In which the pond meditates with prattling Polonius and Dame Slap, but keeps getting distracted ...

 

The pond did enjoy this farewell to Godard ...

It's a riff on one of the pond's favourite Godardian phrases ...A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

The pond frequently invoked the saying to explain why anything the pond touched never seemed to run in any order ...

Sadly the pond's contemplation of the reptiles in its Sunday meditation always follows the traditional order, but at least the pond can sometimes leave out the middle ...

Damned if the pond is going to go there ... and the pond could do without the oscillating fan when Polonius's prattle was to hand ...

Getting through Polonius these days might not mean leaving out the middle so much as seeking distractions.

For starters, Polonius is a divisive figure with his constant sneering at anyone who doesn't agree with him, which leads to a heck of a lot of sneering ...

There's something deeply unhappy about the man, and the pond wonders if he ever got out on the right side of the bed right up to this current display of spleen and spite ...

What the pond enjoys about Polonius is his naked hostility and his pedantry, exemplified by that blather about postnominals ...

There's something about the Fitz that gets stuck deep in his sneering craw.

Personally the pond can take or leave the bandana, but if clothing was the main issue, the pond couldn't walk along King street in Newtown without assaulting half the young things, apparently unaware that they're clones from a 1960s folk festival ...

Even more disturbing to the pond, of late Polonius has been a little lacking in the pedantry front, with new contenders distracting the pond,.

To give just one example, the pond was particularly pleased to read in the Graudian a heated column about commas...

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” became the surprise earworm lyric of the late noughties when the Ivy League-educated band Vampire Weekend asked the question on their debut album. Fourteen years later, I can tell you that the definitive answer is: Thérèse Coffey.

The new health secretary and deputy prime minister has begun her tenure by issuing language-use directives in an email to departmental civil servants. Language should “be positive”, “precise”, and “avoid jargon”. But most importantly: there should not be, under any circumstances, Oxford commas.

You might think: given the NHS falling apart, aren’t there rather more important things Coffey should be addressing? What about the 6.8 million people waiting for routine treatment? Or the 132,000 unfilled NHS posts? Or the patients dying in ward corridors? Look, those things can wait because Coffey hates the comma...

Then to edit her a little, Hannah Jane Parkinson later turned to comedy ...

So, what is this contentious comma exactly? The simplest explanation is that it is a comma placed before the final item in a list. For example: Coffey’s email was patronising, unnecessary, and a distraction. But even the specifics of the definition are hotly disputed.

My main reason for enthusiastically supporting the Oxford comma is that it is important to the cadence and rhythm of a sentence. I feel this in my bones. But another argument is that its omission can change the meaning of a sentence, or introduce ambiguity.

This sentence, for example: “At the government’s circus-themed party, I struck up a conversation with the clowns, Suella Braverman and Nadine Dorries,” which does not have an Oxford comma, has a different meaning to: “At the government’s circus-themed party, I struck up a conversation with the clowns, Suella Braverman, and Nadine Dorries.”

One of the most famous rumours of an Oxford-comma fail relates to The Times supposedly publishing a description of a travel programme starring Peter Ustinov which included the sentence: “The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.” Another is the (probably apocryphal) book dedication: “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” That would be a truly wild coupling.

Despite its most common moniker, the Oxford comma is actually more widespread in American English. Some in the US call it the “Harvard comma”, which is rather sweet. The New Yorker, which readers will know takes its style choices extremely seriously, is a user of the “serial comma”. Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief at Random House, describes those who do not use the Oxford comma as “godless savages”...

Of course the pond routinely encounters prattling Polonius, an 800-year old demigod republican and a tampon-collecting monarchist ...

Yes, the pond is bored, but expects a free-flowing discussion about commas from correspondents, in lieu of idle talk about the republic ...

That must be the squillionth time that Polonius has written about conservative-free zones, and yet the pond has had to stop listening to the ABC, for reasons explained by the venerable Meade in the Weekly Beast ...

Can you imagine the outcry from News Corp if the ABC hadn’t treated the death of the Queen with the reverence it deserved? With the ABC devoting significant resources and airtime to the historic event the critics had nowhere to turn, that was until Crikey criticised the public broadcaster for sending too many people to London, and news.com.au agreed.

“The ABC has confirmed they have sent 27 employees to the United Kingdom to spearhead their coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s death amid growing backlash over their saturation of royal stories,” news.com.au reported on Friday.

For the record, the ABC has 30 people in London, including correspondents already there covering other European news, and Nine Entertainment has flown in 100 staff, including outgoing A Current Affair host, Tracy Grimshaw.

Enough already, turns out the cardigan wearers are deeply conservative, but that doesn't stop the sniping at them whether they're coming or going in celebration of the monarchy ...

That's why the pond has had to cut dead ABC news radio - the BBC World Service still lives with ancient memories of lost empires - so when Polonius suggests that the ABC, and literary festivals and eight-hundred-year-old dildoes are conservative free, he probably means they're relatively free of barking mad fundamentalist tykes of the Franco-loving DLP kind ... which might also explain why he gets so agitated about red bandanas ... being a man so resolutely dull in his dress that you can only find pictures of him in a black suit, occasionally leavened by a grey suit ...

