A vacant stare at the reptiles while on vacation ...

 

By golly,  waggle my whiskers, as Harold Hare used to say, the lizard Oz's second eleven are a dull lot.

 Just look at the tree killer edition ...

 

... replicated at the top of the digital edition this morning ...

 

As if the pond gives two hoots about the craven Craven, and of course we can't speak of Gladys - off on a holiday - in the way that the reptiles routinely spoke of comrade Dan, and as for the commentary section, talk about a dead zone ...

 

 

Victorians are back in jeopardy, Francis?

Why not take a rest with Gladys, that'll set you right, and you might even recall that it was the 'roaches that ruined things for the sparrows of the south ...

As for the rest, no Major Mitchell, no Oreo, no Caterist, nothing except the poor old lizard Oz editorialist forced to work overtime to fill in the gaps ...

The pond drifted, as in a reverie, back to the joys of its weekend reading ... with one thing always leading to another ... and Marina Hyde leading to a link in the New Statesman ...

Sure it's ancient history, but what fun to be reminded of Boris blathering about Winnie ...

The book reads as if it was dictated, not written. All the way through we hear Boris’s voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster.

Wooster! Why that's up there with a Harold Hare reference (the funny bunny even earned his own spin-off magazine for a time).

Richard Evans, a Cambridge history prof, delivered plenty of facts along with a few more zingers:

The contemporary references to television shows such as Downton Abbey are among the many factors that will ensure this book has a very brief shelf life. Boris writes disapprovingly of the extramarital affairs of Edith Aylesford, a society lady of the late-Victorian era. “That was how they carried on in those days, you see,” he comments. Not just in those days, Boris..

And yet the pond shouldn't overlook Hyde's own excellent contribution and the reference that sent the pond haring off to a magazine which the pond remembers with deep affection for the way the This England section helped it through life at a university at New England

...I can no longer remember any Boris Johnson podium address that wasn’t riven with subconscious invitations to consider the real victim in all this: him. No matter what you’ve been through, please do take more than a moment to consider the heartaches and ballaches visited upon a man who simply wanted to be world king, but would settle for being the kind of prime minister who smiled and drove diggers through polystyrene walls – yet now has to deal with all this shit in his in-tray instead. Of course, there is the odd bright spark. Johnson would have enjoyed being told by Bill Cash during Wednesday’s trade deal debate that he was like both Alexander the Great and Churchill. Even if that is like being told you make a lot of sense by Mrs Rochester.
But mainly, we are forever being subjected to self-dramatising speeches about the latest virus measures he hates, to which the only dignified response is: I couldn’t care less how it all makes you feel. You’re the prime minister. The people listening are the ones you’re supposed to lead, not your psychotherapist.
Was this the way with the PM’s noted idol and supposed political lodestar, Winston Churchill? I’m afraid I haven’t Johnson’s Churchill biography to hand – though of course, I never permit myself to be more than four feet away from Sir Richard Evans’s majestic review of it. (Sample blast: “The Germans did not capture Stalingrad, though this book claims they did.”)
But even without this canonical text to check against, I think we can be sure that Churchill did not feel the need to deliver all his wartime announcements laced with frequent expressions of how he was handling the whole thing of having to deliver all these wartime announcements...

And so on and on, and in this lazy, hazy holiday mood, and the pond ran out of the puff to pay even token attention to the reptiles, slacking off in their hive mind termite mound way on a Monday …

Meanwhile, the pond sat around wondering whatever happened to an Australian distribution of relevant vaccines, how silly to wonder, SloMo was handling that ...

And so the pond again wandered back in time, to the good old days of just the facts, ma'am ...

 

 

Would idiots like the lesser "Ned" Kelly now not want to be vaccinated, and remain perfectly happy with a dose of hydroxy?

 

The pond rarely spent any time with this class loon during 2020, and likely enough that will be the last the pond thinks of him and his climate denialist ways during 2021 ...

Meanwhile, in this day's Oz, that mention of the climate drew the pond away from the second eleven, and once again the pond was distracted ...

 

 

Where's a Caterist when he's needed to put Suncorp in its place, blathering on about fake news and fake science and fake whatever?

 

Needless to say, the Oz readership was in a frenzy at this outrageous money grab and all this talk of science climate fiction ...

 

The reptiles even had a graph - a sure sign that they were intent on competing with the ABC, when one day in March the public broadcaster returns from its summer hols ...

 

 

 Follow the money, they used to say, but the pond will follow up with the lizard Oz editorialist ...

Still the reptiles talk of the Donald's legacy?

And what's this blather about embittered refusals and a core of diehard Trump supporters? Is that any way to talk of Fox News, desperate at being outflanked on the right? Oh the sorrow and the pity when neo-Fascists argue amongst themselves ... and the Graudian is left to marvel at the sight ...

This week will be a sublime form of the American comedy, and the ongoing decline of the United States, and let's never underestimate Chairman Rupert and Fox News' role in that decline ...

And so to a shout-out to Boris to complete the virtuous circle, heading back where the pond started, before it meandered along, coping as best it could with the absent reptile heavy hitters ...

Graudian away here.

Yes, while the reptiles are away, the pond will Graudian away ...

And now please allow the pond to offer up a cartoon to the lesser "Ned" Kelly, with a couple more just to please the lizard Oz editorialist ...