In which the pond doesn't need the reptiles to go silly on a Friday ...

 

 

As the pond has reluctantly turned its attention back to the reptiles - more news and another pond threat later in the day - this hovered into view ...

 

 

The name seemed familiar, something to do with hereditary royalty down under, perhaps Lord Downer?

Never no mind, and it seemed rather odd to be hanging the reputation of the monarchy on a monarch who will shortly leave the scene, and leave behind a wretched, confused spawn ... some lurking in America, some just lurking ...

That said, the pond has become something of a monarchist of late, simply on the entertainment value it provides ...

 

"More unique"?

In the pond's world, it's always totally* unique (*ABC licensed and approved). 

Still that BBC story  offered a splendid cup which would certainly grace a Lady Downer of East Cheam or the Adelaide Hills table ...

And that reminded the pond of royal stock with slight genetic mistake ...

Of course, of course, it's a bloody international conspiracy of the first water, and it helped the pond understand why that dopey Northern Island leader resigned last night while the pond was watching the Sky News breakfast show ...

The pond knew it right away and absolutely refused to accept Daily Beast assurances and snide hints that there might be conflicts of interest or even signs of absolutely fabulous and famous dissolution ...

A former girlfriend of Prince Andrew, Lady Victoria Hervey, on Wednesday claimed that the notorious picture of Prince Andrew with his arm around Virginia Giuffre’s waist was a fake made with an “Irish body double.”
Hervey, 44, who dated Andrew, 62, in 1999 appeared on a British documentary earlier this month about Ghislaine Maxwell in which she said she was used as “bait” by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.
Hervey, whose brother was the famously dissolute 7th Marquess of Bristol, appeared to back claims made by Andrew’s camp that the photograph is fake. 

The pond knew right away that Andrew had only hung around Epstein for his elegant discourses on Shakespeare, and the way, as old chums, they could engage in historical comparisons between the reigns of the first and second Liz... 

As for that other Hervey, head to the wiki for a sad and sorry tale ...

Frederick William John Augustus Hervey, 7th Marquess of Bristol (/ˈhɑːrvi/ "Harvey"; 15 September 1954 – 10 January 1999), also known as John Jermyn and John Bristol, was a British hereditary peer, aristocrat and businessman. Although he inherited a large fortune, he died almost penniless from funding a chronic and persistent drug addiction.
John was the eldest child of Victor Hervey, 6th Marquess of Bristol. He was distant from his father, who treated him harshly, and did not get on well with him, though he was close to his first stepmother, Lady Juliet. After spending time in London, Monte Carlo, Paris and New York in the 1970s, he settled in part of the family seat, Ickworth House in Suffolk, becoming the 7th Marquess in 1985. Despite inheriting a large fortune of up to £35 million, the Marquess spent most of it during his lifetime. He struggled with addiction to cocaine and other drugs, serving several jail sentences for possession, and was known for his flamboyant lifestyle and homosexuality. His brief marriage in the mid-1980s did not last because of this, and he became increasingly depressed as he lost money and faced bankruptcy, culminating in the sale of the remainder of Ickworth House to the National Trust. He died in early 1999 of complications resulting from his drug addiction, and was succeeded by his half-brother, Frederick Hervey, 8th Marquess of Bristol.

Dammit, we need our foolish fops, and we need our aristocrats and we need our monarchy, and that's why the pond stands with Lord Downer and his brood.

The last thing the colonies need is some dullard GG turned President, incapable of a decent scandal generating much gossip, wasting his time and taxpayer's money doling out scones, jam and cream at Government House!

What else? Well as those attentive to the comments section, always much more interesting than the pond itself, the pond was gazumped by a reader.

Here's how it came about ...

The pond simply couldn't believe its ears, and headed off to Lady Grattan of The Conversation to get it confirmed ... and sure enough ...

He's just normal white bread? That's me?

What a fuckwit. He actually did say it ...

Now don't get the pond wrong, it's not racist, it's got nothing against white bread, especially the old fashioned kind ...

 

 

One of the pond's better treats in recent years came when it dropped into a bakery in Year My Voice Broke territory and enjoyed an old fashioned style loaf of bread with heavily blackened and baked crust ... (no, just because the pond mentioned a movie doesn't mean the pond will go into how disappointing Belfast is as a movie, the pond saw it weeks ago, and has bitten its tongue ever since, and has steadfastly ignored the clowns on ABC breakfast carrying on as if Branagh knew how to write and direct as well as do bad Agatha Christie).

