For once Polonius is prattling on about something other than the ABC - spoiler alert, he even references Chris Masters, as if Masters was contributing some insight or truth, without mentioning the ABC - and gasp, he even manages to reference Muriel's Wedding, proving that he's as up to date as 1994 ...
The pond had absolutely no dog in the fight, so it settled back for the ride ...
The pond doesn't mean to rain on Polonius's parade, but really, been there and done that ...
It was still playing the last time the pond checked, head off to the ABC's RN and you too can hear what Polonius was listening to back in May 2022, and the artwork's pretty much the same too ...
But the pond doesn't mean to rain on Polonius's parade, and besides we must get to him quoting Chris Masters, it's too deliciously ironic ...
Um, that'd be the Hamish McDonald talking about the matter on the ABC back in May, but a columnist must use the material to hand.
And so to Polonius desperately trying to pretend he hadn't actually listened to RN back in May, and talk of other sources, including the lizard Oz ...
Alas, that's the mention of Masters done and dusted and alas, that's the end of Polonius, and alas this must be the first in many a week that Polonius has failed to mention that there's not a single conservative commentator anyone to be seen, found or heard on the ABC ...
Would the pond have been better off spending quality time with the Killer and a raging mango Mussolini?
Regrettably the pond must leave the Donald there, lying his socks off, or lying through his teeth, or perhaps in the company of a Ukrainian woman with many projects on the boil, including the mango Mussolini, with the reptiles hastily rushing to his defence ... singing that old ballad, is that all there is ma?
Indeed, there was only an attempted coup and why the dispute over documents when the Donald had arranged the strictest security ...
Enough of the low comedy, the pond had to gird its loins and get ready to defend the country with Generalfeldmarschall Bromancer.
Standing ready, Generalfeldmarschall, and awaiting orders, and let's give them hell ...
No fair-minded observer? Presumably the bromancer was saying that nattering "Ned" isn't really a fair-minded observer ...
Announcing the royal commission on Thursday, Albanese used the same
standard formula – a full investigation was essential “to ensure that it
can never, ever, happen again”. Yet this is already established – the
scheme is abandoned, the class action is settled, the court had issued
its judgment, the former Morrison government had apologised.
Yes, nothing to see here, just a sideshow, now back to the war with China ...
This is exceptionally serious stuff and the pond wishes it could pay full attention, but the pond is desperate to work in a reference to the Weekly Beast, and the gutless wonders at 9, and in particular the contemptible fellow-travelling of a Chip off a lesser block, more a grand mal than le grande ...
No link to the wretched hit job ... perhaps the pond could have dressed it up for the bromancer by comparing minnow Taiwan to authoritarian Xi's bullying ways, and Chip joining with Lachy to bully a press fingerling, but instead we must return to the military conflict in the South China sea likely to occur before Xmas ...
It would certainly be remiss of the pond not to acknowledge the splendid planning and foresight of beefy boofhead pure grain-fed windmill free Angus ... celebrated in the Graudian on 22nd April 2020 by Daniel Hurst ...
A most excellent vision, now carry on bromancing ...
What do we do about the ADF? Dare the pond suggest it's simple? Appoint the bromancer as chief strategist and deviser of listicles, namely the key tasks for a mission. If the pond might add a few words, it's amazing what you can do in an F-14 with bit of chaff, what the enemy doesn't know is your limit, time is your greatest adversary, it's not the plane, it's the pilot ... and any old sub is better than no sub at all ... and don't forget the missiles ...
In all this a fearless armchair warrior of the bromancer kind has to battle the cardigan-wearing nannies in the navy ... and please, don't forget to cancel the tanks. The pond has never once heard the bromancer on tanks, so this is a truly novel approach, full of forward-thinking strategies ... (some might say that the bromancer's line about never having used a tank since the Vietnam war is now up there with Polonius's noting that the ABC has no conservative commentators, but the pond will not accept that sort of cheap shot).
Only to two? Sheesh, this is going to be a long one, as the bromancer gets on to his special theme, those bloody subs ...
The Xian Democrats might rule in Beijing? So yesterday the Pellists were right, with 60-90 million Xians ready to dominate the 1.3 billion odd heretics ...
Phew what need of the bromancer's advice, when the Pellists are ready to take down Xi in the same way they took down the pagan Roman empire ... and to think there were all those historians Gibbon's notion that it was the Xians wot done it ...
