Fear not. The pond isn't going to take a look at scintillating Sharri doing over Barners one more time ...
There are a number of reasons. First the Terrorists have become very keen on a Times-style paywall, and the pond is inordinately pleased, and has taken this as a personal compliment.
The reptiles have gone to all this trouble just to stop the pond, with its gnat-like number of hits?
Steady. It's easy to get swept up by delusions of grandeur and imagine that the reptiles have taken this stand as a direct riposte to the pond ... but the reality's a little more obvious, as noted a few days ago in Crikey ...
You'll have to access Crikey for that hot link and the rest of the story, but the point's obvious enough ... the reptiles are in a world of pain.
It's all the weirder then that news.com.au still keeps on giving away the family jewels for free ... do the reptiles really think this bait and switch strategy is working?
And besides, the pond can only take so many bouts with Barners and the reptiles on any given day.
It's worse than a Tamworth Paleo diet ... kill the 'roo, eat the lapin in a red wine sauce ...feast on Barners beef jerky ...
The pond likes to vary its diet and lately on a Friday, it's taken to hanging out with the Speccie crowd ... and there's usually some prime example of extremely aged wagyu dangling on the vine ... or perhaps clutching a medal ...
The pond was startled.
Had Giles at long last found the Order of Lenin medal that had haunted the Major Mitchell for so long?
On a dark night, checked out with fogged glasses, that might be the sort of thing Manning Clark was caught wearing by the Major's spies ...
Was Giles holding it up as a way of reassuring the parrot, who has also ducked behind the paywall ... but still cops jokes from the likes of Guy Rundle ...
Sheesh, there's the pond still carrying on about the reptiles, when Giles is waiting to carry on about the neo-Marxists that plague the land ... nay, the entire world ...
Oh why, oh y ...
You could bottle this distilled essence of grumpy old men shouting at clouds, and make a fortune selling it as "Dr. Pond's miracle cure for a laugh a day" ...
This is just the sort of stuff the pond needs for a TGIF ... distilled essence of paranoia, lavish servings of meandering memories, a certain braying solemnity and an incipient hysteria, and above all, a complete absence of humour, irony or any form of self-awareness ...
Grants? What does that tell us about the teat-sucking attitude of our Giles, down there with the Caterists?
Where's the entrepreneurial spirit, where's the going out in the wilderness on your own to carve a civilisation by snatching it away from the heathens and the primitives and lesser folk?
As for good old Percy being Australia's best composer, does that come with a free whip, a love of Nordics and a deep mother fixation?
There's a good tour of the flagellation section of Percy's museum here ... while the place itself is worth a visit if out Royal Parade way... remember to hum a tune about country gardens while giving one of the whips a go ...
As for Streeton v. Nolan, all that confirms is that poor old Giles is lost somewhere in the 1950s or perhaps the 1960s, and is unlikely to return soon ...
And now please remember to capitalise things, and mock girlies who stay in dorms at boarding schools ... just so you can get that vintage mindset flowering ...
God? God willing? Inshallah? Has he turned Islamic terrorist?
Like those delusionals, he's still talking with his imaginary friend?
But what if She takes a view about all this talk of war and battles and such like stuff?
What's old Giles got against knitting? What if She happens to like knitting?
Never mind, the pond went in search of comedy, and by golly it found it, along with the news that painting seems to have shuddered to a halt by the nineteenth century ...
And what about that moan about all the state-funding, while moaning about the way that Quadrant didn't score state-funding?
Not to worry, here's an artist's impression of Giles haunted by post-modernist Marxists ...
Well that's a good enough excuse to end with a Rowe, celebrating a most peculiar form of trickle down, with more trickling Rowe here ...
Some book! wordstopages.com tells me that 16000 words is about 36 pages.
ReplyDelete(Berlioz sometimes suffered from writer's block -"The lobes of my brain seemed about to disintegrate; I felt as if burning embers were scorching my veins. Sometimes I stayed sitting with my elbows on the table, holding my head in my hands. Sometimes I strode up and down like a sentry on duty in twenty-five degrees of frost. I stood at the window and looked out at the neighbouring gardens and the heights of Montmartre and the setting sun – and at once my thoughts flew off and I was carried off a thousand miles from the hideous opera-comique.")
Just a wee quote from Wikipedia, Joe:
Delete"many chapter books for children start at a length of about 16,000 words"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count
hmmm - "Noddy Fights for Western Civilisation", perhaps?
DeleteFlouty Auty: "The late Percy Grainger ... is arguably Australia's foremost musical composer but how exactly would you rate him in comparison to Handel, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, say."
ReplyDeleteI'd probably rate him against them on much the same basis as I'd rate him in comparison with Peter Sculthorpe and/or Carl Vine. Amongst many, many others who you can look up here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_list_of_Australian_classical_composers
And you can add in ACDC if you're inclined.
The Flouty again: "The Western civilisation which the neo-Marxists in our midst are so anxious to destroy produced Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt and Vermeer over quite a short space of time."