The pond has no idea if the Braidwood bakery still makes the style, but oldtimers will know the form of high top white loaf that used to be ubiquitous, though that snap really should have a lot more charcoal on top to be considered properly done and fully flavoured … in Tamworth in the old days they liked to burn the top to a crisp ..

But that said, and while old school white bread is a wondrous thing, surely there's more to life than just being a white bread dickhead. As the bible said,

When I was a child, I spake and ate white bread as a child, I understood as a child and thought the black crust was the bee's knees, well worth a fight with siblings, I thought as a child entranced by bread, blackberry jam and cream topping: but when I became a man, I put away childish things, and decided to fuck Australia and deny grants thanks to a white bread mentality …

Well it sort of said that, and it goes without saying that there are all kinds of bread, and if you were a genuine bread lover rather than a boring dickhead speaking in tongues to an imaginary friend, you'd be celebrating all the various breads there are in the world. Why even the magic water man thought nothing of forking over ten bucks for a good sourdough.

But once on site, so to speak, there was another story in The Conversation which reminded the pond that at one point it had a passing interest in history, like seven years of studying the bloody stuff … 

This one, by academics Andrew Francis and Aidan Sims, was so good that it got snaffled by The Graudian ... and over there, it was headed We resigned from the ARC College of Experts – political meddling gave us no choice.

The pond couldn't help but admire the point the two academics made, which the pond will transcribe into its own subtle non-academic dialect: Stuart Robert is a colossal fuckwit.

Of course being academics they were more circuitous and genteel, but at the end this is what caught the pond's eye…

Such meddling is unheard of in comparable democracies (like Canada, New Zealand, the UK, the US). Per Britain’s Haldane principle, once funding parameters, rules and assessment processes are set, the complex and wickedly hard decision as to which research represents the best mixture of originality, significance, feasibility and, yes, benefit should be left where it belongs: in the hands of experts.
As mathematicians, we are not experts in the areas of the vetoed grants – we are the mythical “pub-goers”. So we trust the expertise of those who assessed them. We resigned from the College of Experts because we could not be complicit in a process that does otherwise. 

Then they signed off ...

Andrew Francis is professor of mathematics, Western Sydney University and Aidan Sims professor of pure mathematics, University of Wollongong

These were maths bods, going into battle for principle and the y'artz research grants that were cut … why it was all very C. P. Snow, and what's more they came up with a favourite pond saying…

Deciding what research to support is hard. As argued previously, it is difficult, maybe impossible, to predict what lines of inquiry will bear the best fruit – or even what fruit to grow. As is generally attributed to Oren Harari:
The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.
It is only obvious in hindsight that understanding electricity represented “value for money”. Likewise, as Ofer Gal explains, the national interest in understanding history and culture may only become visible after the fact, through the tragic consequences of ignorance.

As well as the electric light, Robert McNamara was led as a prime example of a goose completely oblivious to history, but the pond will leave others to do the read as they will or won't …

Now that could have led the pond into a discussion of the fundamentalist Xian school in the deep north attempting a back flip, but that was too pathetic, and too nakedly obvious. 

They couldn't stand the heat in the kitchen, they did the obvious Xian thing and lied their socks off. Just like lying white bread SloMo ... (the pond won't mention BoJo because his relationship to Xianity is as distant as his ability to lie shamelessly is close)

They still believe gays are off to eternal hell, and trannies are aliens from Venus, but now they just won't say it for awhile, in the hope that the fuss will go away, but the long absent lord help any child that's a little different that's sent to that school by stupid parents ...

Instead that mention of schools still lighting their education system with biblical candles reminded the pond that it really didn't spend enough time plugging The Conversation...

So much time wasted plugging reptile loons, and that's how, Ripley, believe it nor not, the pond ended up spotting that story ... already well covered in the comments section ...

 

 

What a ripper illustration, and of course there was a reminder at the end of current follies and where following the reptiles might lead us ...

Indeedy do, and that invocation of the proverbial boiling frog naturally led the pond on to its wiki ...

...In the 1996 novel The Story of B, environmentalist author Daniel Quinn spends a chapter on the metaphor of the boiling frog, using it to describe human history, population growth and food surplus. Pierce Brosnan's character Harry Dalton mentioned it in the 1997 disaster movie Dante's Peak in reference to the accumulating warning signs of the volcano's reawakening. Al Gore used a version of the story in a New York Times op ed, in his presentations and the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth to describe ignorance about global warming. In the movie version the frog is rescued before it is harmed.This use of the story was referenced by writer/director Jon Cooksey in the title of his 2010 comedic documentary How to Boil a Frog.
Law professor and legal commentator Eugene Volokh commented in 2003 that regardless of the behavior of real frogs, the boiling frog story is useful as a metaphor, comparing it to the metaphor of an ostrich with its head in the sand.Economics Nobel laureate and New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman used the story as a metaphor in a July 2009 column, while pointing out that real frogs behave differently. Journalist James Fallows has been advocating since 2006 for people to stop retelling the story, describing it as a "stupid canard" and a "myth".[17][18] After Krugman's column appeared, however, he declared "peace on the boiled frog front" and said that using the story is acceptable if the writer points out that it is not literally true.

