In which Polonius provides a chance to snooze, our Gracie sheds tears for landlords, and the bromancer and Tuckyo Rose duke it out ...

 

The pond found this correspondent's link irresistible. Why not begin a meditative Sunday this way?

The comments were pretty good too, what with the beefy boofhead pure Angus copping a mention...

Then it's time to get back to bed and catch a little snooze, because what follows is that great soporific, prattling Polonius ...

Of late, the only interest is punting on how soon Polonius mentions the lack of conservatives in the ABC and/or literary festivals.

Some might want to start up a secondary betting market - how soon will Polonius resort to reptile clichés?

But how can you establish decent odds when Polonius right from the start leads with "cancel culture"?

Anyone who cares knows that none of the reptiles have been cancelled ... they keep punching their tickets week in, week out.

The pond isn't even sure of what it actually means, what with the etymology deeply mysterious, per its wiki ...

The 1981 Chic album Take It Off includes the song "Your Love Is Cancelled" which compares a breakup to the cancellation of TV shows. The song was written by Nile Rodgers following a bad date Rodgers had with a woman who expected him to misuse his celebrity status on her behalf. "Your Love Is Cancelled" inspired screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper to include a reference to a woman being "cancelled" in the 1991 film New Jack City. This usage introduced the term to African-American Vernacular English, where it eventually became more common.

New Jack City?

It's a bloody long way, on a warped and weird road, from there to here, and yet here we are ... with Polonius down wit it ...

No move yet on the ABC and literary festivals, so those who took longer odds must be feeling cheerful, or at least more upbeat than the pond feels being served another load of old Rowling rope, especially that Polonial line "...individuals born male should not attempt to hold a space once totally occupied by those born female."

The silly old chook doesn't even know how to do some dinkum TG bashing and instead resorts to furtive talk of spaces and total occupation, when really, there's been a lot of space sharing over the centuries...

Transgender people (including non-binary and third gender individuals) have existed in cultures worldwide since ancient times. The modern terms and meanings of "transgender", "gender", "gender identity", and "gender role" only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.

Sumerian and Akkadian texts from 4500 years ago document priests known as gala who may have been transgender. Likely depictions occur in art around the Mediterranean from 9000 to 3700 years ago. In Ancient Greece, Phrygia, and Rome, there were galli priests that some scholars believe to have been trans women. Roman emperor Elagabalus (d. 222 AD) preferred to be called a lady (rather than a lord) and sought sex reassignment surgery, and in the modern day has been seen as a trans figure. Hijras on the Indian subcontinent and kathoeys in Thailand have formed trans-feminine third gender social and spiritual communities since ancient times, with their presence documented for thousands of years in texts which also mention trans male figures. Today, at least half a million hijras live in India and another half million in Bangladesh, legally recognized as a third gender, and many trans people are accepted in Thailand. In Arabia, khanith today (like earlier mukhannathun) fulfill a third gender role attested since the AD 600s. In Africa, many societies have traditional roles for trans women and trans men, some of which survive in the modern era. In the Americas prior to European colonization, as well as in some contemporary North American Indigenous cultures, there are social and ceremonial roles for third gender people, or those whose gender expression transforms, such as the Navajo nádleehi or the Zuni lhamana. (wiki for the footnotes)

And so on, and on, because gender is more than birth and always has been ...

Aha, the pond tricked punters. 

They were expecting the third gobbet to contain that reference to conservative free zones such as the ABC and literary festivals, but Polonius snuck it in early. 

Congratulations to the winners, who had faith in Polonius ...

And once Johnny one note gets to playing his tune, he keeps on repeating it ad nauseam. 

Case in point? The start of the next gobbet.

In Polonial eyes, what's the surest sign of a deviant? Did they once work for the ABC? Then they're little better than zombies, the walking dead, or vampiric suckers of Sydney Institute souls ...

Must bookies pay out again for that repeat: "It's the ABC meets literary festivals"? and all the rest of the predictable guff that follows.

What a peevish old sod he's become.

Is it enough to call it mind-numbing, wearisome, dreary, tedious, tiresome, humdrum, and repetitive, monotonous blather, showing that the bees buzzing in Polonius's head have a very limited repertoire ..

The pond regrets that there's not a bonus prize, because surely the most tedious dullard in the reptile game should be rewarded for dully noting another dull program, especially as he couldn't held but mention the ABC yet again in his concluding sentence.

But then it's a chance for stray pond readers to toss their Valium, Xanix, Librium and such like in the bin, and get in a good early Sunday snooze ...

And so to our Gracie. 

Readers with a memory longer than the pond's will recall that yesterday the pond was reduced to heart-rending sobbing at the thought of the suffering of landlords ...

