In which the pond flirts with assorted forms of loonacy ...

 

 

 

 

Dear sweet long absent lord, what on earth has Disney got her wearing? 

And does that animation make her look like a coquettish slut or what? (Not that there's anything wrong with being a brazen hussy of a mouse).

Could this be the end of western civilisation as the pond once knew it?

What's that you say? It was done in 1941 and called The Nifty Nineties? 

The pond is still considering its options as it copes with its freedumb, and one option is the mother lode of Murdochian freakouts, Faux Noise.

But the US has many experts in this area, who regularly track the bizarre outings, and few manage to get as bizarre as Candace or Cucker. 

Besides, you can just drop in to a place like the NY Daily News, and get a summary of the current weirdness ... or rather, one weirdness among many ...

Right-wing pundit Candace Owens joined the Fox News war on cartoons by attacking Minnie Mouse Wednesday.
Disneyland Paris announced earlier in the day that it would celebrate its 30-year anniversary in collaboration with Stella McCartney, who designed a new pantsuit for the cartoon character Minnie Mouse. It will be worn in March, which is Women’s History Month, by the person who plays Minnie Mouse at the French theme park.
That decision apparently infuriated Owens, who made Disney’s upcoming promotion the center of a Fox News routine Wednesday.
“This is why people don’t take these people seriously,” Owens ranted. “They’re trying to destroy fabrics of our society pretending that there’s issues.”
...Citing fictional children’s characters as a metaphor for cultural shifts has become common practice at Fox News. Last week, primetime host Tucker Carlson complained the animated characters used to advertise M&M candies were being made less sexy to the point where, “you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”
Pundits on the right-wing cable channel have also centered narratives around “Sesame Street” character Big Bird, cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew, Mr. Potato Head toys and Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which licenses books for kids.

Oh come on, the pond is desperate enough, but that would be pathetic. 

The pond is used to dealing with domestic morons but  to pay attention to Faux Noise would be engaging with imbecilic idiots of an astonishing level of "destroying fabric of society" depravity ...

Likely the pond would end up gaga and wearing a pigeon perched on its head while some suave mouse tried to clamber into the pond's weird naughty nineties gear...

 

 

 

 

Besides, what about local issues?

Yes, they're all braying about plans to save the koala and save the reef, when we all know what they really mean is save the slow moving sloth known as SloMo ...

The pond used to regularly dip into the Nine papers back in the days when the magic water man strutted the scene, but who remembers Paul Sheehan?

These days the rags are just a pale shell of their former selves ...

Thank the long absent lord that the venerable Meade has returned so that the pond can still look at the reptiles at a distance and read stories like this ... about the pulling of an interview with Clementine Ford by Kerrie O'Brien, the sort of soft lunchtime promo about a book, How We Love, which has absolutely no interest for the pond, but still ...

Tory Maguire, the executive editor of the Herald and the Age, confirmed the story had been pulled at the 11th hour.

As an aside, what is it with Tories? 

Not the English Tories, but women called Tory? Did the Karen movement get it badly wrong, and miss out on the proper name for Tories carrying on like pork chops? She certainly sounds like a Tory nee Karen ...

...“Clementine Ford spent years making vile and personal attacks on the journalists and editors of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age after the mastheads stopped publishing her column,” Maguire told Weekly Beast. “I had knocked back a pitch for an interview with her but there was a breakdown in communication and it was commissioned and published in error. I have pulled it from Spectrum and taken it down out of respect for my team.”
The animosity was sparked by Ford’s harsh criticism of the Herald on Twitter, and in an article for Schwarz Media’s the Saturday Paper. Ford was angered by getting an official warning from her editor for calling Scott Morrison a “fucking disgrace” on social media and said she quit because of the “cultural shift” at the newspapers, which are now owned by Nine Entertainment.
But she denies Maguire’s claim that she “spent years making vile and personal attacks on the journalists and editors of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age”. Ford says she has had a thing or two to say about the direction of the SMH - but that has been aimed not at the journalists but senior management and Chessell.
After she quit she wrote that “the change in political culture at Fairfax began long before the television network set its sights on establishing a newspaper presence”.
“To my mind, the trajectory traces back to the appointment in March 2018 of James Chessell as Fairfax’s group executive editor of Australian Metro Publishing … he has also been an adviser to former Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey, as well as a known associate of many in business and finance,” she wrote.
Chessell, since promoted to Nine’s managing director of publishing – with responsibility for the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, Brisbane Times and WAToday – as you can imagine is no fan of Ford’s.
Ford, who had no idea what had happened to the piece when we contacted her, was disappointed readers wouldn’t get to read about the “lovely chat” she had with O’Brien.
She told Weekly Beast that “if something as gentle and inoffensive as a piece about love can be spiked as retaliation against valid journalistic critique” then “I do think readers should think carefully about what that means”.

