In which the pond suggests a game for the bromancer's word salad ...

Knowing how much the bromancer is adored by all, the pond couldn't resist his special guide to China as a late weekend holiday bonus …

To make it easier, however, the pond suggests playing a game, which might be called "Contradictions" i.e., in all the rules the bromancer lays out in a condescending way for others to follow, are there any indications that the bromancer himself might be inclined not to follow them?

Now the pond is not inclined to do spoilers,  even if the game requires some focus on what has been scribbled - you there, with the glazed look, and the dribbling, stay awake - and to help out the dumb, dumb, dumb ones in our midst the pond proposes to provide distractions at regular intervals, a cunning tactic to divert attention away from the game, like when you've stacked Mayfair with all the houses and hotels you can find ...

Uh huh, a calm, peaceful opening gambit, here, have a distraction …

Now there's an extensive preamble the bromancer goes through, but the pond should warn that there are clues scattered through all the text, and it might take a Poirot to spot them (though realistically the bromancer is more into Midsomer style plotting of the small village kind) ...

Now there are a couple of clues in that lot, but the pond must play its own perverse, dumb, dumb, dumb game and offer some verbal confusion and distraction …

Yes, it's a word game salad, and the bromancer knows how to whip up just the right mix of oil and vinegar ...

Finally we get to the rules, and the first few provide some promising clues … but the pond must insist on a distraction …

Now back to the game ...

Ah, digital culture, the reptiles' mortal enemy … and now the pond must give at least one part of the game away … but not before offering a metaphorical distraction …

Shoot someone? Tone down your language ...

Did you spot it in Rule Four?

"Tone down your language"? Sound like an "opinion page columnist"?

You know …

Uh huh …

Now into that dog's breakfast of toned down word salads, you can throw "wrong, divisive and insulting", "illogical and silly", "no glimmer of sense", "egregious offence", "dreadful embrace of identity politics," "just as rotten a tactic" (irony alert), "wretched second-rate rhetoric", "defaming Australian citizens," "polarising the Australian community", "Dumb. Dumb. Dumb." (No, the pond will not argue that 'Dumb and Dumber' is more correct) …"foolish",  "these comments were stupid and disgraceful", "baseless concerns", "suffer cognitive dissonance, chronic compartmentalisation and functional schizophrenia …

The pond could go on, but that would involve extracting words from the gobbets below, which is a bit like going down into the fruit cellar with a barking mad Tony Perkins …and the pond has already copped a gob flu of the tone …

Yes, all the pond and the bromancer have done is suggest, in the most superficial way, for those without a glimmer of sense, how they might tone down their language, dumb fuckers that they are …

And so to more rules, which hopefully can be broken with as much vigour as that pesky blather about tone ...

Yes, yes, hopefully by now everybody's into the swing of it, and those who started with rule nine might well have some splendid fun going through tracking the dog botherer's use of 'relationship', which ranges from its use in rule 10 to its previous appearance in rule six, where the idea of cultivating a good relationship is deemed problematic because of assorted pitfalls …

Here, have another word salad cartoon …

Now the pond knows by this stage some might have even decided they should get into the re-write business, as in ...

Rule 14: Listen to lizard Oz journalists on the specifics of what Chairman Rupert wants but don't ever let them set the tone politically for the relationship, which we all know is a waste of time generally anyway, because if you talk of the relationship, they'll do you over, but that said, remember the lizard Oz political judgment is generally rotten (but please maintain that even keel of modulated tone when speaking of them), and they generally have no very deep institutional commitment to liberal democratic values - just watch Fox and Friends for a nanosecond -  while their understanding of security, beyond News Corp's, is extremely thin...

This might be best said with a curl of the lips and a superior Rees-Smogg sneer, though a smugly superior bromancer smile, it can be argued, would suffice ...

Of course, none of this solves the problem that some have with the bromancer …

But wait, a final thought.

You know what happens when someone tells you not to go into the briar patch? You immediately want to run into the thickest, densest spot, and do something naughty …

More dumb dumb dumb figures here …

Well, the pond trusts that everyone will keep playing the game - the pond was careful not to do too many spoilers, and instead would like to wrap up with a few more word salad cartoons …

And that will have to serve as the pond's reminder to angry Sydney Anglicans that soon Satanists will be stalking a street near them doing the Devil's work …

Burn the demanding, greedy wretches, with their misleading, deceptively innocent eyes, at the stake, the pond says ...

