The pond knew its homework was right there. The reptiles had put it on a platter and made home learning a breeze …
The pond, always cautious when such easy delights are on offer, took a quick squiz at the commentary section just to be sure the right peas really were under the shell …
Yep, no need to read "Ned" reciting a few of Lowe's talking points - might as well just read Lowe's remarks, but who needs to be depressed? - and then there was General "Killer" Creighton on Lowe, but the pond is very tired of our Adam at the moment. So much killing to be organised, so little time.
As for Lomborg, the pond banned his form of climate denialism long ago. He's now just a distant howl in the wind. The lizard Oz editorialist also didn't appeal - isn't the revival road to a dynamic and more productive Australia simply to do a shakedown of the tech giants and make them fix up a failing business model?
As for Marise """ Payne, the reptiles got that right. Is there a duller, more invisible, more pointless, more useless politician doing the rounds than the """ woman? No wonder they couldn't be bothered finding a picture, what would be the point? As for inspiration and leading the way, the pond for a moment had a weird spiralling downward sense of despair … until it remembered the treats on the platter …
And sure enough, Dame Slap had been blessed by the cult master, a sure sign that delving into the entrails would bring good luck …
Batman? The redemptive power of tech giants handing money over to News Corp? Who knew what it meant, but Dame Slap was very keen to assist everyone develop paranoia, in the brooding Black Knight style, about the Liberal government, because frankly SloMo's mob is not to be trusted … (fancy that, and yet how Dame Slap used to love the mutton Dutton) ...
Clearly, leaving Dame Slap in social distancing social isolation isn't the best way forward for her. The enveloping Orwellian police state has brought out the deep IPA streak in her, and she's going to cultivate that fear of government until the red tape cows come home ...
Indeed, indeed. Who can argue that the coalition government isn't to be trusted? Who would want the mutton Dutton spying on them? And who spends all their time supporting the coalition government and insisting they stay in power, because a police state is better than life under comrade Bill?
Of course there are ironies, there are always ironies … not least the irony of Dame Slap having a go at a couple of weird evangelical buddies ...
And yet for all this abuse and hate mail, didn't the government do its very best for the reptiles, as celebrated by Rowe here …?
And so to the section which might be titled "the pond can't believe it's doing this", which is to say enjoying the reptiles' ongoing fascination with Malware and his tome of terror …
No stone has been left unturned, no angle unexplored, in the desire to do Malware down …
Lego Masters wins! Except, it seems, in the lizard Oz.
The parrot was lurking in the Currish Snail, in his queenly rage, but the lizards of Oz have also been utterly compelled. This was the prescribed reading list for nattering "Ned's" piece …
Relax, it's a screen cap, there are no hot links, you don't have to do extra homework, you just have to admire the diligence of the reptile paranoid obsessiveness ...
Now the pond could have explored petulant Peta's offering, but nattering "Ned" is a reliable bore, and in these troubled times, tediousness is probably better digested than bitchiness …
Of course we shouldn't begin, without first noting that "Ned" himself has skin in the game …
The Australian's former political scribe David Crowe is described telling Turnbull he was going to leave the masthead because he hated the "negative" and "destructive" culture. Crowe is now this masthead's chief political correspondent. Meanwhile, Turnbull took diary notes on another (allegedly) extraordinary March 2017 conversation with The Australian's political doyen, editor-at-large Paul Kelly.
“Kelly observed that at News and especially on Sky the view is that I have to be destroyed because I am too left wing — no better than [Labor leader Bill] Shorten — despite all the evidence to the contrary,” Turnbull writes. “Indeed he says that on Sky they have lost all interest in Australian politics as a struggle between Labor and the Coalition, rather their frustration is between Turnbull the soft centrist and Tony Abbott the muscular conservative (who let them down again and again). Crazy Times.” (SMH here)
Oops, please, do go on … there will be revenge, there must be blood ...
Oops, no wonder that petulant Peta is upset and feeling a bit agitated, contemptuous, and sulky about it all …
But here's a whiz to alleviate the tedium. How about a William Burroughs' cut and paste from way back when, featuring the pond's favourite teacher, the aforementioned Dame Slap, tucked high above the faraway tree handing out marks? I know, I know, some think the pond makes fun of Dame Slap unfairly, as if she wasn't a pedagogue, but she really does think of herself as a hard-marking teacher …
Malware an A student, even if a little more work is needed …?