Back to that interim sub, with the Collins class a rip roaring success and a splendid choice, with at least 1 in 6 always ready for active duty ...
The pond absolutely feels no pressure at all. With the bromancer as defender in chief, and all the reptiles dragooned into military service, the country is extremely safe ...
That said, the pond did face a monstrous choice for the bonus.
There was our Gracie railing at the toads - the pond loves a good rant at toads - and yet the pond decided to abandon Gracie for Dame Slap ...
Look at what the pond was missing ...
It was a difficult decision, but the pond couldn't walk past Dame Slap's bid for attention, beginning with that headline proposing to put "true authenticity into focus."
That put Dame Slap firmly in the camp of airheads and bubble-headed boobys of the new age kind ...
Just what was "true authenticity". Was it a match for untrue inauthenticity? Or perhaps simply untrue authenticity? Or perhaps true inauthenticity?
Could it lead to authentic inauthenticity? Was there the possibility of tautological travel, in the sense of solutions to the conundrums arriving one after the other in rapid succession?
The pond thought that, just like in Dirty Harry, it's gotsa ta know ... (and relax, the reptiles got around to fixing that typo) ...
Yes, it's Meghan now, but let's face it, her skin's the wrong colour ...
Surely regarded as reactionary?
No, surely it's just racist. Why else mention skin colour? What's the point, if not a racist point of the Xian white nationalist kind?
But that's Dame Slap at her oblivious best ... and never mind the idle monstrous stupidity of trading off on Markle to celebrate little Johnny ...
The pond realised at once the nature of the game. Spend some time on trashing Markle, as if the pond would get outraged at the trashing of a minor ersatz royal, and then spend endless time imagining a golden age featuring little Johnny, and never mind the Iraq war or sundry other acts of endless, mindless chutzpah and bastardry ...
Let's face it, what royal has any discernibly useful job, but the pond seems to recall that one of the endless acts of bastardry perpetrated by little Johnny was to kill off a republic so that we might retain the monarchy and all that colonial era stuff, so that women's magazines might be made safe for future generations with gossip about the royals, and minor attention seekers of the Markle kind ...
So little Johnny is actually not just a marker, but a perpetrator of the insufferable dross on hand today, but Dame Slap is too thick to realise it ...
Authenticity?
Ah shucks, how could the pond resist when it comes to Dame Slap preaching about authenticity?
Been to that inauthentic pussy-grabbing well a zillion times, and likely will go there again, because even Humpty Dumpty could tell you that's authentically stupid ...
But back to the current golden age bullshit, and never mind the Iraq war ... or the climate science denialism and inaction or all the rest of it ... or the fact that this terminally modest man has published yet another interminable volume ...
...the Liberal elder also flagged some of the divisive arguments conservatives will use against the constitutional referendum over a Voice to Parliament.
It was a reminder of Howard's ideological blind-spots - most pointedly, the glaring inconsistency of owning and celebrating the great achievements of Western civilisation but carrying none of the responsibility for the atrocities on which those achievements were built, because, simply, we weren't there.
And it was a reminder too that Howardism hasn't ended yet. (here)
And there it became obvious, if it wasn't already. Dame Slap is just providing filler, guff to fill up the spaces between the reptiles' click bait videos, carefully neutered.
Who cares if Markle has a monstrous sense of entitlement? Isn't that the Tory way? Who cares about an alleged nursery fire?
Might not the pond have been better off reading Marina Hyde, in her usual fine form, as she zoomed past planet Janet to contemplate wearing a truss, because here's a sense of entitlement at work ...
"Cost of living” is an expression now used so frequently, including by those in positions of power, that it’s possible to end up forgetting how incredibly bleak those words are as a concept. (See also: “human resources”.) Maybe we should revitalise the cliche by calling it the “price of existing” crisis. It is, after all, a perfectly matter-of-fact way of suggesting that there is a point at which many may simply find it too expensive to endure. People generally make too much fuss about cliches, but – in one of the very richest countries in the world – this one does feel worth urgently denormalising.
So who’s going to do it? Liz Truss?! The light from even the stars we can see without telescopes can take years to reach us – sometimes thousands of years. On Tuesday Truss was in the West Midlands, with the public able to look at an emanation from her that read: “I will support businesses to get our economy firing on all cylinders – delivering growth and opportunity in the West Midlands and beyond.” How many years ago were these words beamed out? This morning the energy price cap hit £3,549. You sense West Midlands businesses – to whom the price cap doesn’t even apply – would like to know how on earth they’re supposed to afford to switch on the cylinders at all.
