In which the onion muncher is on a final warning ...

  

As the pond's favourites return from their holydays, the pond is beginning to feel the heat.

Where only a few days ago the pond had to scrabble around for essence of loonery, this week looks like producing a superabundance, a glut the pond is incapable of handling...

Who could imagine that the Terrorists would head into a frenzy about the latest threat to schools, while over at the lizard Oz, the reptiles were in a state of electric shock at those newfangled monstrosities sending the Tories into a spiral of despair and doubt ...

Having fucked up the NBN, what else was there for them to do? The reptiles even stuck it at the top of the digital page, just to emphasise the irony ...

Sparks showdown? Oh the firing on one cylinder wit of it all ...

Meanwhile, in another world, global sales of EVs soared 63% compared to the same period last year and looking ahead to 2040, China is forecast to capture more than 40% of the EV market ...(Business Insider, December 2017, with graphs too!)

With the move on, what better way for the luddites to waste their time and stick their collective fingers in the dyke, or failing that, up their bums?

It's all to hand with a quick google, China and the EV, and yet the pond had to let it go, just like it had to let old favourite Major Mitchell go ...

The Major is back and squawking up a fine song, apparently not realising the talk wasn't of the victims of crime, the talk was of the racist, race-baiting, fear-mongering, xenophobic, quite shameless behaviour of the reptilian Murdochians ...

The Major's return is a bit like the way the ABC goes on a couple of months break. Once you stop banging yourself on the head with a hammer, there's a powerful temptation not to resume the chore in the new year.

But in any case the pond can't spare the time, because for some time it has been worried about the onion muncher and whether he has a secure space in the pond's banner ... and he too has staked his claim by making a return to the lizard Oz ...

It sounded grim, a tad tired and pathetic ...

Really, the old black armband routine? It all felt so long ago, so distant, like ancient jokes of yore ...

John Howard long gone, and yet still the talk is of black armbands? So it seems ...

Oh sure, the onion muncher did his best to sound offensive and insulting, as if all those Aboriginal deaths were just an irrelevance ...

Now by any objective standards, that's beyond the valley of the weird ... only someone deeply, intrinsically Pom could pull it off ...

As for quoting Life of Brian, how cheeky can you get?

The film, originally released in 1979, is a classic example of anti-Catholicism.

Who can forget that immortal 1979 debate featuring Malcolm Muggeridge, though you have to wait a little while before the doddering Muggers turns up to mug the Pythons?

And now the wretched onion muncher turns up to hail it as a "classic", water under the bridge, so he can steal lines and ideas from it, talk of its hell-bound heresy forgotten, now just a suitable subject for appropriation so he can talk of black armbands, as a way of avoiding what actually happened in the early days of the British invasion, not limited to, but including land dispossession and massacres, and in Tasmania, a goodly shot at a holocaust?

It's really just another way of talking about difficult, pesky, stone age blacks, though the onion muncher doesn't have what it takes to go the full Akker Dakker ...

It's very tired, something akin to other tirednesses seen in the land ...

Tra la, not that the pond minds, the onion muncher having lost his puff and appearing to have lost his way ...

It's as if he can now sense it's his destiny to be a tired gnat on the rump of history, chirping away, with nobody paying much attention ... and with all the heat shifting to the likes of Cory ...

Facts aren't facts? Oh the post-Trumpian cheek of the fact-avoiding fucker ...

And the simple-minded, simplistic repetitions lead the pond into repetitions too ... you see, whenever the routine about Mytall Creek gets raised, the pond reverts to Bill Bryson ...

And then there were other matters, mentioned in the pond's comments ... like the Tasmanian business ... and good old George Arthur ...

When he arrived in Hobart the settlers' relations with the Aboriginals were as bad as they could be. There were probably only about 1000 of them, but, understanding nothing of white man's law, seeing their hunting grounds occupied, their women ravished and their men maltreated whether by bushrangers, convict servants or others, they naturally retaliated, spearing livestock and attacking the whites. Both Sorell and the British government deplored these developments, but Arthur was able to do little to modify them. He tried to explain the colonists' law to the native people, and to punish impartially the guilty on both sides; but the Aboriginals could not understand. On 29 November 1826 he ordered the capture of their leaders; hostile natives were to be treated as 'open enemies' and those guilty of felony to be arrested and punished. Exactly a year later he reminded the settlers of these instructions and ordered out the military to help to enforce them. On 15 April 1828 by an absurd demarcation proclamation he forbade all natives to enter the settled districts, and followed this on 1 November by a declaration of martial law. Taken together these orders appear as 'plans of military operation', and they mark Arthur's adoption of a policy of removal, or extermination, and his surrender to the demands of the settlers. 'The aboriginal natives of this colony are and ever have been a most treacherous race', he wrote on 15 April 1830, though he still welcomed attempts at friendly parley; but, though he forbade the capture of 'inoffensive' natives, a notice of 27 August 1830 reiterated his determination not to 'relax in the most strenuous exertions' to drive all others from the settled country. In October 1830 he decided to try, by a comprehensive operation, to drive them into Tasman Peninsula, for he told Murray on 20 November, 'the hope of conciliation cannot be reasonably entertained'.

Sure in the first pass they only caught two in the Black Line, but the spirit was right, and in the end the job was pretty well done, as it was in other parts of the country ...

The pond has no idea why anyone insists on a sentimental, dewy-eyed view of the past, when an unvarnished look might eradicate glib talk without requiring anyone to don a black armband ...

Well it's true that we no longer have knighthoods, but did the onion muncher have the first clue how he sounded in that final par?

We'll hear a lot more from him? He'll have a lot more to say? He'll treat us to more examples of him rabbiting on about things that need criticising and correction?

Me I  ... and 'you', the hapless victim ...

He makes it sound like a threat, as if we don't have enough already while getting through the day.

And that was the upside to this Monday.

The onion muncher is on a final warning. If all he's got is simple-minded repetitions, and the fucking over of history, the pond has been there and done that, and will head off to modern thinkers... you know, the ones worried about them new fangled gadgets, those damned electrified things ...

As demand for the technology grew, many resisted electricity’s brilliant new glow. It was just too bright. It lent a “corpse-like quality” to those subjected to its glare, one Londoner argued, and it could make a crowd look “almost dangerous and garish.” Robert Louis Stevenson penned “A Plea for Gas Lamps” in 1878, hoping to dissuade London’s authorities from installing obnoxious electric streetlamps like those in Paris. “A new sort of urban star now shines at nightly,” he wrote, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!” (here).

And so to a cartoon about the Donald which might also carry a message for the onion muncher ...