In which the pond takes a number of detours before ending up with a good Groaning and a fierce Slapping ...

 

The pond hesitated about publishing at the usual time this day ... how many punters might then miss the adorable Dore doing dorable things, as he inevitably slipped off to another land above the faraway tree?

Not to worry, this arvo the pond will feature Lachlan in full flight, a sight as adorable as the Dore ...

Meanwhile, if you can ignore the deeds of the sociopathic Vlad in Ukraine - a big if - there's much to amuse and distract in today's proceedings.

As an aside, the pond should start by noting that finally the ABC's iView is dead to the pond. 

The only tragedy is that the pond's occasional use of the service was so rare that the pond's abandoning ship won't even show up as a blip, but bottom line, the pond isn't interested in giving its personal information to a broadcaster, especially one that's supposed to provide open and free access to the taxpayers that fund it...

Now on to the pleasures. 

What about John Crace, in as fine a form as the pond has seen in recent times ...

The denial was near total. You’d have thought that Boris Johnson would have had plenty of time to prepare a response to the Metropolitan police’s decision to issue the first bang-to-rights 20 fixed-penalty notices. After all, they can hardly have come as a surprise. Only it seems that everything is a surprise to the Suspect – or the Criminal as we may soon have to call him – these days.
So much so that he’s still not sure if he actually went to a party during lockdown even though the police have concluded that loads of people did. Even now he’s swearing blind that no one did anything wrong in No 10. The police must have made a mistake. If it wasn’t already before, it really is now one rule for him and another for the rest of us.
Imagine the scale of the delusion. It had been a lovely sunny day and “Party Marty”, aka Martin Reynolds, had suggested that the Downing Street staff get a bit pissed together in the garden after work. Just to cheer everyone up a bit and to thank them for all their hard work. And he had even been sure to ask everyone to bring their own booze because he had been thoughtful enough to remember that the Suspect was quite mean and didn’t want to have to pay for people to get trashed. Party Marty had even sent around an email confirming all the details.
But for some reason Boris had not only failed to read the email, he had totally forgotten there had been a party arranged for that evening. So when he had wandered outside with Carrie, he had been totally baffled to discover the garden of No 10 full of people, along with trestle tables weighed down with food and drink. Obviously he had been too polite to ask what everyone was doing there, so he just went along with it. As you do. And it goes without saying that it had also completely slipped the Suspect’s mind that he had introduced legislation preventing people socialising and that parties were illegal.
Now it gets positively spooky. Because the same thing kept happening time and time again and each time the prime minister forgot about the pandemic. There were at least 12 parties in Downing Street – Johnson attended at least six of them – and the Suspect was somehow convinced that no parties had ever taken place. And, bizarrely, still is.

And then there was that mean girl out and about in assorted places ...

 

 

 

Of course it was downplayed by the reptiles, and it is a tad bizarre that Fierravanti-Wells only seemed to discover these truths after being knifed in the back, but all the same ...

“Morrison is not fit to be prime minister,” she said. “And Hawke certainly, is not fit to be a minister.”
She said Mr Morrison had a long history as a back-stabber.
“His actions conflict with his portrayal as a man of faith; he has used his so-called faith as a marketing advantage,” she said.
“We learnt the leader [of] his Hillsong Church group was a mentor to Morrison ... Houston recently stood down as head of Hillsong because he was charged with sexual offences,” she said.
“It is noteworthy that in the past, Houston flew top cover for his paedophile father,” she said, in comments protected by Parliamentary privilege.
Mr Houston resigned as a global senior pastor after he was found to have breached Hillsong’s moral code in his behaviour with two women.
He had previously stepped aside from church leadership roles to fight charges of concealing information that may have been material to the prosecution of his father Frank Houston.
Mr Morrison, who praised Mr Houston in his maiden speech and attempted to have him invited as an official guest at a state dinner at the White House in the US in 2019, immediately sought to distance himself from his mentor, saying he had not been a member of Hillsong in 15 years.
“Morrison is not interested in the rules-based order, it is his way or the highway - an autocrat, a bully who has no moral compass,” she said.
Senator Fierravanti-Wells also claimed to be aware of several statutory declarations testifying that a candidate originally beat Mr Morrison for preselection in Cook before it was overturned.
“I’m advised that there are several statutory declarations to attest to racial comments made by Morrison at the time that ‘we can’t have a Lebanese person in Cook’,” she said.

And then in the Graudian came the rotting fish head ...

 

 

 

 Oh it's all too rich, what with the mean girl talking of the suffering of mean girls, and not a reptile in sight to berate those fiends who tortured mean girls ...

Now on with other reptile business, and naturally the reptiles were in raptures about the budget ...

The hagiography was extreme, with nattering "Ned" forgetting all that nasty talk of debt to occupy the top of the digital page, ma ...

Sorry, that cartoon just leaked into the pond's coverage ... and then there was the triptych of terror ...

 

Good old bouffant one, diligently pumping up the love, and down in the comments section, the tremendously objective simplistic Simon was also at work ... (how's Bid?)

 

 

Ah, a shot at a miracle and finding the balance ... and what a masterpiece of a budget in reptile la la land.

Sadly the pond decided to dodge the lot of them, and even had to let the bromancer go, with a sob and a tear, because the bromancer getting hysterical about disasters is always a treat ... 

But why not "Ned" and the budget? Frankly this headline summed up the pond's feelings in a line ...

 

Yes, it was as naked and as cynical an exercise as that ... but no need to dwell on Murphy brooding about it here, because the pond really wanted to note the full-on hagiographic pictorial feast in the tree killer edition ...

 

 

 

Shouldn't that have been the cost of bribing voters? 

And as for that full length portrait, the pond much preferred the immortal Rowe offering to be found here ...

Before moving along, the pond would like to award a medal to humble Sophie. It must be hard yards to transcribe the thoughts of your master, but someone has to do it, and it's a living ...

 

 

Talk about a technicolor yawn ...but that allows the pond to promote its special late arvo edition featuring the thoughts of the Chairman's spawn.

And now with so much time and space wasted, just a few token contributions, with the Groaner held over to do a good groaning about the budget ...

Amazingly it was a very short groaning, which allowed the pond the room to slip in a Wilcox ...

 

 

And so to a final gobbet of groaning by Dame Groan ...

 

A house of cards? But it's party time ...

As a bonus, there was just room for Dame Slap doing a bitch-slapping in patented Will Smith style ... and eek, the object of Dame Slap's fear and loathing has short hair ...

 

 

Naturally Dame Slap is all for creepy old guys roaming around taking snaps of her ... and of course she approves of the Daily Snail, a sophisticated, elegant operation which could show the reptiles a thing or two about sleaze ...

What's most interesting about all this is not Wilkinson and her carry-on, but the amount of bile that seems to lurk in Dame Slap, gushing out every so often like the sort of geyser you get from squeezing a large, messy pimple ...

Of course Dame Slap loves the pap, and gives the pap a run, because what could be a better way to a republic than sending Diana careening into a wall?

Why is all this so rich? Well you have to travel a few years back, before Dame Slap was up for a krogering, back when she travelled with bankers ...

Crikey is of course dead to the pond, except when it comes in handy ... 

Yes, it's the snout in trough league taking shots at people for having snouts in trough ...

Well you won't find any attempt at humble sanctimony or righteousness from Dame Slap. She's going to stay the bitch from hell, possibly hoping to end up some day in hell (is it worse than being up for a krogering?). Oh if only that wasn't a figment of the Xian imagination ...

And so to end with an infallible Pope ... celebrating an infinite capacity for bribery and corruption ...