Back on planet Earth, Whitehall has drawn up plans for energy-intensive firms to power down this winter. The single swinging lightbulb in Liz Truss’s head seems to have flickered on overnight, resulting in an article for the Daily Mail in which she explains: “My immediate priority will be to put more money back in people’s pockets by cutting taxes.” The latest forecasts hazard that inflation will hit 18% in early 2023. The price cap prediction for April is currently at £6,823. Which would certainly change a lot of things, among them the working definition of the word “cap”. The political reality is that a Truss administration would have had to make a number of era-defining interventions by that point – and the no-handouts posturing will seem like a relic of a distant time.
Now that's how you talk about a monstrous sense of entitlement ... but the pond must return to the single swinging lightbulb in Dame Slap's head, where apparently little Johnny has taken up residence ...
And there have it, and the pond feels fully justified, because it's always fun to observe the scribbler of Nothing Much carrying on like a Duchess of Nothing Much about other duchesses of Nothing Much ... except when she's celebrating that authoritarian pussy-grabber full of much in the way of coups and secret documents ...
After that, what's left? Mindless padding and filler for a couple of click bait videos and a bit of book flogging ... surely. it must already be headed to the remainder shelves ...judging by the ads, it's already being marked down to half price.
And now, having padded and filled with the best nothing much on planet Janet, the pond can at last turn to an infallible Pope for relief ... after a serve of Dame Slap, the pond always has a hankering for a slice of cheese and a cup of tea ...
Ah - Polonius was excused from prattling about the ABC this weekend. Good ole ‘Gleeso’, in the ‘Curious Snail’, received the message on his computer that it was his turn to maintain the rage. The bait has ’With ABC radio posting some of its worst ratings on record, it’s sad to see an Australian institution lose its way so badly, writes Peter Gleeson.’
ReplyDeleteThey do sadness so well, don’t they?
And so selectively forgetful, Chad: no sympathy at all for the awful loss of audience that has befallen Alan Jones and Piers Morgan.
DeleteAnd that casual belief that "As it is now, so it shall always be" and therefore the ABC will never, ever be able to regain its audience ... until the next major bushfire or other disaster that is, because of course people know that they can only trust and believe the ABC in troubled times.
"So yesterday the Pellists were right, with 60-90 million Xians ready to dominate the 1.3 billion odd heretics ..." Well, they do have an invisible friend on their side, don't they ?
ReplyDeleteInsert any of the actors above as King & courtiers, especially scomo.
ReplyDeleteThe Constitutional Peasants Scene
youtube
com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng&feature=emb_title
"Fran Bailey says she forced Scott Morrison out as head of Tourism Australia because of a “complete lack of trust” and has called on him to quit federal parliament immediately" in the SMH article "Ex-minister who ousted Scott Morrison from Tourism Australia says he must leave parliament".
I loonoond was around in the days of Monty Python, they'd get script ideas all day everyday. Thenks DP.
Just search "The Constitutional Peasants Scene" copy paste link address and replace dot. (hoho)
Anonymous - thank you for the clue to the Faine/Fran item. I was able to get a free read (by not having tried to read anything in the SMH for, I suppose, this year) by going to
Deletehttps://www.smh.com.au/national/i-was-gobsmacked-when-he-became-prime-minister-20220826-p5bd19.html
To others here - worth a glance, if you can score the 'freebie', because it begs the same question - if you knew he was so deficient in management skills - why did you not alert the rest of the party to that?
There is also plenty of material available (I think the 'Wiki' does it best) to show that the Bikini'd Bingle campaign achieved one of those rare distinctions in advertising and marketing - demand for the product dropped during, and after, the campaign. Still, that is common experience with many of this country's supposedly talented CEOs, who move from one failure to another, but always upwards.
Umm, "why did you not alert the rest of the party". Err, because they're supposed to be mature adults who can form their own judgement ?
DeleteHahahaha ... yes that was juvenile humour.
;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) - juvenile humour does help when one tries to get a perspective on the entire $coMo fantasy.