L'homme au complet gris indeed ...

But that doesn't stop men in gris suits playing the man rather than the ball, while comically pleading for a genuine debate about clothing, and perhaps a republic...

But apparently princes don't because there are any number of comical listings dedicated to the talking tampon making a pictorial goose of himself ...this just a sampling of dozens ...

And so and and so forth, all in the name of a genuine debate.

And so, with Polonius done, now, with the pond reluctantly kicking, and screaming, and digging in heels, the pond must turn to Dame Slap's latest instalment in her never ending black-bashing saga ...

The pond has made as much of a nod to royalty and republic as it can bear, and so black-bashing it is, though the pond might well get a tad distracted along the way ...

The problem with being in the company of a monomaniacal obsessive is that there's never the slightest display of a sensa huma, or even a sense of irony.

There was Marina Hyde having fun with business yesterday in Britain has become One Nation Under Brands, detained in our Center Parcs lodgings...

...It’s been like a competition to see which retailer can act the most preposterously, the most self-regardingly, and with the most complete commitment to the twee.

Could it be Morrisons, announcing that it had turned down the volume of its till beeps “out of respect”? Could it be pawnshop chain Cash Converters formally announcing its self-seclusion from social media? Or could it be – and this one’s the correct answer – Center Parcs decreeing that holidaymakers must be thrown out of its villages for the day of the Queen’s funeral “as a mark of respect”, before backtracking and permitting customers to remain on site, while ordering them to “remain in their lodges”?

Yup, I’ve gone. Completely gone. If you’ve felt slightly “managed” by aspects of the relentlessly choreographed elements of the past week, then this really was your Triumph of the Corporate Will. It was, all of a sudden, simply impossible not to picture oneself in one’s wood-effect, lodge-effect detention hut, cowering by the forest-mural feature wall as village guards toured the site with loudhailers while screaming “REMAIN IN YOUR LODGES!”

There's a lot more at the link, but the pond only needed a little do dilute the concentrated power of relentless Dame Slap black-bashing ...

What's amazing about Dame Slap is that she has the temerity to suggest that there's anything at all right about the proposal. She's been agin it from day one, she's agin it now, and she'll be agin it until they rip the keyboard from her cold, dead hands ...

You can sense it in the condescending malice, dripping like poisoned honey in that line "No doubt some have a genuine personal attachment to Indigenous matters."

No doubt none of that matters to Dame Slap, no doubt her genuine personal attachments are to the snide and the sarcastic and the joys of black-bashing, taking to black-bashing the way Springfield's inhabitants took to snake-bashing day ...

That reference to the five secret ministries? It's the art of the magician, as explained by Penn and Teller. Distraction ...

Throw in a reference to a deviant doing things, and imagine that nails others as matching deviants ...

It's as if the pond decided to hare off on another matter, wondering whether demands of extensive and expert legal advice are necessary when you can shoot from the lip like a Dame Slap or a Lindsey Graham ...

... or to ask questions, or better still devise a listicle of questions, as if there's no time or space going to be allowed for more detailed considerations, because really when it boils down to it, Dame Slap is just doing a Lindsey ...

She's agin it, she's been agin it from the start, she's agin it now, and no attempt to answer her questions will prevent her from being agin it in the future ...

The questions are all of the FUD kind ... designed to raise saucy doubts and fears, and not to worry about answers, precautions or future deliberations ...

All tedious speculation, hysteria, exaggeration and hyperbole, all dressed up in the form of "just asking questions",. but we've all been down that path before ...

A 'just asking questions' master at work ...

And so back to 'just asking questions', Dame Slap style ...

And how do you know that Smersh and Spectre won't combine to create a black president in charge of a republic, who will insist that the entire country is required to wear red bandanas?

There's a certain unholy cruelty in this relentless, obsessive, monomaniacal litany, and it reminded the pond of other cheap trolling tricks ...

And in turn that reminded the pond of Charlie Sykes in The Bulwark ...

A few samples ...

It's the cruelty, the relentless uncaring cruelty, and if you want a link to Dame Slap, thing of the relentless uncaring cruelty behind her never-ending FUD campaign ... dressed up as just asking the questions ...

(Don't forget to read on and get to the bit about the GOP's deep love for the Unabomber ...)

As for the link between DeSantis's dollops of cruelty and Dame Slap's black-bashing, some might think the pond is exaggerating. 

Then please explain what talk of prostitution in Darwin, with Hopperish illustrative snap, has got to do with the referendum or an Aboriginal voice. The pond might as well run a snap of the brothels in Parramatta road as part of a discussion of the federal government ...

It's just using pawns in a cynical trolling exercise ...

Fittingly that last line is the kind of 'nuke the fridge' ultimate form of FUD - "the future governance of the country" - with images of despotic blacks running and ruining the show, and who knows, everybody being forced to wear red bandanas ....

It's not that far from the white nationalist fear of 'the other' and 'the different' that bedevils the United States ...

Should the pond have gone there? Better to go there, than to go semi-there ...

And now as the pond has a few left cartoons over, why not end with them?