Luckily it was easy for the pond to answer ... it knew immediately the answer was Walter Lindrum who could break a googly to deep silly mid (lo)on ... and clear the table, and so the pond's status as a member of the land of Oz remained intact ...
The pond can understand the logic at work here. An academic discovers a letter, it's the silly season, and bereft of an angle or something to report - the GOP or the Murdochians not being in the sporting writer's remit - why not give the yarn a run?
Likely some loon of the prattling Polonius kind will bite, and the next thing you know, the pond is reporting on Polonius and the yarn has a cosmic impact as it ripples through the full to overflowing internet ... with Polonius apparently unaware that if you're dismissing a yarn as a pile of tosh, you're spending an unseemly amount of your own time on tosh, perhaps because you too are short of a yarn in the silly season and are addicted to tosh ... with prattling tosh your main product ...
And yet still Polonius rabbits on endlessly ... and yes, yet again it's all the fault of the ABC ...
Please pardon the pond while it nods off ... about the only thing the pond knows about Bradman is that Jack O'Hagan wrote a song about him,
Our Don Bradman, and he also wrote the immortal line "
I'd like to linger longer in Yarrawonga" and he also wrote
The Road to Gundagai ... and the pond remembers him each time it stops in Gundagai to see the sights ...
Okay, okay, next time the pond will pay attention to the framing, and so back to a final gobbet featuring a more tedious than usual prattle, with Polonius yet to recover from the effects of the silly season ...
How silly can a Polonius get? He's wasted an entire column, when he could have been berating the ABC at length, as he usually does ... but at least he mentioned Kudelka, so the pond has an excuse to dig oout the first
Kudelka of the year ...
The pond really should have saved that for a Killer Creighton column, and what to do for an encore?
The pond has absolutely no intention of waiving the red card it handed to Dame Slap - banging on endlessly about the voice in the new year in the same way she did the previous year - and so the pond hit on the same idea as it deployed for the hole in the bucket man on Friday.
Why not do a Polonial catch-up?
Being a devotee of conspiracy theories, the pond did wonder if that reference to "lunar madness" was a tip of the hat from Polonius to the pond.
After all, "lunar" and "loon" sound similar though the
wiktionary set the pond straight on that one ...
From Middle English louen, lowen (“rascal; rogue”), probably of Middle Dutch or Middle Low German origin. Compare Dutch loen (“simpleton”). Or, related to sense 2, due to the bird's loud cry. Folk etymology associates it slang-wise with lunatic, though the latter may have influenced it; see loony.
Shortened from lunatic, and likely also from loon ("rascal", and also the bird)
Dammit, Polonius was giving the pond a shout out, a reward for the pond's devotion to his prattle for the entire year ...
As for the litany, Polonius in his usual modest way forgot to mention the real highlights ...
January through March, Polonius wrote a column deploring the ABC, and the lack of a single conservative voice on the ABC, and explained how the ABC was the ruination of the country ... though modestly in this summary he only mentioned the ABC as featuring in March and the Graudian was given the plum January slot ...
Surely the next few months will see the ABC see the corporation restored to its proper position in the Polonial firmament ...
Such a modest chap. April through to September, Polonius wrote a column for the lizard Oz deploring the ABC, and the lack of a single conservative voice on the ABC, and explained how the ABC was the ruination of the country ... and yet he only referenced the ABC in this summary in April, May and July.
Oh the Nine papers scored a mention and so did the Graudian (now apparently inn an axis of weevils with the ABC), but what of the reptile follies through the year?
For that you need only one patented Polonial eye ... sssh, no mention of any reptiles, because Polonius always keeps his head stuck firmly where the sun don't shine ... and there's no sign of the sun or the lizard Oz appearing in the next few months ...
Such a modest chap. October through December, Polonius wrote a column deploring the ABC, and the lack of a single conservative voice on the ABC, and explained how the ABC was the ruination of the country ... and yet with heroic strength, he managed to only mention the AFR and The Project and how the liar from the Shire should be treated with respect for being an epic liar, and a devious incompetent ...