And who has this wondrous "Western civilisation" produced of late ? Salvadore Dali and Christo maybe ?
No, no we've gotta do better than this mugwump, DP. Bring back Fruity Flinty !
Lastly: "Ours was once a pretty decent country ..."
Yair, back when the judicial Lefties introduced the Eight Hour Day and the Living Wage and votes (and the right to stand for election) for women. Then the Right-Wingnuts took over again.
Much more to PG than fnar fnar sniggers about whips, DP. A strange and obsessed man, certainly, but generous and painfully honest. You’re more right than you know about Country Gardens. Perks reckoned it was anything but a light-hearted setting, instead expressing a wild, almost savage energy, more turnips and taters than twee trellises.
ReplyDeleteThe pond happens to be a devoted fan of PG, and has nothing against whips in the right place at the right time ... but as noted elsewhere, for someone to blather about Percy when there have been a number of significant composers since Percy's day induced a desire to give silly old Giles a good lashing.
DeleteDoes Percy represent all that's great about western civilisation, with his Freudian fixations and his willingness to go the Nordic route? Sure he made great sounds with fencing wire and strange machines, but you won't find Giles blathering about those noises ...
No Giles deserved a good whipping, because the boarding school view of life sometimes leads to excessive wanking ...
Okay Mr Auty, I give up - where are these left-wing “orgies of luxurious nonsense” of Scruton’s? To me that is a perfect description of the unfettered (right wing) capitalist greed that caused the 2008 GFC. And that's just one example of free market debauchery that us plebs were left to clean up.
ReplyDeleteSpecial Operative Auty is going to need more than a commando squad if his “enemy” is everyone who voted for SSM. What a twerp!
ReplyDeleteAhh, the poor widdle neocons. Having to fight against the millions, when all they have is fuck-tons of money on their side. Boo hoo...
ReplyDeleteThe much praised Roger Scruton (that's his pic with the gong at the top, not Auty's) - homophobic, animal-torturing, arriviste Roger Scruton - was drummed out of British academia by those nasty PC warriors, not, as it turned out, for the aforementioned "dangerous ideas" of his, but because he was exposed by the Guardian for writing anti-anti-smoking articles in numerous newspapers without mentioning he was getting $100,000 from the Japan Tobacco Institute. Oopsie!
Fleeing to America, it was natural for a man with as solid a moral compass as Scruton to sign on with the Ethics(?) and Public Policy Centre, which, as you might imagine from the name, is one of those NeoConBot factories like the IPA. Funded by the Koch brothers, the Islamophobic and anti-immigration Scaife Foundation and other affiliates of the wingnut John Birch Society, it has been a regular source of well-reasoned, not-at-all-groupthinky social commentary and legal kite-flying to overturn hard-won civil rights since the mid 70's.
He skulked back into the UK a few years back and took up a minor post at Oxford - not in a College, but an independent Catholic "Hall" - lecturing to empty theatres about things no one cares about, and lives out his days as a professional curmudgeon.
To his credit, in his prime Scruton (while mostly wrong) was intelligent, mildly influentual, and moderately ballsy*. I think Nick Cater wants to be him, only being a bit deficient in intelligence, influence and balls.
*fought his way into the establishment from modest roots, got trailed around Czecho and Hungary by the secret police while being generally annoying to the communists...
But he could still be holding an Order of Lenin medal, couldn't he FrankD? I mean, they were everywhere amongst Deviant Leftists, the Kremlin handed them out like confetti, and Major Mitchell has been hunting them down ever since ...
DeleteWikipedia says that "Scruton has written over 50 books on philosophy, art, music, politics, literature, culture, sexuality, and religion".
Delete50+ books ! None of which any of us - with just maybe the exception of FD at some time in his life - have ever seen, much less read.
So I guess his Lenin medal is all that he really has to pass on down to the succeeding generation that he never fathered.
I deplore the idea that I would ever waste my precious time hunting up books on philosophy, GB, let alone reading them. I pride myself on being inscrutonable...
DeleteSadly for the gaudily-crested one, this is not the medal he is looking for. It is the bauble of a Knight Bachelor, which gets you "Sir", but no postnominals, and unlike the OOL, will not facilitate entry into smoky clubs where men in turtlenecks and berets discuss "permanent revolution, comrade".
The Kt trinket is also a Boojum, and the photo captures Scruton in the process of softly and suddenly vanishing away.
Well I have to say that reinforces my impression of your good sense, FD, but somebody may once have thrust such Scrutonising nonsense into your attention, unsought and unwelcome. Even with one such as me that has happened from time to time. But fortunately I have a very porous memory and such things happily vanish from my consciousness.
DeleteBut re books on philosopjy, I have to say that I did enjoy parts of Bertie's History of Western Philosophy - especially his total takedown of Sokrates. That was when I realised two things: that philosophers are much more skilled, and entertaining, at destroying 'philosophies' than creating them; and that the only part of 'philosophy' with any meaning at all is logic.
Otherwise, some snarks indeed are, aren't they (lessons in life from a master logician).