Yes, ironies abound, oh how the hoppy toad ironies abound … and so back to embittered "Ned" still agitated by Malware's memoir …
As for the onion muncher, do we have a Dame Slap mark? We do, we do …
An F!!
Golly, she's a tough marker … but now back to nattering "Ned" ...
Dame Slap had marks for others when she handed out her marks in December 2015, but the pond will be content here for the moment just to observe the other losers in the same dropkick camp as the 'F' student onion muncher …
The very bright Angus Taylor? No wonder she's always been a hopeless teacher. Has there ever been a more dropkick dud loser than Angus "pure beef" Taylor?
At least that's the poor performers out of the way, because there's one final gobbet of "Ned's" natter to go ...
Ah dear, that bloody "F" student! Did Dame Slap call it right or what?
As for SloMo, he has a crisis to manage, but there will be blood, there must be blood? As if anyone gives a flying fuck in this time of high anxiety, of no money coming in, of life and death and social isolation, of being driven to climbing walls by rabid reptiles, gouging at each other in the colosseum for their own entertainment … while the country staggers along in crisis ...
Well the pond is glad it's not flying with Dame Slap or nattering "Ned", but instead prefers to climb aboard the immortal Rowe … with Australian aviation certain to be very different in the years ahead.
And now for real devotees, here's the rest of Dame Slap's marks for the class of 2015. It all seems so long ago, and since then she's shifted her school house from above the faraway tree into the house of the IPA, and gone even more barking mad. The pond doesn't usually end with a clipping, but this will surely plunge some into a sea of nostalgia and wonder, with the hope that the plane doesn't sink into the Hudson before the rescuers arrive …
As for the delusional reptiles, the reprehensible "Ned" who foolishly dropped his guard with Malware and actually told the real truth, the howling at the moon Dame Slap, the entire coalition government, and the self-regarding Malware, who does the pond hate? Who have you got? Anyone will do ...
My source was first up on e-mail this morning, with the revelation that the flagship included this -
ReplyDelete“AN HOUR AGO 7.10am US deaths double in two weeks.
In the us, coronavirus deaths have now surpassed 800,000, doubling in two weeks. The US accounts for a third of the world’s more than 2.5 million cases of COVID-19.”
That item was from Adeshola Ore, who lists simply as ‘a reporter at The Australian.’. My source also ‘revealed’, because this was the point of her communication, that, according to the brief bio. available from the flagship site ‘Adeshola holds an Honours Degree in Sociology from the University of Melbourne.’
Them sociologists are really good with numbers, aren’t they?
The source also tells me that there is a special special offer for an electronic subscription to the flagship - all in the national interest of practically giving us access to the very best advice and guidance for surviving this virus - of 28 days for $1. I thanked her for that information, but cautioned her to be wary of any missing zeroes.
Other Anonymous
Them sociologists are really good at logic too, aren't they. Never really a prerequisite for a Sociology Hons, of course.
ReplyDeleteLove that $1 for 28 offer; true reptile sucker bait. I wonder how much they get for selling their subscriber list to Google and facebook.
It is schadenfreude, GB, but I do wonder if some of the animosity from Limited News to F...book goes back to the Chairman's bad judgment in choosing to 'invest' in 'Myspace'. Apparently he took that option because its business model involved trying to wring money directly from the punters in every which way, which showed how little he truly understood about how consumers responded to media.
ReplyDeleteSeveral writers have made a good case that from earliest time, at least in the UK, the readable content of newspapers was essentially free. The cover price was the convenient means to pay distributors, down to humble 'newsboys', to put the content in front of readers. Until the middle of last century, many English newspapers used their front page for - advertising, because that's where the real money came from.
Other Anonymous
Yeah, I've always wondered a bit about Roopie and Myspace. Seemed to be a quite successful earlyish web business, but then Roopie bought it and pretty quick smart it went poof. My sneaking suspicion was that, indeed, neither Roopie nor any of his despicable minions understood what they'd bought.
DeleteYes, I've always more or less grasped that the sale price of newspapers, and most magazines, basically at most covered the printing and delivery - especially as I was one that benefited thereby as I rode my early morning paper delivery rounds (long enough ago to have delivered the Melbourne Argus for a brief few years).