Only in the world of Polonius and his prattle ... and so the loon year of the reptile ended pretty much as it began ... which is just as well because, by the pond's reckoning the lunar year of the tiger is scheduled to end on 21st January 2023, and so Polonius ended the year as he began, with offerings for fact checkers and an emphasis on the lunar loon ...
And speaking of loons and the new lunar year of the rabbit about to begin ... what pleasures there will be in store this year ... and what a menagerie ...
Sure they finally settled it, but the pond has all these celebratory cartoons and dammit, they still deserve a run ... because the next time that something turns up in the chamber that gets the far right loons agitated about the spineless doormat known as Kevin, be there, it'll be wild ...
“The Guardian-ABC axis”: GH should be more open and include Channel Nine and then he could just say “the axis of evil”! After all, most of his gripe appears to be any media outlet which is competition for News Corp.
ReplyDeleteI have this image of GH sitting in a room at the Sydney Institute with radios blaring out the ABC local stations and RN and every wall, ceiling and floor space covered in TV screens showing various ABC programmes with maybe two old computers (certainly not a laptops!) chugging away in a corner showing the digital versions of The Guardian and ABC news, not a copy of a News Corp paper in sight.
Such radios would, of course, be old-style valve models - preferably those with Australian AM stations listed on the screen.
DeletePoonish Polonius: "No one mentions that ABC TV News comes behind that of Seven and Nine in ratings, indicating that most Australians watch news they trust less than the ABC - eh ?" And nobody mentions that Seven and Nine News each runs for an hour starting at 18:00 whereas ABC News starts at 19:00 and runs for only half an hour. Other than the '24 hour ABC News' that runs on channel 24 that is. So watching habits and time of day might just have more influence on how many watch whose News, eh ?
ReplyDeleteBut oh, "when pain and anguish wring the brow" and fires rage or rivers flood or suchlike, what ministering angel do people turn to ? Why the most trusted ABC news on tv and radio, of course, as even Polonius knows quite well.
Fed Uni the home of predictable leftish lines??? Nope: more volatile than that. It's apparent Gerard hasn't a first hand understanding of, or spent any time at, Mt Helen, even "broadly defined". But that's Gerard: all puff and wind.
ReplyDeleteThe Poonish P: "[Amanda] Lohrey's working life has been spent in tertiary institutions with the benefit of public funding courtesy of the taxpayer." Oh wau, isn't that just utterly amazing - and like the ABC there isn't a single 'conservative' that has had a university career "courtesy of the taxpayer" is there. No, not a single one anywhere, anywhen, anyhow.
ReplyDeleteShame ! We just can't pay any attention to anybody who has a university career - they're almost as bad as ABC employees.
‘Bradman was not in a position to instruct Fraser on anything’ is true, but it is difficult to identify anyone from whom Fraser was prepared to take any instruction on economic matters. He did seem to think that Mrs Alice O’Connor - aka Ayn Rand - had some ideas about economics. I suspect that indicates that he did not try to read the books issued under the Rand name, or even he might have realised that she lived within a mythical society of her own creation.
ReplyDeleteI like to identify the writer by the name by which she was known to the social services in the USA, from where she drew her full ‘entitlements’, even as she wrote of the essential immorality of anyone being sustained, in any way, by a (gasp) government.
Having nominated inflation as a potential catastrophe, justifying discarding so many conservative conventions so he could be seen as in charge, Fraser’s performance in damping-down inflation barely registered. Of course, over his term, he changed the narrative such that the trigger for the inflation of the 70s changed from Whitlam’s economic ignorance to those dreadful Arabs messing with the world oil markets. Yes, Whitlam had shown deep economic ignorance - why, he slashed the tariffs that Menzies’ trade policy had been building up steadily, by 25% across the board.