DeleteHoward’s hero is Menzies, but it’s a pity he doesn’t emulate him in one particular way. For all his myriad faults, Ming at least knew when to fuck off and shut up. After retiring as PM and publishing his memoirs he barely commented on public affairs; the only instance I can recall was that in 1977 he cautioned against the referendum proposal to impose a retirement age for judges. Howard, however, simply can’t keep out of the limelight; sharing his reactionary views on sundry current issues, giving interviews and writing books in an effort to position himself as some sort of elder statesman, and happily being trotted out to campaign in any failing Liberal election campaign - even though he appears to achieve nothing more than frightening the occasional pensioner at a suburban bowls club. To quote the title of one of Barry Humphries’ old shows - “Isn’t it pathetic at his age”.
ReplyDeleteYou know I just can't remember there being any great public demand for Menzies in person after his retirement - though he did write a couple of pointless books in retirement. Maybe because he was such a useless guy that the Lib faithful had to put up the money to buy in Haverbrack Ave (since demolished which shows how revered he was) for him and Dame Pattie.
DeleteBut little 'Onest Jonny is never going to shut up, is he.
Oh dear, here comes the galloping militarist, the Bromancer: "Smith and Houston must deliver a new defence force philosophy." and "We will always be a much smaller power than any nation that can threaten us." Oh, and exactly which nations can actually threaten us ? Russia perhaps - see how well the Russkis are doing in the Ukraine - and then who ? The Japanese. maybe ? But we know, dont we: the mainland Chinese ! And that's a mere 1.4 billion of them and 26 million of us: just about a ratio of 54 to 1.
ReplyDeleteSo let's ask ourselves: will China ever assemble the very large transport fleet needed to get maybe 200,000 Chinese PLAs onto Australian soil and defend it in transport ? And what would they do if they got here ? That's 20 very large vessels each carrying 10,000 PLAs plus equipment, arms, supplies etc. And assuming we can't manage to sink or disable any of them and that we couldn't put a resistance force wherever they intended to land - oh ok, 20 resistance forces if they decided to land in 20 different places - maybe we will need all those tanks - spread evenly around the entire 25,780Km of our coastline, that's one tank per every 215Km . A mere doddle Yes ?
I think we'd better give up on the 'conventional' arms (ships, planes, subs, tanks etc) and just go for maybe a couple of million land based hypersonic ICBMs and just go for the "if you try, we'll take you all with us" defence force philosophy, yes ? Remembering that China has a lot of people in its cities (20 million and more - eg nearly 22 million in Beijing) and is thus very vulnerable to missiles.
So go for it Bro: make Australia safe.
Our Gracie: "Landlords and rentiers will both suffer but imagine what might happen if every other state decided to copy Queensland." We could then afford a decent heath service ? And our big underground railway too ? [Which, incidentally passes well within 1/2Km of my place.]
ReplyDeleteBut you're right, DP, that's all the Gracie we need for today.
Polonius may have taken a break from whinging about the ABC, but he still manages to get in a dig at prominent ALP figures Jim Cairns and Lionel Murphy, “who did not like anti-communists” opposed to the Tito regime. Ah, those heroic anti-Commies, such as then-prominent Liberal Party member Lyenko Urbanchich, leader of the Party’s “Uglies” faction. Urbanchich’s star rather dimmed when it was revealed that he’d been a prominent Nazi sympathiser and collaborator in WW2 Slovenia. But hey, he and his mates hated Communism, so how dare members of the Left oppose them, right?
ReplyDeleteHappy Slappy: "Everything that is frightfully shallow about modernity is wrapped up in the form of the Duchess of Nothing Much." Here we go again: pissy attribution followed by sharty projection ... and projection ... and even more projection. What kind of "High degree of self awareness" is needed for Slappy to "Own who she is" and to "Respect self and others" ?
ReplyDeleteNow surely, this is all that ever needs to be said about the Slappy and all the other reptiles: "Like a kids game of pass-the-parcel, you unwrap layers of self-absorption, virtue-signalling chitchat about how she feels, graceless whimpering and whining, dramas and finding offence, courting the media then blubbering when coverage doesn't go her way, only to find nothing of note inside."
And talking about "dramas" and when a thing "doesn't go her way" what did happen to Slappy and IPA ?
And why is the Murdochria picking on poor little Meghan ? They're also telling lies about Biden too. Just what is going on ? "Spend some time on trashing Markle ... and then spend endless time imagining a golden age featuring little Johnny..." Yeah, ok then but how about: "I still have no clue what Morrison believes in apart from his Pentecostal [delusion]." After all this time and she still can't grasp that Pentecostalism or not, $loMo firmly believes that his invisible mate is on his side and will continue to deliver miracles for him. Bleedin' bloody obvious, yes ?
