and dear by the Dyson ...

The pond diagnoses too much reading of the lizard Oz and the Spectator, very dry sherry in hand, as the leather chair rustles and creaks with indignation ...

Never has an attempt to shut someone up, or shut them down, led to such a lengthy and verbose retort ...

Barking mad of course, the world seen as dominated by many inscrutable 'leets, with an uncontrollable and immutable determination to put poor old Heydon down ... but what's worse, even for the most intrepid voyager, there's still two gobbets to go, and as any long-suffering student of Latin will recall, the last gobbets were always the most painful ...

Now the pond doesn't hold it against the Xians for destroying the Roman empire, and thereby preventing the pond from attending a jousting of gladiators ... we now have thugby league, so all's well ...

But it really does irritate the shit out of the pond when people overlook the deeds of colonialism and imperialism, often done in Christ's name (ssh, no mention of the Belgian Congo or South America please), a couple of world wars, the Holocaust, and all the rest of it ...

If this is the civilising influence of Xianity, then the planet is truly fucked ...

But instead of picking an argument, the pond would like to suggest a guessing competition as a reward for those intrepid souls who actually manage to get to the end of the very last gobbet.

At what venue was the unelite High Court judge speaking when he delivered all these gobbets of hysterical paranoia about the 'leets?

Congratulations anyone who guessed the ACU ... there no 'leets, no 'leets there ...

The pond would like to say to winners that your copy of the pamphlet "It's time to bring back the notion of heresy and the dunking stool" is in the post, but instead all the pond can offer is a Rowe cartoon, and happily anyone can find a lot more Rowe here ...