In which the pond endures Polonius, sees a cartoon opportunity with the bromancer, and finds an empty house with our Gracie ...

 

The pond felt blessed in its reading this weekend. 

Hadn't Marina Hyde herself referenced the pond with her line  Creating some mad conspiracy to explain your shortcomings really is the last refuge of the loon.

The pond is of course the last refuge of the loon ... and the pond felt blessed that Hyde loved loon refuges ... and that brings the pond to its usual explanation for its Sunday offerings ...

The pond only begins with Polonius's prattle because it remains fascinated and compelled at how the wasps buzzing around in the pedant's noggin manage to survive, masticating over the same old, same old week in, week out ...

If Hyde wanted a real loon, she need look no further ...

Not the Pellists again. For years the used to think of Polonius as some beady eyed ancient mariner ...

It is an ancient Polonius,

And he stoppeth one of three.

'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

May'st hear the merry din.'

He holds him with his skinny hand,

'There was a Pellist,' quoth he.

'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'

Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

He holds him with his glittering eye—

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years' child:

The Polonial prattler hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:

He cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright-eyed Polonial seer ... (here for the original)

Loon! Always the loons ...

Those who don't succumb to the hypnotic effect of the loon's glittering eye might well return to bed for a snooze, and the pond will have done its work.

Those who do hang in might still find themselves nodding off, as the ancient doddering pedant does his oft-repeated schtick ...

Do any of the other reptiles whisper into the Polonial ear, just let it go? Take pity on the readership and just let it go ...

Apparently they're starting to do that for Vlad the impaler, deeply mired in his folly, but apparently not for Polonius.

When a loon gets hold of an idea or an obsession, it's hard to shake them out of it ...

The pond is sometimes reminded of Dickens and David Copperfield and Mr Dick ... there only needs to be a few words changed to improve the read

...Polonius and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his day’s work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every day of his life he had a long sitting at his lizard Oz column, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for the Pellists and Xian Porter always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about the Pellists, the feeble efforts he made to keep them out, and the certainty with which they came in, and tumbled the column out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. 

What Polonius supposed would come of the columns, if they were completed; where he thought it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more than anybody else, I believe. Nor was it at all necessary that he should trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were certain under the sun, it was certain that the columns never would be finished. It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive columns, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart.

Of course some confronted by this kind of kite-flying madness are inclined to scuttle past, ignoring beseeching looks ... not wanting to get involved ... part of the maddened herd, unwilling to spare a moment for the Polonial plight ... and so it happened in the final gobbet, with the cruel hussies not even sending a comment ...

Speaking of a lack of self-awareness and bad names, is Polonius remotely aware of how he's regarded, as a tedious old fart, boring others to death with his obsessive crusading? Or is he, in Mr Pooter style, proud of his capacity for tedium and the production of ennui, and without the benefit of exceptionally sharp and clever jokes ....

November 16.—Woke about twenty times during the night, with terrible thirst. Finished off all the water in the bottle, as well as half that in the jug. Kept dreaming also, that last night’s party was a failure, and that a lot of low people came without invitation, and kept chaffing and throwing things at Mr. Perkupp, till at last I was obliged to hide him in the box-room (which we had just discovered), with a bath-towel over him. It seems absurd now, but it was painfully real in the dream. I had the same dream about a dozen times.
Carrie annoyed me by saying: “You know champagne never agrees with you.” I told her I had only a couple of glasses of it, having kept myself entirely to port. I added that good champagne hurt nobody, and Lupin told me he had only got it from a traveller as a favour, as that particular brand had been entirely bought up by a West-End club.
I think I ate too heartily of the “side dishes,” as the waiter called them. I said to Carrie: “I wish I had put those ‘side dishes’ aside.” I repeated this, but Carrie was busy, packing up the teaspoons we had borrowed of Mrs. Cummings for the party. It was just half-past eleven, and I was starting for the office, when Lupin appeared, with a yellow complexion, and said: “Hulloh! Guv., what priced head have you this morning?” I told him he might just as well speak to me in Dutch. He added: “When I woke this morning, my head was as big as Baldwin’s balloon.” On the spur of the moment I said the cleverest thing I think I have ever said; viz.: “Perhaps that accounts for the parashooting pains.” We roared. (Gutenberg)

And so, with a hearty roar, to the bromancer, and another explanation. 