Well that's a fucking disgrace, and a reminder to the pond that there's nothing to be seen at the Nine rags ...

The pond has thought carefully about what it means, and it means that the Nine rags aren't an option ...

 Look at the line-up for "opinion", which they run well down the page, because who gives a pigeon on the head flying fuck?

 

 

 

Sure there's one reptile willing to do a Chamberlain and appease Vlad the impaler, because appeasement works so well ... but really?

 

 

Look, if the pond wanted a rag which specialised in endearing typos ...

 

 

... it wouldn't turn to the Nine rags for that sort of faux folly.

It'd ignore the commonweal or even the common good and turn to the Graudian.

But as for the Graudian, they're just a bunch of spoilsports ...

 

Sheesh, didn't SloMo just dribble out some cash in the paw to save the reef ... what's this blather about a mass bleaching event?

Temperatures over the Great Barrier Reef in December were the highest on record with “alarming” levels of heat that have put the ocean jewel on the verge of another mass bleaching of corals, according to analysis from US government scientists seen by Guardian Australia.
On Friday the Morrison government announced $1bn for reef conservation over the next nine years if it wins the next election – a pledge branded by some as a cynical attempt to stop the reef being placed on the world heritage “in danger” list at a meeting in July.

Cynical? From a notorious liar who spent an inordinate amount of time and money pretending the reef was in fine shape? Tell the pond something it didn't know about that congenital peddler of porkies ...

It's true that the pond could spend some time with the Graudian and read the odd opinion piece, especially as the Met's intervention has led to a delay in the Gray report, and there's much indignation as once more they conspire to keep Boris the boofhead in power ...

 

Hmm ... not really. The pond will still go on quoting Hyde and Crace, but too much birthday cake can ruin the appetite ...

Should the pond revert to the old stomping ground of the Speccie mob?

Sure, they've been degutted by legal eagles, but still, it's a promising line up ...

 

 

That feels more like it, that feels like the sort of methadone maintenance therapy needed when experiencing reptile withdrawal symptoms ...

 

Why go to Lloydie of the Amazon, when you can go to one of Lloydie's primary sources?

 

 

Yes, yes, that felt more like it, and that dragging in of an airport novel by James Michener just added to the pond's delight. It was like a return home ...

 

 

Perhaps the pond might even summon up the courage to head off to ... gasp, Quadrant ...

They deliver the pure stuff, straight to the vein in the eyeball, though to be fair, this is pretty good drum, or the good climate science denialist oil, or whatever ...

 

Ah, the good old global cooling routine ... will it ever get old? And so to a cartoon, as the pond impatiently waits the return of the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope ...

 

 

And now, inspired by an American correspondent, the pond would like to continue its trip down Tamworth memory lane ...

 

 

 

So far as the pond knows, this is the first easily available photo of the P. G. Smith store in its glory days on the full to overflowing internet. 

In his day, P. G. Smith was a big cheese in Tamworth, with an interest in the y'artz and a keen eye for a deal.  His store later became P. G. Smith and Reagans, thanks to a consolidation, and the pond can dimly recall going into the store, and getting lollies hand selected and packaged in a brown paper bag. 

Overhead there were all sorts of tubes and wires dangling from the ceiling, taking cash thither and bringing receipts yon ... in fact, you could still see an example of such acontraption in a store in Quirindi well into this millennium, until they ruined it ...

The illustration came from an ad in a 1924 publication to be found on Trove, which reminded the pond of how Tamworth once aspired to be the centre of the known universe ...

 

 

 

Ah John Oxley, talk about bringing a tear to the pond's eye ... how we loved Oxley, how we learned absolutely nothing about indigenous Australians ...

 

Look, there's the Northern Daily Bleeder at work, now in the hands of the Chairman and son, and hidden behind a paywall ...

Back in the day, they were patriots rather than lickspittle lackeys of American owners.

It was all simple enough. Draw a line through the state of NSW, and then Tamworth became the capital, though there were pretenders who blathered on about Armidale, or Newcastle, or even worse, towns way too close to Queensland ...

Once that line had been drawn, how soon before the country came to its senses and realised that Tamworth was perfectly positioned to replace Canberra as the country's capital? 

And once that realisation dawned, it would be a simple step to relocate the UN to a more appropriate location ... and then how soon before Tamworth became the centre of the known universe?

Alas and alack, it all went wrong for Pinky and the Brain, and now Barners' main claim to fame is switching wives and attacking dogs ... but it could still happen, if we were to just take the first step, and draw that magic line for freedumb ... (please, note how Newcastle is carefully excluded by the line) ...

 

 

 

 

Ah, there were loons in those days, giants of their time, and Tamworth was home to many of them ... and so the pond has a noble ancestry with a love of lollies in brown paper bags, as befits kinky meece...