The pond should declare a personal interest here, having spent its early years being kicked from pillar to post by unscrupulous, uncaring landlords, who'd seize bonds knowing that paperwork would defeat any attempt to retrieve them, who never spent a dime on maintenance, and who otherwise showed complete indifference to the fate of their tenants.

So when the pond got around to reading Bleak House, it was already ripe for the presentation of Krook the landlord, named with the usual subtlety employed by Dickens ...

Occasionally there was a lighter note ...

We made a pleasant journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach and had an entertaining companion in Mr. Skimpole. His furniture had been all cleared off, it appeared, by the person who took possession of it on his blue-eyed daughter's birthday, but he seemed quite relieved to think that it was gone. Chairs and table, he said, were wearisome objects; they were monotonous ideas, they had no variety of expression, they looked you out of countenance, and you looked them out of countenance. How pleasant, then, to be bound to no particular chairs and tables, but to sport like a butterfly among all the furniture on hire, and to flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from mahogany to walnut, and from this shape to that, as the humour took one!

"The oddity of the thing is," said Mr. Skimpole with a quickened sense of the ludicrous, "that my chairs and tables were not paid for, and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as possible. Now, that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why should my landlord quarrel with HIM? If I have a pimple on my nose which is disagreeable to my landlord's peculiar ideas of beauty, my landlord has no business to scratch my chair and table merchant's nose, which has no pimple on it. His reasoning seems defective!"

"Well," said my guardian good-humouredly, "it's pretty clear that whoever became security for those chairs and tables will have to pay for them."

"Exactly!" returned Mr. Skimpole. "That's the crowning point of unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner. Have you no consideration for HIS property?' He hadn't the least...

Ah, the joys of landlords and repossessions.

They've frequently had a bad press and rightly so ... and our Gracie seems to get a hint of this every so often in her piece, but she does love her Krooks ...

Most people will have a tale to tell about the experience of being a renter. Searching for a property in Sydney can be the most soul-destroying process, with the pond still vividly remembering to help a vulgar youff in the family embark on a hunt, only to stumble on a cockroach-infested dungeon of filth requiring an exorbitant fee for the pleasure of learning the noble Sydney art of rat-hunting ...

Even if you're well off, and can afford a decently fitted out rental property, the screws are usually in, and the worst of the worst are the tightwad small "landlords", who purchase apartments to flip and fill them with tenants to keep the space occupied in the meantime ... only to turn bitter when there's a downturn and the flipping for vast capital gains becomes problematic...

Then try to get them to fix a leaking shower and see how you go ... as the pond's partner discovered when trying to touch base with a Melbourne landlord who rigorously refused to take any calls at all ... but still managed to pocket the rent ...

In short, fuck landlords and the capital gains they rode in on, but how pleasing to see our Gracie return to her roots...

Being a landlord has been made too hard? Try being a renter and you'll find out what it's like to experience the hard ...

And so to the bonus, and yesterday the pond gave fair warning that the bromancer would be the one to make the cut.

The pond's warning also happened to note that now that he's back the bromancer seems incapable of shutting up, so he's gone on at great length, up there with the Everest known as nattering "Ned" ...

This means the pond has no time for The Weekly Beast and the first day of the Great White giant media mogul up against the Crikey media prawn, nor the chance to celebrate Miranda Hyde, though her opening thrust was the usual doozy ...

There are various ways you could sum up the new government to an outsider. It is vocally opposed to the nanny state, but its business secretary still has a nanny. He is 53. Prime minister Liz Truss is “prepared to be unpopular”. That feels fortunate. I’m prepared not to be cast as the new Batman. Among Conservative MPs, Truss is about as popular as anthrax, or a midweek visit from their wives. The PM keeps explaining she’s going to do everything differently, and her economic policy possibly makes best sense as a defence policy. She is casting the UK as a country too mad to nuke. It’s not classical game theory, is it? But maybe we’re just playing Buckaroo.

High-handed funeral gurner Kwasi Kwarteng this morning unveiled his massive mini-budget, described in advance as containing “more rabbits than Watership Down”. Which is a cheery image, though perhaps also apt for something many experts fear could inflict generational trauma. As part of its war on spoilers, the government has declined to have these radically expensive plans costed by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which conforms to the it-can-always-get-worse rule of contemporary British politics. We could soon be begging to go back to the days when prime ministers only bought gold wallpaper they couldn’t afford.

Lowlights of the week? Jacob Rees-Mogg accused opponents of fracking of “sheer ludditery”, which means so much more from a man whose Fitbit is a carriage clock, and who makes his secretary type on a spinning jenny. The presence of Rees-Mogg in the key quad of Truss’s ministers really is something, given all his gaffes, given the fact he has never “delivered” in any previous job at all, and given he has to be lowered into a priest hole for the duration of every election campaign the Conservatives actually want to win. Yet Mogg has never been more important than he is now. Maybe the Tories really are trying to throw it; the mere presence of his name on the teamsheet screams “far east betting syndicate”.