The pond has no dog in the American elections, and is simply there for the entertainment, and being the bromancer, there's sure to be some fun, and if not, the pond will make its own ...

Warning, it's a long haul, and with the pond's interstitials, it'll likely get longer ...

And you can bet that the result will see the United States spiral even deeper into hysterical ideology and zealotry ... as if there wasn't already enough happening in the circus to ensure a good time for everyone ... (Daily Beast, paywall)

While Herschelling recently, the pond did enjoy this piece by Rex Huppke, I don't care if Herschel Walker paid for an abortion or if he blew up the planet Alderaan Getting Walker elected is key to gaining control of the Senate. Now is not the time to let morality concerns get in the way, which steadily mined that single riff to conclude...

Basically, nothing matters as long as we win

The discovery that Walker is, in fact, the Dark Lord Voldemort, "He Who Must Not Be Named," and is plotting, with the help of Death Eaters, to rid the world of Muggles, would in no way impact my support for a candidate whose qualifications include being somewhat famous.

I want control of the Senate. Getting Herschel Walker elected is key to that end. And if that means being OK finding out he once snapped his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet and instantly wiped out half of all life in the universe, well … so be it. I’m not about to let the morality I use to disguise my craven thirst for power get in the way of my craven thirst for power.

When you're reading the bromancer, you're at one remove from the real fun ... and instead must indulge in idle speculation as to how it all might play out, and yet it will all play out in due course, and the rest is digital fish and chip wrappings littering the full to overflowing intertubes...

Karl Rove? The pond is more in tune with Newt Ginsburg ...

“I’ve known Herschel a good while. I have known Herschel well. I think he’s a remarkable person. I think he’s the most important Senate candidate in the country because he will do more to change the Senate just by the sheer presence, by his confidence, by his deep commitment to Christ. You know he’s been through a long tough period. He had a lot of concussions coming out of football. He suffered PTSD.”.

It goes without saying that the pond would use the bromancer for a cartoon-led recovery ...but that means there must be the odd gobbet filling up the spaces between the cartoons ...

In her talk with Channel 4, Marina Hyde said how much she hated predictions, when we might be better off analysing what's actually happening now. 

But how can any sane person be expected to analyse the spew emanating from the bromancer, including but not limited to his occasional wandering off into the land of his notorious climate science denialism?

In the end, the vote will be what the vote will be, though perhaps there will be even bigger and better clowns added to the current carnival of clowns ...

Good old Dr Oz, he and Fetterman's unhinged social media campaign have already supplied some splendid moments ...

But really the bromancer does a disservice to the candidate hand-picked by the mango Mussolini ...

Well amen to that because how they love their pussy gropers and the odd bit of domestic violence ...

And so on with the bromancer, at last giving due credit to Herschel ...

Ah so it's all the fault of the Clintons, yet again, and never mind the pussy-grabber, still providing great entertainment ...

And so to a last short gobbet ...

Actually it's all probably going to be academic, as the United States moves on to fully implement a post-democratic one party state where the best loons can get ahead ... drink beer, lots of it, so whatever, you know ..

And so to a bonus in the form of our Gracie, because while the bromancer has gone on at length, the pond often feels guilty about not attending to her columns ...

The pond never feels guilt avoiding the oscillating fan ...

... but it does feel a twinge about Gracie, always ready to solve domestic crises ...

Ah, the poor, put-upon, persecuted landlord routine ... celebrated by Thackeray ...