In which the pond is devastated by a disappearance, our Gracie prays to the sky lizard and Polonius prattles that they're coming from the north ...

During the week, pure Angus beef was roaming the range … fudging, and dissembling, and peddling falsified documents … and then this happened …

Well it would be remiss of the pond not to celebrate that last cartoon before Rowe mysteriously, tragically, cruelly disappeared, was given an Orwellian status …

People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

A bit like the planet, when you come to ponder on it ...

Curiously the image resonated with another reptile story during the week ...

But enough of beefy Angus, in his prime follies, it was time for a Sunday meditation, and our Gracie allowed the pond to turn to pious thoughts of the impending right to abuse deluded believers in Santa Clause and Jeezus up hill and down dale ...

Yes, our Gracie blew her stack ...

Poor Gracie was in a nightmare world.

For example, a journalist scribbles furiously that climate science alarmism is the work of nincompoops and everybody should enjoy prime Angus beef. The reader, perhaps an actual climate scientist …

... complains of feeling uncomfortable, bullied and distressed. The publisher - why it could be the lizard Oz's publisher - must address the issue. The publisher isn't allowed to say, "oh well, we'll publish some actual science once in a blue moon." 

Luckily it's not like that, but it's still fun ...

Staggering? Not really … we all suffer, as the infallible Pope noted recently …

But back to our Gracie's nightmare scenarios … a nightmare for the pond, what with the pond thinking that religion is one of those mind parasites so vividly evoked by Colin Wilson …

Look, the God eye in the brain. She's haunting us all ...

Poor Gracie, fancy expecting this government to provide shelter for anyone, whistleblowers included …

And so to the pond's duty and its burden, the need to celebrate prattling Polonius, even though it goes without saying that Polonious is a virus of the mind, and it is infantile to believe anything a man in the Sydney Institute sky says, when clearly it shouldn't exist ...

Now forewarned is forearmed, and the pond knew it would be in for the usual history lesson, and this week, it dug this story out of the archives (clicking on it for readability might be handy) ...

What a quisling, what a lickspittle, what a useless fellow traveller, an appeaser nonpareil ...

But would the pond be rewarded? Would the usual history lesson include a mention of Ming the Merciless?

Funny. Poor Polonius hasn't mentioned that grand idea, the Multifunction Polis … or even worse, that sinister plot by councils to set up sister cities, so that they might spend $15 million on junketing airfares (or so prime Angus beef tells us),  to and fro …

Yeah, yeah, yadda yadda, here but not the bloody Commies …

Eek, the bloody Commies.

Next thing you know we'll be having their digital surveillance abroad in our fair land, and only the mutton Dutton on hand to stop them …

Ah well, never mind … Xi could learn a thing or two from the Central Scrutinizer…

But now it's back to prickly Polonius getting a dose of the mutton Dutton prickles ...

Indeed, indeed, it's so wrong, especially when there are so many other ways to take a shot at SloMo …

The pond has no idea how it's going to cope without a regular supply of Rowe, but it can easily imagine a day when the Polonial virus of the mind might disappear … 

But what do you know, the loyal lad watches the ABC religiously, even if he must pretend that it was Sky wot done it first ...

Well yes, but wouldn't it have been simpler to focus on this story, which is a genuine scandal, rather than slide it in on the coattails of a distraction about China? 

Was that a way of distracting readers from realising that what Polonius really wanted to do was recycle Four Corners,  because he's just a half-arsed borrower of work by real reporters, while the pond is even more pathetically a half-arsed recycler of half-arsed bludgers of the Polonial kind ...

Perhaps Polonius should stay focussed on the ABC … he seems to find it useful, and every so often he seems to learn a few things…

Why in due course he might even discover climate science, the drought and the whole damn thing … though if the ABC keeps sticking in his craw, the infallible Pope will do ...

In which the pond goes punk with Dame Slap, and that somehow fixes the middle east with the dog botherer

 

So long ago, was it a Monday dream? Monday, Monday …can't trust that day, sometimes it just turns out that way … whenever Monday comes, you can find the pond cryin' all the time ...