I tend to agree with the idea that Rupert didn’t really understand what he had bought GB....or understood the digital future. Seeing he was surrounded by the best money can buy, you have to wonder.
DeleteIf he had started out like many of us, with a paper round, he may have had a better business plan for it....who knows.
He may have been like me, too envious and impatient for the big rewards.
My mate had the paper stand next to the Inkerman Hotel and within 6 months had enough to buy a new Malvern Star racer. I had the stand near the new Safeway in the Balaclava shopping strip.....nowhere near as lucrative!
I got the idea to move up the street a way, as close as I could get to the platform exit to the Station......which was pretty well next door to my employer’s news agency.
Turned out quite lucrative......for about three days, until the boss noticed a drop in shop traffic and stuck his head outside and noticed the problem.
The only job I ever got the sack from....... the business plans of a 12 year old with too much ambition will often end in embarrassment. Take note Roopie is all I can offer.
Cheery Anon.
Goodness gracious me, CA, I used to live in Inkerman St quite near to the Balaclava station and I did my weekly shopping at that Safeway. There was a Milkbar/Convenience store just a few doors west along Inkerman from the block of flats I lived in and the Inkerman Hotel was about 100 yards to the east. By that time I'd long left my paper rounds behind, though. I applaud your sense of business initiative, however - I did also sell morning papers for a while and strangely that was from just outside the shop because I could get onto the trams but the tram passengers didn't have time to get into the shop for the short time the trams were waiting at the intersection (one tramline e-w, one n-s).
DeleteBut thinking about Roopies' minions, one of his best was Roger Ailes who made Fox News USA what it is today. But I wouldn't have expected Roger to know how to run Myspace - simply worlds apart.
And he has a bit of a problem with his inheritors: Lachlan is hopeless, I can't recall him ever getting anything right. James is smarter but ideologically opposed to everything that Roopie and Lachlan stand for. He's got a few daughters, but apart from Elisabeth, none have seemed to be interested in the business. I think that when Roopie snuffs, the business will follow him not too very long afterwards.
Apology to the Pond - my early reference to trivial error (the source tells me it was corrected about 4 hours later) seems to have diverted attention from the serious (yeah, sure) content in today's flagship. As others have shown, the 'Myspace' adventure showed just how all that expensive, and exclusive, prep. school education prepared the offspring of Rupert and #2 wife to function in the business of social media, where it might have helped to have had acquaintance with those of their coevals who were educated in Peoria or even Schenectady, High.
DeleteIt also took us away from that rolled-gold Lobbecke. Talk about circles in a spiral, wheels within wheels - like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon (to borrow, with attribution, the Bergmans).
Other Anonymous
Corrected in a mere 4 hours, OA. Incredible efficiency ! And it's so good that everything is online these days; imagine having to produce a special print run of the dead tree edition to correct an error like that.
DeleteThe Murdoch media dispensed with the services of subeds long ago, didn't it ?
Well that was a nice post-mortem of the slow road to ruin that is Murdoch la la land. Just so many bad actors with a C grade script, that it was inevitable that all we were ever going to get, as you say, was an urge to climb the walls as the reptiles, in true form, gouge at each other for their own entertainment (paycheck), while the country staggers along in crisis.....and that was before this pandemic.
ReplyDeleteWith the Slap and Ned demanding exits, paranoias, blood and revenge, one could possibly feel safer hitch hiking in the far north wearing a First Nations T- shirt during the days of Joh.
Cheery Anon.
Talking about a slow road to ruin, CA, you might enjoy this (it's the 10 threats to humanity):
Delete"The 10 threats are climate change, environmental decline and extinction, nuclear weapons, resource scarcity (including water scarcity), food insecurity, dangerous new technologies, overpopulation, chemical pollution, pandemic disease, and denial and misinformation."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/ten-threats-to-humanitys-survival-identified-in-australian-report-calling-for-action
And it didn't even mention arrogance, cupidity, ignorance and anti-rationality even once amongst the 10.
But the one you might really like is this:
"The media executive [Kim Williams], who resigned from News Corp in 2013 after two years at the helm, said the results of some recent elections showed the public didn’t listen to the company’s advocacy, [ie to the Murdoch Press] and had effectively told Murdoch to “root your boot”."
