In which the pond goes on an epic voyage to the reef with the lizards of Oz ...

The pond has recently been noticing a glut of Dan Brown books in the street libraries of Newtown …and once a Dan Brown book gets offered for free, it seems to stay there forever, hogging valuable space.

Yep, these days even free Dan Brown can't seem to sell.

Of course the pond could theoretically do something about it. After all, the pond prides itself on removing dangerous unexploded ordnance of the Mark Latham and Bob Katter kind, and storing them away from the light, until the half life renders them less toxic.

But there's nothing the pond can do about bad taste, especially when incredibly awful writing is devoted to mindlessly silly conspiracy theories. Even in an airport, you'd be better off reading security warnings than trying to wade through Dan Brown's peculiarly American form of verbiage.

And that's a roundabout way of explaining why the pond is going to do its bit by refusing to recirculate the latest Dame Slap …

For starters, that use of "Orwellian" simply nauseated the pond.

The pond is so over "Orwellian", though it's a reminder of the sort of kissing, MAGA-hat-wearing company that Dame Slap routinely keeps …

And then there's the dragging in of "marauding South Sudanese gang"s.

The white nationalist racism that infuses the lizard Oz is an ongoing, sickening spectacle. It's probably a relief to indigenous people that the Sudanese are now on the lowest rung of the pecking order, and so they're copping it in a way usually reserved for assaults on Aboriginal Australia … but that's not much of a consolation.

No matter how the Sudanese might try to escape their pariah status, the reptiles are relentless. It's possible to hear them snicker as they ran with this angle at the top of the digital page this morning …

Of course the bonus for the racial politics is the possibility of demonising Andrews and Labor and scribbling, in furious rabid Dame Slap fashion, about the "Orwellian state" …

Well Andrews can look after himself, but the pond feels some fair degree of sympathy for the hapless Sudanese, because let's face it, they commit a regular, routine thought crime in the eyes of the reptiles … they're black,  and at the bottom of the totem, and ungrateful and they don't do enough humble forelock-tugging, and that's more than enough for thought crimes in an Orwellian newspaper …

Oops, dammit, see how easy it is to catch the reptile disease? Just stand nearby and soon enough you're huffing and puffing and delivering a stream of nonsensical verbiage ...

So the pond went looking for something totally innocuous for a Sunday meditation, and came across the Oz editorialist …

Sweet long absent lord, a chance to return to the 1950s, though to be fair, the reptiles offer this fun ride at least once a day …

Now the pond can hear sceptics muttering and gnashing their teeth … after all, Magellan set out from Seville in 1519 to circumnavigate the globe, not so long after Columbus had sailed the ocean blue into areas deemed to be full of dragons, but eventually only managed to lure the Donald to its shores …

There were plenty of others during what the pond had drummed into it was the "Age of Discovery" … and the pond was reminded of this when it did a Greg Hunt and headed off to the wiki on "maritime history" to discover more about Cook …

Jacques Cartier was a French navigator who first explored and described the Gulf of St-Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named Canada. Juan Fernández was a Spanish explorer and navigator. Probably between 1563 and 1574 he discovered the Juan Fernández Islands west of Valparaíso, Chile. He also discovered the Pacific islands of San Félix and San Ambrosio (1574). Among the other famous explorers of the period were Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Yermak, Juan Ponce de León, Francisco Coronado, Juan Sebastián Elcano, Bartolomeu Dias, Ferdinand Magellan, Willem Barentsz, Abel Tasman, Jean Alfonse, Samuel de Champlain, Willem Jansz, Captain James Cook, Henry Hudson, and Giovanni da Verrazzano.

Well they also showed a picture of Cook in Tahiti …

Don't get the pond wrong, what Cook did, especially when it came to the scientific work of Banks, was plucky stuff …he didn't discover Australia, as the reptiles might have it, but he did at least crash on the reef and generations since have toiled to get rid of it ...

But truth to tell, he was following on from some truly epic voyages … as noted in this map in the wiki listing for the Age of Discovery …

So why are the reptiles rabbiting on about Cook? Apart from the usual chip on the shoulder inferiority complex ...

Well there's the parochial interest, but then it should be remembered that most of those other names sound really woggish, and so the reptile schemata, hardly worthy of ranking highly in world history ….

Not convinced? Have a look at the reptile line of reasoning ...

"We are leaving behind a period in which a cultural lack of confidence obscured the wonder of his voyages of discovery."

Even scribbling about Cook, the reptiles can't walk around their ongoing sense of white nationalist triumphalism …bragging about "new hemispheres of thinking."

And what might those new hemispheres of thinking be?

Oh fucketty fuck, though to be fair, it's just Sudanese and Andrews bashing, and an appropriation for the zillionth time of "Orwellian", when it might have been a celebration of "Lord" Monckton, or talk of a UN conspiracy to use climate science to establish world government by Xmas or a donning of the MAGA cap and a dance in the street with Alex Jones, or another meditation on the wonders of the Donald…

But it would be wrong of the pond to leave it there. For some inexplicable reason, the reptile editorialist also took a view on Malware, and his work on the reef that gave the Captain such grief …

Yet even here the reptiles can't take a trick.

"We suggest no impropriety"?

How about Barrier Reef Foundation grant 'unthinkable, mind-blowing', former board member says …

Shocking, mind-blowing?

Hey, the pond would even sub-license a use of "Orwellian" for a modest fee …

Why the reptiles themselves presented this rogue's gallery when they looked at the grant, the size of which must have made the Caterist Menzies institute go greenie with envy …

 

And how did this all come together in the reptile story?

Talk about an epic boondoggle ...

Never mind, it's back to bashing the Sudanese, wretches who've got so much to learn about the Australian way of doing things …

If only they understood that a little street crime is nothing compared with a half billion heist ...

Here, have a cartoon because it's closing time …