Much as the pond loves tales of Moggie the impractical cat, there's simply not the time or the space ... we're talking seven gobbets here, and most of them chunky ... but as the pond started with the bromancee, so we must have the last dance with the bromancer ...

Usually when the pond is presented with bromancer alarm at the Russian sociopath, the pond likes to remember that the standard News Corp line is borrowed from Mad magazine. 

What, me worry?, says Tuckyo Rose ...

Being Axios, there's not much more, but then why should the pond care? Tuckyo Rose doesn't care, and it throws all the bromancer's caring in the shade ...

The pond has heard this before and from others who at least speak Russian, as with Cathy Young in The Bulwark on The Weakness of the Strongman.

Then there's Giselle Donnelly in the same place in What the Ukrainians Need to Succeed, or Joshua Yaffa in The New Yorker with Putin's escalation in Ukraine is a losing strategy ...(paywall, try cache clearing)

Given that everyone is scribbling about it, and given the pond's tendency to conspiracy theories, the pond wondered if this was an elaborate attempt to distract the pond from interesting questions ...

Pick one? That's very bromancer, why not pick both, and throw in Chairman Rupert while we're at it ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer is burbling along ... in fact, he still hasn't got out of first gear ...

There's been endless amounts of this from armchair warriors all over the planet .... and meanwhile, in another galaxy far away ...

Sorry, the pond doesn't link to News Corp sites, but as the pond is already in an epic with the bromancer, what the heck, why not add to the length with a few samples ...

And then ...

And that's what a quisling appeaser and kissing cousin to the bromancer sounds like.

And then this all built up - there's a lot more Putin worship and Putin excuses the pond left with the rest of the roadkill - to this classic moment ...

That reference to bankruptcies and triple marriages, um divorces, really sent the punters off ...

And with that extended detour done, it's back to the bromancer, apparently unaware he's kissing cousin with Tuckyo Rose...

Given all the attention on other matters, is it wrong to think of the bromancer as mounting a distraction operation? Distracting from Tuckyo Rose, and the works of Faux Noise and News Corp, and the ongoing deeds of the orange Jesus ...

But the pond was relieved. The bromancer could rant away and the pond could slip in a few relieving cartoons ...

Yes, there it is. "Like many dictatorships, he has fanned irrational, paranoid and extreme nationalism," and incidentally won the starry eyed support of Tuckyo Rose and sections of the GOP ...

Back to the bromancer ...

Suddenly the scales from the pond and it all became clear. Instead of spending quality time with his kissing cousin Tuckyo Rose, the bromancer has been sneaking off to read The New York Times, and even worse, that prize loon Tom Friedman ...

cf Thomas Friedman's Five Worst Predictions

Oh heck, just google Thomas Friedman's wrong predictions and enjoy the ride ...

There's a link in one of them which links to a Friedman story in which he explains that Sleepy Joe was making Putin blink...

Putin has been on such a run of outmaneuvering the West and destabilizing our politics that it is easy to overrate him. It is also hard to believe a word that comes out of his mouth. But if Putin was sincere when he said Tuesday that he was “ready to continue on the negotiating track” to ensure that Ukraine never joins NATO and was also pulling back some of his menacing forces — U.S. officials say there’s no sign of that yet — it’s because Biden’s statecraft has given Putin pause.

Specifically, the Biden team has mobilized enough solidarity among the NATO allies, enough advanced defensive arms transfers to Ukraine and enough potentially biting economic sanctions on Russia to put into Putin’s mind the only thought that matters: “If I go ahead with a full-scale invasion and it goes bad — wrecking Russia’s economy and resulting in Russian soldiers returning home in body bags from a war with fellow Slavs — could it lead to my own downfall?”

 

The rest, as they say, is history, but it does help explain why the bromancer ignores a fifth possibility.

Thanks to News Corp, Tuckyo Rose, the GOP and all the other rats in the ranks, the GOP wins in November, rejects all assistance to Ukraine, helps Vlad the sociopathic impaler to his booty, and tears up the NATO treaty as the mango Mussolini wanted ... 

There are many new orange Jesus wannabes ready to take to the skies ...

... that it might just be that Vlad finds new friends in the USA, as well as his old friends in Italy ...

Yep, maximum danger lies ahead because News Corp is still full of quislings, turncoats, traitors, collaborators, colluders, back stabbers, and double-crossing double-dealing renegades who long ago fell in love with authoritarian narcissists of the orange Jesus and Vlad the sociopathic impaler kind ...

And some day the pond will tell you what the pond really thinks ...

And now, as it's been a long haul, and as we've been discussing ratbags and posturing macho loons, the pond is pleased to end with an infallible Pope, saved up for the day ...