He was such a sharp landlord, that he could hardly find any but bankrupt tenants; and such a close farmer, as to grudge almost the seed to the ground, whereupon revengeful Nature grudged him the crops which she granted to more liberal husbandmen. He speculated in every possible way; he worked mines; bought canal-shares; horsed coaches; took government contracts, and was the busiest man and magistrate of his county. As he would not pay honest agents at his granite quarry, he had the satisfaction of finding that four overseers ran away, and took fortunes with them to America. For want of proper precautions, his coal-mines filled with water: the government flung his contract of damaged beef upon his hands: and for his coach-horses, every mail proprietor in the kingdom knew that he lost more horses than any man in the country, from underfeeding and buying cheap.

But enough of Vanity Fair, it's time for the fair vanity that the private sector will sort it all out ...

Clearly our Gracie has never been in the hands of a mum investor, or been stiffed her bond, as one mum investor did to the pond, in the days when there was little by way of recourse ... but it's the closer to our Gracie's final gobbet that really had the pond intrigued ...

Now there's a riddle to be riddled. The houses are there already, they don't need to be built, and the owners just need incentives to make them available. 

So there are zillions of houses out there, just waiting to be rented? And yet Australia's '1 million empty homes' and why they're vacant - they're not a simple solution to housing need ...

The recent release of 2021 Census data revealed a shocking "one million homes were unoccupied".
This statistic sent housing commentators, government agencies and policymakers into a spin. At a time of significant housing shortages, this extra million homes would surely make a big difference. They could provide housing for some homeless, ease the rental affordability crisis, and get first-home owners into their first home.
There has been a great deal of speculation about how this has happened. Has it been caused by overseas millionaires buying up housing and leaving it as an empty investment? Is it Airbnb taking up homes that could be used for families? Or are cashed-up Gen-Xers double-consuming by living in one house while renovating another?
In fact, we've got a pretty good idea of what's going on.
First, it's not a new phenomenon. When we compare 2021 with previous censuses, a slightly smaller percentage of our private dwelling stock was classified as unoccupied — just under 10 per cent, compared with nearly 11 per cent at the previous census in 2016.
Since the release of the data, many journalists have pointed to this startling number of empty homes, portraying them as abandoned or left empty. There is almost certainly a much more ordinary and less startling story to tell. We suspect there are three main explanations.
A big part of the story is how the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) determines whether a dwelling is occupied or not. In short, it does its best by using a variety of methods, but, for the majority of dwellings, occupancy "is determined by the returned census form". If a form was not returned, and the ABS had no further information, the dwelling was often deemed to be unoccupied.
This is important to our interpretation of the empty homes story. At any one time, lots of things are going on in the housing market, and most of it is a long way from abandoned or empty.
For example, 647,000 dwellings were sold in 2021. This means many thousands of dwellings were unoccupied on census night because they were up for sale or awaiting transfer.
The second and perhaps most important contributor to the empty homes story is holiday homes. Estimates vary, but we know 2 million Australians own one or more properties other than their own home. It's estimated up to 346,581 of these properties may be listed on just one rental platform, Airbnb.
It's part of the census design to pick a night of the year when the most Australians are at home. If you think back to Tuesday, August 10 2021, it was a Tuesday night in mid-winter, so many of Australia's holiday homes would have been empty — and counted as unoccupied.
If we map the distribution of unoccupied dwellings across Australia, two things stand out.
Firstly, unoccupied dwellings tend to be concentrated in sea-change and inner-city holiday spots, such as Victor Harbor in South Australia (as the map below shows) , Lorne in Victoria and Batemans Bay in New South Wales. This reinforces the holiday homes explanation.
It's also striking how few unoccupied homes are in our major cities. Sydney is a great example. The map below shows a very uniform absence of unused housing across the whole metropolitan area.

There's more, but let's not get too heavy ... it is a Sunday after all, and the Polonial prattle and the bromancer are already memories, and there's a few left over cartoons to wrap up proceedings, with the end of the world putting things in a perspective that makes Pellism seem like an idle dream ...

And then as we enter a damp, soggy, sodden summer, there's a winter coming on up north ...

And make of this one what you will ...

Speaking of predatory capitalism, did someone mention Elon Musk?

Not on a Sunday, never on a Sunday ...