In which the pond goes statue-hunting with Henry, and then attends an English git ...

The ABC doesn't make embedding easy, fuck 'em, and while we're at the fucking, fuck iView as well, but here's a link to the YouTube outing, and it might help starting there, because our Henry is about to follow ...

Of course the big news coming out of the USA is the devious, wretched Bolton's book about the snake oil salesman liar Donald … which is why the pond and the reptiles faithfully ignore such heresies and concentrate on important issues …

But why start by mentioning a couple of puppet birds crapping on a statue, and even more shocking from the dreadful ABC, a ploy surely designed to irritate prattling Polonius and a host of reptiles?

Well it was the only way the pond could cope with its assigned mission … wander back in time with our hole in the bucket man Henry, and if the pond is now daily worried about the mental state of the bromancer, what is there to say about good old Henry's equilibrium and stability?

Say what? He can hear dead people speaking? Sigh, roll camera again … and again you'll have to head off to YouTube ...

That isn't the way the original screenplay ran. The pond knows for a fact that the screenplay was heavily censored and altered, and originally ran like this ...

Cole Sear: I see dead people, they don't know they are dead.
Crowe: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins? Statues in Hyde Park?
Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. Writing columns for the lizard Oz. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. You know, climate science denialism, the glories of Anglo-Saxon culture, the wonders of the British empire, things like that. They don't know they're mentally and spiritually dead.
Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole Sear: All the time, they're everywhere, at least in the lizard Oz …

And so to our Henry talking with statues, and blessed by a lesser graphic …

Dammit, what is it with these reptiles?

Our hole in the bucket man surely deserves the cult master instead of Jellett indulging in a little kinky bondage (does the statue have a safe word? Pigeon poop? Just a suggestion, you need a word you  don't use every day, though come to think of it, when the pond reads the reptiles, it's always saying, "gosh darn it, pigeon poop").

Okay, okay, the pond has filibustered and fudged as much as it can. Time to plunge in the deep end ...

Hang on, hang on … remarkably modernist?

No, you can't get away with it by saying "for its time". For its time it was unremarkably Victorian, doing their usual cheesy triumphal ersatz Roman style …

Never mind, have a real statue …

As winter kicks in, the pond finds it harder to deal with the likes of Henry, especially when he gets into his history routine, but at least he realises that this statue stuff is all the fault of those damned Xians and their puritan ways ...

The pond knew it would turn out in the end to be the fault of the secularists … but strangely our Henry says nothing of self-satisfied complacency, self-regard, and a complete lack of interest in those who failed to qualify for "civil society", what with being savages and all, not worthy of the vote or entry into society or sundry other rights, or anything much, even if they originally lived on the land, but wait, terra nullius, legal statues, or is that statues, and all that, and there's your civility, and freedom and separation from the coercive powers of the state … 

But why does the pond keep on talking to dead people? They only see what they want to see.  They only hear what they want to hear. They only like the statues they want to see …

Where's the statue to Windrayne that dominates Hyde Park in Sydney? A valiant fighter and noble warrior ...

Sorry, not modernist enough, and besides, it's the winners that get to write the history, and do the statues, and fanatically scribble in the lizard Oz ...

Strange, all that talk of cultural heritage - a bit like Confederates talking about their flag - and yet so much of our heritage still not celebrated with bronze or marble.

Would Henry join the pond in mounting a subscription campaign so we could better celebrate our cultural heritage? We could surely get a decent modernist sculpture out of this pose ...

 

And so to another problem making life hard for the pond. Look at this pathetic line-up …

The lizard Oz still maintaining the war with China, Thomas-Noone blathering about innovation, as if Henry on statues was some help to his innovative modernist cause, Jason Thomas indulging in a war on Jihadists from the comfort of Swinburne, Overington reduced to reptile hack work, and the bouffant one putting out another press release for Scotty from marketing …

Sure, there were a few other ironies on view … but a simple juxtaposition takes care of the Swiss bank account man ...

      

Australia would be exposed? As in exposed to a desperate ranting sociopathic bully threatening a complete decoupling, as a way of trying to make people forget his sycophantic pleading for help from Xi to get re-elected?

Here, have a cartoon …

 

The pond's solution? Instead of a lizard Oz piece of commentariat scribbling, it would take in some news of a Pommy git …

No, not this one, celebrated at the Graudian here …

… this one …

The pond's childish theory was that, confronted by a silly young prat educated in Dr Challoner's Grammar School, the pond could just ignore his attempt to grab the headlines …

… and run a few cartoons …

The story itself was simple enough not to need a commentary. English twit attempts new version of Monty Python skit ...

So all that the pond needed to do was to insert a few cartoons as interstitials …

The reptiles were playing the same game as the pond.

See how after doing the obligatory knee shot, they managed to slip in a tasty bit of crumpet from Game of Thrones (yes, the pond speaks fluent Murdochian page three)...

Quite right too. Talk of bodies in the street needs to be balanced with a tasty bit of crumpet ...

Of course the pond could have gone the usual Raabian route, and talked of Game of Twits …

 

But why not a cartoon-led coverage of all the issues of the day, disguised as a report on the Raab?

And so after one final short gobbet of Raabian magic, featuring another Pommie git ...

… emanating sublime stupidity, since the point isn't to kneel for others, but to make a point and protest in a way that got up the noses of the establishment, as it surely did … just like it did in the old days …

… and with all that done and dusted, the pond could wrap up the day's proceedings, with a final cartoon … an offering by the immortal Rowe, and more Rowe here ...