In which the pond reluctantly joins Dame Slap in blaming ordinary Australians for everything that's wrong in the country, as we bid fair to become the Greece of the South Pacific ...

Why not start off with a reason why the pond found Armidale hard to handle?

Serves Barners right - living in a mental fog should be matched by living in a physical one …

As for the day's reptile reading, the pond still hasn't caught up with the Caterists and only reluctantly agreed to look at Dame Slap …

You see, the pond was touched to the heart by a recent petrol head story the reptiles borrowed from comrade in arms The Times …

This must be the first time the pond has paid attention to cars …but what a timely intervention.

How it suits the reptiles, deep this day in their devotion to coal, and - it has to be said - to the rampant socialism needed to overturn markets and quaint notions of capitalism at play, so that government might spend squillions saving dinkum Oz coal, oi, oi, oi …

The agrarian socialists are on the march …no wonder the smell of petrol intoxicates the reptile nostrils ...

Oh how they like grunt, oh how they like a manly car with muscles, and balls of steel, and fiery excitement, and look, big enough to work on a coal field of the mind if push came to shove...

Silly effete Jaguar … and the pond was looking forward to more stories in the lizard Oz about the way there's a return to newsprint, the benefits of vinyl, the new future for the 8-track, the joys of the Philips compact cassette, the importance of reel to reel, and the desire to revive VHS, along with stories about why streaming is just a passing fad and the future is in cable television … the reptiles have no idea why the pond wastes time streaming documentaries about bizarre Indian cultists setting up camp in Oregon when it could just spend a fortune hooking up with Foxtel…

But in lieu of all these exciting stories, the pond had to turn to Dame Slap, with deep reluctance, because she's still banging on about the late great cricket saga, and the pond is so over it …

But at least Dame Slap knows the real cause … the corruption in the heart of the common Australian, and soon enough we'll end up like Greece, and we all know, as we love our cultural stereotypes, what a lazy, shifty bunch they are ...

Ah the long suffering banks, tricked by perfidious and deceptive customers, and with not the first clue about how to check up on them and find out the true state of play.

How they suffer, and how right of Dame Slap to stick up for them ...

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, 
When first we practise to deceive! 
A Palmer too!—no wonder why 
I felt rebuked beneath her eye: 
I might have known there was but one Dame Slap
Whose look could quell the common Australian … (you too can be bored by Walter Scott here).

It did occur to the pond that valiantly standing up for the banks and savaging the ordinary, common, deceitful, lying, cheating, fraudulent Australian sounded strangely unDonald.

Drain the swamp? Nope, blame the bludgers, desperate to get above their station ...

Now whatever you do, please don't expect Dame Slap and the lizard Oz to move beyond their passionate abuse of ordinary Australians to worry about the behaviour of businesses big and small …but do expect a mention of Emma Alberici, the ABC, and, it should go without saying, "Orwellian"…

Oh and the sudden discovery of the concept of "shrinkage" …

Consensus is actually very hard to find on what the term ‘shrinkage’ means and what should be included and excluded when it is being calculated. Some authors regard it as a catch all for a wide range of losses suffered by retailers, including both crime-related events such as staff and customer theft, and errors incurred as part of the process of retailing, such as incorrect pricing, changes in price, damaged products and food items going out of date, while others only seem to use it to refer to variance in the value of expected and actual inventory. The origins of the word ‘shrinkage’ seems to have been traced back to the UK Co-operative Movement in the 1860s and from there it began to be adopted in other countries as a term to describe the difference between expected and actual retail sales, based upon a valuation of delivered inventory compared with actual inventory in the business. Other writers refer to ‘shortages’, ‘inventory shrink’, ‘inventory shortage’, ‘retail inventory loss’, or simply ‘loss’ rather than ‘shrinkage’ although they all seem to be essentially trying to describe the same sort of thing. (here for a pdf with the original footnotes).

Who knew George Orwell was such a phenomenon in retail in the nineteenth century (though come to think of it, the pond heard the word when it was in retail in the 1960s).

Never mind, the pond loves the way that Dame Slap puts all the blame on common folk … she must have tossed out that Make Australia Great Again cap, and put on her banker's cap …

In the old days, banks did checks and employed balances … these days you can start an account in a trice online and get yourself a card and start making out like a bandit, but remember it's nothing to do with the banks and their lax verification systems ...

Never mind, no doubt Greece will at last come to Dame Slap's mind, and the Dame will rant about personal morality, and the behaviour of Barners, and the extraordinary behaviour of the Donald in relation to sex out of wedlock with a porn star, and all the other cheating that goes on in the world ...

Oh fucketty fuck, all that from a little ball tampering, the nation in ruin, and a South Pacific Greece, and how soon before Dame Slap signs up as either a born-again primitive Methodist or perhaps joins the Greens?

But no mention of Barners, a proud believer in breaking marriage vows he deems irrelevant?

Not to worry, since the Donald has been mentioned, and at one time Dame Slap was wildly infatuated with that example of moral, fiscal and business rectitude - what an exemplary example multiple bankruptcies are to the common Australian - it's time for a few Donald-related cartoons … how about a vehicle with some grunt for starters?