As for the behaviour of real frogs ...

During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.

So it's actually true, what with reptiles having no soul and no brain to speak of ...

Meanwhile, speaking of the Met, a novel topic for the pond, there's probably one pond reader who nodded head yesterday at this Graudian exclusive … 

A Metropolitan police officer disciplined after an inquiry into misogynistic and racist messages has since been promoted, the Guardian has learned, as Cressida Dick was warned she could lose the confidence of the mayor of London.

Misconduct was proven against the unnamed officer after a watchdog inquiry into messages about hitting and raping women, which were shared by up to 19 officers based mainly at Charing Cross police station.
There were also messages about the deaths of black babies and the Holocaust, prompting accusations of a culture of misogyny and racism within the country’s biggest force.
The officer was promoted from the rank of constable to sergeant despite being sanctioned for failing to report wrongdoing, the Met confirmed.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) also revealed that three officers who remain in the Met sent potentially discriminatory messages. They were classed as being less serious than the messages that emerged on Tuesday.
On Wednesday the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, put Dick on notice that she had to urgently reform the force or he could withdraw his confidence in her. The commissioner is appointed by the mayor and home secretary.
For the first time sources made clear Khan would consider attempting to oust Dick if she fails to deliver rapid progress. The two had a 90-minute meeting described as “frank” after the revelations about Charing Cross and continuing crises gripping the Met. A source close to Khan said: “If the commissioner is not able to do so, then the mayor will have to consider whether she is the right person to lead the change needed at the Met.”
The souring of relations came after the IOPC revealed shocking details of messages shared by Met officers between 2016, the year before Dick became commissioner, and 2018. They were uncovered by accident.
One male officer wrote to a female officer: “I would happily rape you … if I was single I would happily chloroform you.”
The IOPC said the behaviour was part of an offensive Met police culture, not just rogue individuals. “We believe these incidents are not isolated or simply the behaviour of a few ‘bad apples’.” The Met denies the force is plagued by misogyny and racism.
Of 14 officers investigated, two deemed to be the worst offenders were sacked for gross misconduct. Misconduct was proven against another three, while another officer resigned before the disciplinary process was complete.
On Wednesday the Met confirmed that one officer against whom misconduct was proven had been promoted. The force said the officer “attended a misconduct meeting and was given management action/advice about reporting wrongdoing”.
A spokesperson said: “In order to achieve promotion, any officer has to go through a broad and rigorous assessment process. Following that they have to complete an extensive workbook to evidence their skills and abilities to ensure they are capable of the role/rank...

Indeed, indeed, and when Boris needs some cover for a damning report, no doubt a righteously extensive Met workbook can be put on parade …in about a year or so ... and that's why you need a tightly knit network at the top, cops to help make the world safe for clods ...

The pond barely had time to note another contribution to the oscillating fan saga ...

The rest is easy enough to find, and it's behind a soft paywall, but the pond wanted to mention it because of its contribution to an entirely new genre, or meme, or trope if you will ... unflattering photos of the oscillating fan ...

 Dear sweet long absent lord, what a sight ...

What else? Well, as predicted above, there's idiocy abroad in education, it's election mode and culture wars time, and ... (soft paywall)

 

Of course it was leaked for a purpose ... to celebrate the deeds and doings of the absent trudging Tudge, inspired by the reptiles ...

 

 

The pond is content. It was thanks to the public education system's insistence that it spend a short time each week in company with a Catholic priest, who much preferred to be golfing, that led to the pond's rampant atheism. 

Each week the class would combine to ask the plump and un-pious one knotty theological questions, and each week he'd give a standard stupid response, and you could sense he couldn't wait to get out of the room and off to the Tamworth course to take a whack at tee and turf, and hope there was no snake waiting to lure him into have a beery banquet in the club ...

To paraphrase a famous quote, you can preach this pious shit George, but you can't make me believe it ...

And speaking of the enormous capacity for infinite stupidity and strange beliefs, please allow the pond to end with a celebration of levelling up, which means whatever you chose it to mean ...