In which the pond adjusts to its new found freedumb ...

 

 

It's the second day of the pond's freedumb, the freedumb that Clive celebrated by throwing so much cash into the reptile claw, and the pond prays that the reptile hard wall will continue forever ...

Of course the pond had turned into a Johnny one note herpetological study over the years, and it's hard to break the habit, but the pond was suddenly tossed back into a world where the issue of a hard paywall was once solemnly discussed ...

Take The Conversation, another site where they importune for shekels rather than obstruct. Way back in May 2016 there was a piece proposing that some newspaper paywalls are simply unsustainable, inter alia with this point ...

 

 

Well yes, and paywalls come and go, but the heart and nub of the matter is whether to be part of the conversation, or to sit in sullen isolation and demand shekels from the unwilling. 

In typical fashion, that piece in The Conversation got the wags at Reddit going ...

 

 

 

Well yes, and outside its herpetological studies, the pond always went elsewhere. 

The pond never actually read the lizard Oz, though it could have, for news or other stories. It selected a couple of loons for daily study, but for everything else, the pond went elsewhere. 

 

 

Filth and full of lies? The pond would perhaps prefer to have said "gutter trash", but there's a reason that the pond has adapted so easily to the Graudian, when in other days, the pond would have thought of it as just another invasion of the colonials by black sheep Poms ...

For starters, there's Marina Hyde, who is happy to be part of the conversation. Her demolition job on Boris the other day was great fun ...

...Quite how long Conservative MPs and the wider British public will continue to indulge him is another matter. Realism appears to be getting the upper hand on cakeism. Boris Johnson promises you “global Britain” but in fact makes your country a laughing stock. He promises to level you up but he just drags everything down to his level. He promises you “the people’s government” but you get the Downing Street version of Marie Antoinette’s ridiculous hameau. He tells you that you can have your cake and eat it, but the only one who actually gets cake is him.
In the end, Johnsonism is little more than a con trick, and the jig looks increasingly close to being up. Perhaps that is beginning to dawn upon even him. Enemies of the naff will shudder at reports that Johnson has installed a fire pit in the Downing Street garden, but it may well be the only constructive thing he’s ever done. After all, familiarising himself with fiery pits would seem to be an increasingly wise long-term hedge.

Click on that link about the hameau, and you end up outside the paywall at a wiki, a most unreptile like strategy of engaging with the world.

As a result, the pond was reminded that it had actually visited the hameau, and while it truly was ridiculous, the pond also thought it wasn't a shabby shack, and wouldn't have minded shacking up there with a squillion servants ...

And earlier in the piece, follow the link to see, Hyde provided a link to a review of Boris's meisterwerk about Churchill. 

It was at the New Statesman, and didn't Richard J Evans, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, have fun ... 

Please allow the pond to drop in for an inter alia ...

...Marxists, he writes, go eat your words. Except that it’s not just Marxists who have argued for the impact of wider economic, social, cultural and even ideological forces on history. Anyone who has the time or energy to press a couple of keys on a computer to look up “tank”, “RAF”, “welfare state” or even “the Second World War” on Wikipedia will see Boris’s sweeping claims vanish in a cloud of inconvenient facts. Churchill did not, as Boris claims, invent the term “Iron Curtain” to describe the barrier between Soviet-dominated Europe and western Europe. It was first used by the Nazis – above all, by their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Nor did he invent the term “Middle East”: it was coined by the American naval thinker Alfred T Mahan in 1902.
At many junctures in the book, the ability to think historically deserts its author. He describes men such as Hitler as “short” when their height (5ft 8in in his case) exactly matched the average height of European men at the time; and he describes Churchill as a “Victorian Whig”, though the Whigs’ attitude to the state in legislation such as the 1834 Poor Law was entirely different to Churchill’s. 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.
Johnson doesn’t weigh up policies and ideas with any care or penetration. If he doesn’t like them, he dismisses them as “rot”, “tripe”, “loopy”, “bonkers”, “barmy” or “nuts”; their advocates and practitioners as “loonies”, “plodders”, “Stilton-eating surrender monkeys”, and so on.
There are some truly cringe-making metaphors and wordplay in the book. Churchill, we learn, was “mustard keen on gas” as a weapon in the First World War. He was “the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat”. Young Tories “think of him as the people of Parma think of the formaggio Parmigiano. He is their biggest cheese.” And Chamberlain’s “refusal to stand up to Hitler” was “spaghetti-like” (clearly Boris is rather fond of Italian food).

That's the thing about being a part of the conversation, as opposed to living in an attic in a castle surrounded by a moat. 

The reptiles rarely provided links, the idea was always to keep the suckers in a closeted greenhouse, unaware that there was a world outside that of the Chairman and his son.