‘Financial Review’ is hardly a neutral commentator on the economic performance of the two major parties in Australia. During the Fraser/Howard administration it had a steady, unexpected, stream of advertising for the trade in import certificates. Fraser’s idea of trade policy was to put quotas on import of all kinds of goods. Those who had previously imported such goods were compensated by being first to receive the import certificates, which were readily saleable. Many businesses did quite nicely out of that. You need not trouble having staff to do all that complicated financing, and shipping documentation, getting transport and distribution agents - simply wait for the next parcel of certificates, put the ad in ‘Fin’, and count the money.
You didn’t even try to apply business analysis or logic to pick which commodities might be the next to come under quota - the selection seemed to be quite capricious.
Other economic sins of the Whitlam administration? That whole idea of raising funds internationally for investments in developing proven resources - not to be countenanced by a conservative government. Well, not until the time of one Costello, shifting such government financing from bond issues (which have to shown in the budget) to those nice, new, ‘merchant banks’, which took so much of the capital works program into what has long been within the ‘budget temporary’ part of the balance sheets. OK - so the main bank has also long been known as the ‘millionaire factory’, but, hey - you can pretend you have balanced the federal budget and presented your side as ‘good economic managers’.
There was a bit of downside - retirement funds no longer had a range of bonds to secure 20-25% of their holdings, so let’s allow punters to sell the big house in the capital city just before they retire, and put a slab of the proceeds (free of communistic capital gains penalties) into the pension funds. Sound idea, and the boost it will give to the overall housing market will just ratchet-up the amount going into the pension fund. As Winston said - he had never heard anyone in Sydney complaining about the value of their house going up.
That ‘millionaire factory’ did not offer Costello a seat on its board in return for the huge boost he gave to their business model. One suspects that was because they saw he was such a sucker for their spiel that he was unlikely to be much help to the board, as they have tended to stick with a group of people who have been in government treasury departments, or in actual banks. The sinecure with the Future Fund is not in the same league.
"‘Financial Review’ is hardly a neutral commentator". Quite. But is it in any way an even vaguely 'capable commentator' ? The appalling ignorance of state finances shown by the Australian people just barely exceeds that shown by the financial 'managers' such as Costello, who still seems to draw approval for being a complete financial dunce.
DeleteGB - so many self-styled 'economic commentators' fell for his claim to have balanced the budget. All this really showed was that they would have been good prospects for someone selling shares in the Harbour Bridge. For me, one of his most egregious scams was the early cashing-out of the farm reserve deposit scheme, to avoid paying drought relief from general revenue during those drought years in their term.
DeleteThe idea of the scheme was - is - good. Primary producers put aside funds in good years, to draw in bad. But it is the nature of such schemes that they only really come into their own after something like 15-20 years, which smooths-out the weather cycles. By suspending the controls on time of withdrawal, Costello destroyed much of the practical gain in the scheme up to that time. And, of course, the successors to the 'Country Party' in that coalition - Charles Blunt (anyone remember Charles Blunt? Anyone? Up the back there? No?) and the sainted Tim Fischer went along with it. Really looking after 'regional and rural Australia'. Perhaps Costello promised Tim a new train somewhere.
I recall the name, Chad, but that is the sum total of my remembrance of Charles Blunt. To be honest, my recall of Tim Fischer, apart from his glorious stint as Ambassador to the Pope, is at about the same level.
DeleteBeing the paranoid that he is, Polonius sees conspiracies where most others see a mildly interesting crossover between two figures from Australian history.
ReplyDeleteIt’s funny that for once, Hendo passes on an opportunity to whinge about anti-Catholic persecution by neglecting to mention Bradman’s well-documented bias against tykes in cricket. Perhaps he’s simply more accepting of such behaviour from the mid-20th century Establishment.
Of course there’s no need to condemn Bradman in such terms as “neo-liberal”. There are plenty of alleged aspects of his personal history that show him as less than saintly - https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/cricket-the-don-accused-of-underarm-tactics-in-financial-scandal/UFMG4KDSI4IIY2AOAZ7HXMUP5M/