But just like Gracie, that's surely enough RWNJs for today.
GB - looking back at what Dame Slap wrote for the weekend, it occurred to me that what she said of Meghan could apply to her colleague (?) Ms Ton-yee-nee, who regularly guides us to the fractional wavelength her identity marks across the great spectrum, as she rails against, er - 'identity politics'. Now, Dame Slap may actually have met the Ton-yee-nee in person (if that is actually a person) where her 'impressions' of Meghan are no better founded than the impressions the rest of us have - and we do not pretend to be on first-name terms with her.
DeleteThat's the wonder of the attribution-projection syndrome Chad: it always applies more to your own than to the ostensible target. And yes, Ms Tog-ninny (or Ton-yee-nee as you prefer) is a perfectly presentable case for it.
DeleteNot that the Duchess of Sussex is any great shakes or anything, but if you remember when New Idea was a respectable housewives' magazine (of the "housewife that gave up the good life" kind), then seeing in today's edition, planted one straight after the other, the following makes one wonder just what species one belongs to:
Meghan Markle’s Podcast Tops Aussie Charts
and immediately below:
Celebs And Fans Trash Meghan’s Podcast Debut
https://www.newidea.com.au/royals
GB - I use 'Ton-yee-nee' only because Ms Tognini grizzled in one of her contributions to the flagship that she was one of a group of special identity - those for whom the great unwashed had not troubled to learn the pronunciation of their family name, according to the rules of the language from which it came. As I recall, she set out that version for the phonetic guidance of we of the g.u.
DeleteMy own family has long accepted the Anglicised pronunciation of our name, as have so many folk whose forbears migrated here from all those other countries. Why, even our Prime Minister happily accepts an Anglicised pronunciation of his family name, where some of his critics have made great show of not using his accepted pronunciation, presumably as a way of patronising him, from their supposedly superior experience of the Italian language. Eric Abetz always made a point of that. Interestingly, the 'Wiki' traces the name back to an ethnic Albanian origin, so the 'pure' pronunciation could be difficult to define.
I was aware of your reasons for using Ton-yee-nee Chad, I was just exercising my Nordic-Anglo predilection for seeing the world entirely through a linguistically simplistic lens (well, ever since The Great Vowel Shift anyway). If ever I should have the misfortune to meet her 'in the flesh' so to speak, I'd have no problem addressing her in my own preferred way :-)
DeletePS DP: next time you're in Melbourne, Gertrude Street. Help make it No 1 !
ReplyDeleteGertrude GB? The pond must stay loyal to Delbridge street, wherein the pond once resided.
DeleteBut, butt, DP, will Delbridge St ever become the 2nd Coolest in the World ?
DeleteMelbourne’s Gertrude Street named second coolest in the world – do you agree?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/26/melbournes-gertrude-street-named-second-coolest-in-the-world-do-you-agree
Delbridge Street still has a plaque celebrating the pond's bravery in visiting the general store around the corner, run by a fan of Fawlty Towers and the soup Nazi, just as Peel street will be ever remembered for the pond's foray up the road to the corner store, only for the local school bully to smash all the carefully curated eggs. No gathering of fawning hipsters can match these timeless entries into cool stories of courage under fire ...
DeleteI've heard Howard called a lot of things in my life, across a few generations now.
ReplyDeleteBut I've had to pull myself off the floor after reading the words "damned refreshing". She really is something special is the Dame Slap.
Seeing history through slap coloured glasses. And she tops herself a para later by proposing "He is the Ash Barty of politics". Um. okay boomer.
Barty retired while at the peak of her game; she felt she had nothing more to prove in tennis. She’s subsequently gone on to other things in her life.
DeleteHoward had one goal in his life - politics. Having made it to the top he had nothing else. He wouldn’t leave voluntarily, but was dragged out kicking and screaming - or less politely, booted -by the Australian people. Fifteen years later, he’s still desperately seeking relevance.
Yeah - I can see the similarity.
"Relevance Deprivation Syndrome: First described by one of its leading victims, Gareth Evans, RDS strikes politicians who suddenly lose a high profile and real power. After many years of the public and media massaging their egos and hanging on their every word, flying in VIP aircraft and getting lurks, perks and freebies far beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, they have to be mere nobodies again."
Delete