For a moment, way back when, there was a strange Monday bliss … a silence of the lambs … with the reptiles raging in the digital edition …

And yet within the day, it was back to business, and the Caterist was front and centre, and tucked down in the corner was the diligent bouffant one beavering away for our local Der Stürmer …

"Campaign speaks truth to power" nestling up against "No sign of buyer remorse over PM"?

Only in the la la land of the lizard Oz … and all the usual ratbags were back in force on the Monday …

Sheesh, the recalcitrant dog botherer, the deeply weird Oreo, and the Major blathering like Sergeant Friday about just getting the climate denialist facts ...

And then the bouffant one kept up a steady hagiographic stream during the week …

Truth to power? Fawn to power, more like it, and this in a week where pure Angus beef displayed at best, astonishing incompetence, but more likely, at worst, a sublime capacity for doing a fraudulent, dissembling, meretricious plane travelgate …

Is it any wonder that through the week the pond kept a metaphorical texta handy? (The pond leaves its supply of Sharpies to the Donald, because the United States' borders are in urgent need of some work…)

What's the fuss? A black line will fix it …

Oh it's been a kiddingly week, but the pond must now get down to business, and what better way to start than a ramble through Dame Slap's enduring impression of a far away land above the tree Planet Janet …

What a tragedy the Artline was in the other room …but then there was something so hugely funny about Dame Slap going full Sex Pistols, or perhaps The Who in the golden days of the mods and the rockers, and what a ripper illustration the reptiles dug up to get the folly on the road ...

Now right from the get go, it's a nonsense, because the punks might have fought the law, but they didn't win. Instead they got the well-groomed Dame Slap, hauling down a hefty monthly fee for spewing verbiage … aimed at mocking diversity, tolerance and justice, deplorable attributes when rampaging bigotry, hate, fear mongering, loathing, MAGA worshipping and climate science denialism are much better ways to fill in column space …

Never mind, the pond could feel a reliable litany coming on … the same old stuff the Dame hacks up and out on a weekly basis, even when tripe shouldn't be served cold ...

It was da punk? And there was the pond, trained to think it had all been the work of Ronnie Raygun …

Well there's nothing like modern day punkistas to show where we've reached with that revolution …

Oh pure punk, undiluted, compelling punk, work of sublime Rockwell art punk ...

But back to the delusional …because you know … punks in East Germany … Jordan Peterson …QED!

We know where freedom of opinion gets us these days …

Go at it punks, tear down the walls, except when you need to build a wall …

But enough of irony, because now the punks must swell into a mass movement of dissent in Dame Slap's head, where feeding from the trough is banished in her new world order ...

Did somebody mention totalitarianism?

We'll that's what you get when you don the MAGA cap ...

So Dame Slap has a few regrets, and now has a few doubts?

And if all that doesn't make for high comedy, there's the low comedy of the dog botherer, speaking in his inimitably deranged way of derangement syndrome ...

Actually if the pond might be so bold, and help set the scene, speaking of the biggest US mistake in the Middle East, let us not forget Lord Downer and the dog botherer's part …

Never had any doubts … clear in your head … and of such are delusions made, and live on ...

Actually, there's a middle path that might have been followed …withdrawing troops without dumping allies … but instead we got this …

Sorry, wrong war … we got this …

It's tough having to rationalise policies that were fucked from the very beginning, and you were one of the fuckers doing the fucking ...

Yes, it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds …

And so to a series of "what ifs", because "what ifs" are all the balm that's available to a minor war criminal trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel ...

Uh huh, a bit like those Kurds, enthusiastically embracing self-determination under constant threat of chaos …

Well, we know where this is heading, because there are minor oilfields to protect - bugger the humanity - and never mind that the policies enacted have been completely incoherent, ad hoc, and futile …

And so it goes …it's all the fault of Obama, as it always is ...

Ah yes, good old George …

Yes, what we need is the sort of bold intervention that Lord Downer and his minion dog botherer so enthusiastically embraced so that the "mission accomplished" sign could be erected … though at least the pond is profoundly grateful to have been spared yet another bout of dog botherer climate science denialism …

So many ways to fuck the planet, so little time for your average delusional lizard Oz scribbler ...

Of course there's an alternative way to look at recent history, and how pleasing it is to see the dog botherer stick to the script …

But as always the pond likes to look on the upside, the silver lining ...

… but sadly the dog botherer remains the worst of the lizard Oz ratbag taggers on the wall of history …