Instead, politicians scribbled to the Chairman, and the Chairman's reptiles scribbled back to the politicians and to each other, and the faithful, an echo chamber where the main sound was paranoia.

Then there's always John Crace, another reason why the pond thinks donating a few shekels to the Graudian a suitable way to respond to rich entertainment ...

Of course the pond stayed up last night to watch PMQs - so much entertainment, so freely given by the streaming British parliament - but only for the pleasure of reading Crace's write-up (if only the pond knew how to pronounce his name) ...

Another inter alia ...

 ...The Suspect smirked and toyed with his toddler haircut, determined to appear upbeat. As much for himself as the MPs on his backbenches on whom he was depending to prolong what was left of his career. He wanted at least to go down with a semblance of fight. All hope of going with dignity had long since passed. If he had had a conscience, he would have been up to his neck in shame. For him it was still all a big joke that the police were conducting a criminal investigation into the prime minister of the UK.
What followed was a stream of unconsciousness. He rattled on about trying to stop Putin invade Ukraine, while Labour just focused on his unfortunate habit of lying about everything. Why was everyone making such a fuss about something so trivial? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Big Dog believes he only lies because other people make him do it. It didn’t seem to have occurred to The Suspect that it was him and his government that had spent virtually every waking hour for the past two months trying to protect his own job.
Nor was there any greater self-awareness as he went on to say he was cutting taxes – they were going up in April – and fixing the cost of living. Just as food and fuel prices were rising. He ended by declaring Starmer was “a lawyer not a leader”. In time he might come to realise that wasn’t such a killer line as he imagined. Not least because he might be needing the services of a top lawyer in the coming weeks. It’s also probable most voters would settle for a good lawyer running the country rather than a pathological fraud. The only thing he can be trusted with is to be untrustworthy.

Yes, that link in the piece led to another piece in the Graudian, yes the pond had already seen the blathering narcissist in action on the telly, but what fun to be able to dip into a Crace, as venomous as the red bellied black the pond once went swimming with out Dungowan way ...

As a result of all this, the pond has found a way to replace the mango Mussolini with a birthday cake.

Such indolent pleasures are the reason why other places have a relatively porous or soft paywall. Even Crikey has taken to featuring "unlocked" pieces.

The pond has access to the rag, and so has no need of this benevolence, though only the long absent lord knows how they've survived over the years. 

They began by asking too much for too little, and their business model must be even more fragile than that of the lizard Oz ... (the pond thinks that the hard paywall suggests the reptile lemon is being squeezed very hard, and all that's to hand are bitter pips).

Every so often, when the pond hasn't signed in, or is using another browser, the pond is reminded of the bait and switch strategy, the theory that one temptation might provoke a subscription ...

 

 

Of course some will just pick the couple of "unlocked" pieces, but at least it remains a part of the conversation, and who knows when a Patreon spirit might kick in with a mug punter.

Looking back, the pond sometimes wonders if it should send the reptiles an invoice for all the hard work the pond undertook to make the reptiles seem relevant, and an interesting talking point. It was, it goes without saying, a naked lie, and disingenuous at best ... they were really only loons, suitable for a pond of loons ... 

The pond is currently considering its future. Over the last year or so, it has really only hung in for the comments. There's only so many times you can read a fucked in the head Killer piece before you begin to feel fucked in the head ...

The pond suspects that it will go out with a whimper rather than a bang, and will do the odd post as the spirit moves it, enough to allow for comments

Meanwhile, all that has filled in the time nicely, and perhaps in due course the pond might settle into a travel or a cinemah site ...

This is how they were celebrating Australia Day in Cooma yesterday ...

 

 Talk about classy vehicles ...

And this is a snap from beefy boofhead prime Angus land ... see if you can spot the location ...

Ah the Monaro highway, ah antiques, the staple diet for those afraid of windmills in beefy boofhead Angus's world ...

And here's a snap of Cann River, as remote from the world as the reptiles trapped behind a paywall ...

And so to the usual cartoon sign off, and luckily there's a Wilcox to hand ...

 

And that reminded the pond of a great sequence. 

The pond doesn't have to provide a link. There are more clips of Chaplin tossing the world about on YouTube than there are interesting reptiles at the lizard Oz ... and YouTube's business model remains advertising supported. The pond has yet to find a single soul who has signed up for YouTube Premium...

And so, by enduring and completely ignoring a bit of advertising fluff, there is much to do, so many places to look, and if the pond's short, limited future is completely reptile free, bring it on ...

Such sweet memories, seeing that as a revival in the Capitol theatre, an ancient picture palace with orchestra pit, later torn down even as the town began to cry out for decent venues. 

Oh Tamworth, Tamworth, what a heartless, cruel Barners-laden town you are, and now you're pitting country music up against King Elvis? Have you no shame? Must you show what happens to a town with a Murdochian paywall holding local gossip to ransom?