In which the pond Sunday meditates with Polonius, our Gracie and the dog botherer ...

The pond thought it might start with an ancient cartoon, because it would make prattling Polonius more comfortable and put him in a better mood, and because his header promised something along the lines of us never having had it so good, or at least, as a secondary consolation … fuck you Jack or Jill, as the case may be, we're doing better than you ...

But cheerful and reassuring isn't much in Polonius's bones …

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out

Well if Polonius can start with McAuley …

Always with the fear of the Kiwi, and even worse, a woman in power. Has someone got a sock handy, or perhaps a chaff bag?

But steady, what of the good news that Polonius had promised …

Now back to prattling on about Ardern - oh where is that sock? - and the green-left and the glories of SloMo ...

There's also little doubt that this recession has led to many statements of the bleeding obvious, and a flourishing of suppurating Polonial clichés, but all along the pond thought it was going to hear how well off we are compared to others …

And so to the rush to get back to work, with Polonius no doubt leading the charge by example … or perhaps by staying safely at staff HQ … but this matter of cowards in their self-contained, tidily furnished and supplied castles is better dealt with when the dog botherer gets going further down the page ...

Luckily the pond had an infallible Pope to hand as a capper for Polonius's prattle …

And what a relief that Kudelka left the reptiles for The Saturday Paper …

Another soul saved for the pond's Sunday meditation ...

And so to our Gracie, who unlike Polonius, seems quite traumatised by the new reality around her, and not just the usual reptile stew …

Dear sweet long absent lord, does she have the first clue what she's saying? She's undoing everything Polonius just prattled, and she's sure to get the dog botherer agitated too ...

But surely we can travel, surely we can gad about? Why the immortal Rowe only a short time ago hung out a welcome sign from Queenslanders, with more welcoming sights here …

Hmm, that welcoming sight doesn't seem to have calmed our Gracie, and she remains agitated ...

Soon, everyone will realise …?

Oh dear sweet innocent Gracie, didn't you read Polonius? Didn't you read the dog botherer? What a strange quartet it was …more timpani than strings ...

Well the pond must do its best to correct and instruct, and what better cane, or Christian Brother leather strap to hand, than the mighty dog botherer, blathering in his usual way about "nanny states" ...

Now before getting on with the dog botherer and "nanny states" and Orwellian repressive governments, the pond thought it might share this piece of whimsy from Crooks and Liars, here:

There, that sets the tone nicely for the dog botherer railing at governments. 

The Crooks and Liars piece went on to talk about Trumpian death cults, but here we have our very own dog botherer death cult ...

You know, once there was a time when colonial Australia so loved imperial Britain that we loved queues and compared ourselves favourably to the unruly French and the hand-waving Italians …

There was order and discipline, and folk would address bank managers with a "sir', and workers would humbly tip their caps to superiors passing by with a cheery "good morning g'uvnor" ...

It seems those hallowed, orderly, structured days are gone, and we must behave like rabid Trumpists and refuse to act like gimps in the basement, and get out into the open air …because where's the harm in mocking people with limps, though wouldn't it have been better for the dog botherer to berate us as a pack of chicken-head eating geeks?

But then there was this story on Morning Joe, featuring Steve Rattner and his usual supply of graphs, enough to make the ABC wilt … here, on YouTube …

The point of one Rattner graph was to note that no matter what politicians said or did, the majority of Georgians voted with their feet on the matter of staying at home …

And he also noted in another graph that Georgian consumers stayed at home …

No matter what Fox and Friends or the dog botherer, from the safety of their bunkers, urged the punters to do, the punters took their own view, and decided what was safe and wise to do …and just maybe our Gracie had a point ...

And it goes without saying that Rattner's graphs piss all over the reptiles' feeble attempts to shore up the dog botherer … because, having run out of any ideas, we must now stand by for a fuckwitted dog botherer rant in listicle form about all the things that bother him ...

You know, speaking of government interventions, the pond is old enough now to remember when rationing was a thing …

    

There were still a few around the house when the pond was growing up.

Truth to tell, if this current bunch of reptiles were in charge of the war effort in the second world war, the pond would likely have ended up enjoying sushi a lot earlier in life ...

You know, while the dog botherer ranted on, and some punters thought that being poor and alive was a better option than working for the man, being less poor and dead, the pond wondered what sort of world the dog botherer lived in, and then realised that there was a New Yorker cartoon that captured the mindset …

Well here's the thing, the dog botherer can keep his head in the sand, but there will be a lot of people who step out and about gingerly, with a Georgian air of sobriety, or perhaps follow the example of News Corp and stay bunkered down in the US until mid-June ...

What happens next time?

Well that's an easy question to answer. Next time we follow the Donald …

There's the TV solution …

There's the Tom Tomorrow solution, with more solutions here …

Or there's the biblical solution …