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/22/former-news-corp-says-turnbull-overstates-role-of-murdoch-media-in-political-downfall
It really will all seem so silly in 1000 year's time ... assuming humanity survives its 10 or so "threats" for that long.
”And it didn't even mention arrogance, cupidity, ignorance and anti-rationality even once amongst the 10.”
DeleteVery wry GB, although in relation to Williams we must include delusion.....that spinning for Murdoch is merely company advocacy is a true stretch, by anyone’s imagination.
Re: Inkerman St. Just too funny for a small world . your abode would have been the U shaped block of red brick flats with the pencil pines in the central garden. The store(Bridge Store)was owned by the old Scottish woman, Mrs Woods and her son Douglas. Fine people who had been there since the 1920’s I believe. They let all the locals run a tab in the 50’s and on Saturdays I would be sent down to pay the weekly bill and Mrs Woods would tease me on how much change I had to get as a maths game. I was technically born and bred in the street directly opposite the store, which ran parallel to the rail line. I actually moved back to the same street many years later, after marrying my wife (also a Woods!) when we bought our first home.
It was a great area to grow up in for a kid. There was Wearn’s dairy and stables on the corner of Blenheim St. and Gronow’s wood yard, a big Pool Hall behind the Texas milk bar on Balaclave Rd. and later, an all American bowling alley( later became ADAPS)..... the beginning of the new age. I think the Safeway was one of the first in Australia, replacing Charles Lasky’s grocery store.
One of my strongest memories, during what was a huge building and immigration boom in the area, was my best friend and I ratting the local apartments garbage areas for soft drink bottles and smelling nothing but the cooking of cabbage. We would then cash in the bottles at the Tarax milk bar, just opposite and down from Billy Duncan’s pub. The old fellow who owned the Tarax milk bar was an old Jewish refugee who had survived the Nazi camps and would always give us dirty looks when we came in to cash the bottles,....particularly if we didn’t buy any lollies. Great days!
Cheers. Cheery Anon
Not U-shaped, CA, but it was kinda red-brick. Very close to the U-shaped place though - only a door or two away - the flats were between Blenheim St and Westbury St I think and it was most likely No 317 (which means the Inkerman Pub was a bit more than 100 yards away, such is the vagary of nearly 50yo memory), but I don't have any records from back then (ended in 1972 when my partner and I moved to Canberra). You, of course, were talking about Jervois St.
DeleteMy strongest remaining memory from there was the appalling fatal road accident (which ripped a young, pregnant woman apart for the benefit of the tv cameras) which finally, after years of total council rejection of responsibility, got traffic lights installed on the Inkerman-Hotham intersection.
But truly, with excellent shopping and nearby tram and rail, it was probably the best bit of suburbia I ever lived in - including the old licensed grocery cum grog shop where I bought my first ever bottle of Penfold's Grange, back when I could afford such things.
Pleased life was good in 70’s.....Grange. To your health GB! A man of taste. You should have laid a couple aside, they must be worth 1K today. :) I was one door west in my mind I think, and I lived in Young St, one street west of Jervois. We ran our trucks and plant from there between 1958- 2001.....all in a suburban street. Wouldn’t get away with it today. We probably passed each other many a time, me driving my indestructible 1946 KB6 International tipper. Up until 20 years ago the truck was still working in a quarry at Ouyen.....possibly still is.
DeleteI remember the dramas about the lights well. There were some terrible accidents on a regular basis for years and years before action took place.....the whole area was really bad. Although drink driving was a birth right back then. Thank god those days have passed to some extent.
The rail bridge was a doozie too. One night a large van hit it at such high speed that he ripped the whole van body off it’s chassis and just kept driving, leaving the crushed alloy body where if landed. Must of got a decent whiplash though. :(
Cheery Anon.
Believe me, CA, I greatly regret not laying down a dozen or two. But back then, though the older vintages were starting to get just a little expensive, the new season's 'fresh' Grange was only about $30 a bottle, and I could manage to afford one now and then.
DeleteHmm. 1958 I was 15 and two years short of Matric at Brighton High School (of which I was a foundation student - of about 250 of us who attended BHS from its first year, 30 of us made it to matric which included 15 members of the fair sex - a very good ratio for back then).
Overhead railway bridges are just a huge problem, aren't they :-)