In which the pond almost forgets to study a reptile or two, and might even fail its BTP ...

 

With all the encomiums doing the rounds lately the pond thought it should mention that in his dotage Barry Humphries went a tad MAGA. It's noted in Laurence Barber's 20th July 2018 piece for the SSO, ‘I’m grateful to Trump’ says Barry Humphries in transphobia-riddled interview.

There's a fair ladle of irony in that line "I’m grateful to Trump for stirring up politics. And I won’t be joining any marches against him”, because the mango Mussolini surely helped stir up the bashing of drag performers (dare one say drag queens? - after all Humphries claimed to be the queen of Australia).

To be fair, the orange turd blossom has lately been outdone by Ron DeSanctus in the sport of ecky thumping minorities.

If Barry Humphries was in his hey day at the moment and had decided to perform in Texas or that penis-shaped state Florida, or some other paranoid southern state, and some loon had fearfully tried to stand their ground at the sight of a man in a frock and a wig and with hideous glasses, Humphries might have left this world in a violent way. 

Was he just stirring the possums or indulging in his patented attention-seeking iconoclasm? Not really. He went full Speccie mob over the years. Funny how this isn't being mentioned or noted, but then the descent into bigotry in dotage is often given a pass...

The pond once saw Humphries, a long time ago in Adelaide, and can vaguely remember one line - something about lifting the pine off the kitchen cupboards to discover the genuine chipboard underneath - or was it the other way around? - and discovered his technical skill as a performer. 

It's some feat not only to spit on your audience, but make your audience laugh uproariously at being covered in spittle, though the pond was glad only seats in a middle row were available. Sure the back rows laughed at the spectacle, but the front rows laughed at copping the spittle. That was something to see, a performer showing his contempt for his audience, and the audience relishing the contempt ...

And that's the pond's encomium, and moving right along, that's by way of explanation of why the pond won't be spending time with Killer or the craven Craven this morning ...

Both the Major and the Caterist doing a dust up of the NDIS? It was way too much, and then the sight of simplistic "here no conflict of interest" Simon reminded the pond of a comment by a correspondent: The latest Newspoll is out; generally ok for the Government and bad for the Opposition. So expect plenty of Reptile spin and turd-polishing on the morn.

Oh come now, be fair, the turd-polishing was out and about last night, and fair go, simple Simon was busy in the usual way ...

 

It's a tough game and someone has to do the equivocating hard yards, and how else to spin the figures than with an excellent sidestep and a bit of bothsiderism ... because "no sign of Labor losing its popular ascendancy" can with a keyboard stroke turn into "voters turning away from leaders" ...

While the empty Chambers was firing blanks, see and admire how this banal EXCLUSIVE ...

... could be turned into this bout of both siderism and a pox on both your houses ...

Now that's how to make the most of a 53 v. 33 scorecard, and please show a little more respect for Simon's skill as a spinmeister. 

Years of honing a craft, even turd or spud polishing, shows the reptile spirit at its finest ...

What else? Well, you won't read this in the lizard Oz, and you might have trouble with the FT's paywall for Climate graphic of the week: Asia’s prolonged April heatwave concerns scientists, so here are the graphs ...

And after this weather report ...

Temperatures climbed to highs of 45C in Myanmar, 44.5C in India and 41.9C in China, according to the climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, with Thailand and Laos breaking all-time high records.
At least 13 people were reported to have died from heat stroke in Mumbai, India, while parts of Bangladesh endured power cuts as electricity demand surged in the unusual conditions. More than 100 weather stations in China recorded all-time high temperatures for April.
Herrera said the ferocious temperatures, which have persisted across parts of Asia for more than a week, amounted to the “worst April heatwave in Asian history ongoing in more than a dozen countries”. 

... came this text ...

Globally, the past eight years have been the warmest on record, with extreme weather events including heatwaves expected to become more frequent and intense as climate change accelerates. Greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in 2022 and temperatures are at least 1.1C higher since pre-industrial times.
This year could also mark the return of the El Niño weather phenomenon, which is associated with warmer sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific and higher global temperatures.
Given the possibility of an El Niño year, “it could therefore well be that new global records are set in 2023 or 2024,” said Helge Goessling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.
“Large parts of south-east Asia, India, China, Australia, and North and South America . . . may be affected by El Niño, with a trend towards stronger heatwaves and, where glaciers are present, increased melting,” he said.
Heatwaves and droughts gripped large swaths of Europe and China in 2022, with Europe experiencing its second warmest year on record and hottest ever summer, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service annual report.
The European Alps suffered a record loss of ice from glaciers, while high temperatures led to record ice sheet melting in Greenland, the observation group said.
China, meanwhile, had its longest-lasting heatwave ever last year, and its hottest ever summer by a margin of more than 0.5C, according to the World Meteorological Organisation’s latest report on the state of the climate.

And after that weather report (who said anything about the climate?), the pond supposes it should now get around to an actual reptile study, what with the pond designed for advanced herpetological courses, leading eventually to a BTP (Bachelor of Turd Polishing), and so turned to the Major, though the pond confesses from the get go to a complete lack of interest ...

Sheesh, the pond will have more to say about reptile snapology, and that shot of a shouting comrade Bill, but meanwhile, is Major Mitchell still back in the days of former Chairman Rudd and that woman deserving of a chaff bag and a drowning at sea? 

That's it, that's the best the Major can do? Didn't the pond read somewhere about the dangers of military types always fighting the last year, and yet here's the Major back in the rear, and the reptiles didn't help with the illustration at the end of the next gobbet ...

Oh fucketty fuck, that's desperate, pitiable stuff, but looking on the bright side, at least there are no fond snaps of the onion muncher, Malware, or the rest of the parade ...

Meanwhile, the Major was still rabbiting on ...

Ah, a cup of coffee. The bane of reptile life, even if Surry Hills offers the finest baristas in the world, just a few steps from the reptile 'leet. And how does the pond know that they're the 'leet? Hearken unto the Major ...

"The national newspapers do a good job on public policy problems ..."

The pond almost snorted its coffee up through its nose. With the lizard Oz just a propaganda sheet of the Pravda kind, was the Major heaping praise on the Australian Financial Review? Or was he just up himself in the usual Major way?

And to the Caterist and the pond admits to feeling inclined not to bother, but there was a chance to explore another pond obsession, so what the heck. Any sensible reader of the reptiles will already have left the room, satisfied by the Major offering and with their BTP beckoning ...

You see that snap of a grimacing comrade Bill at the start of the piece? A repeat of the snap of the comrade Bill snap at the start of the Major's piece?

 It's an old trick. Get a snap of a harried or worried or grimacing subject and stick it at the top of the story, and Bob's your uncle or your average Caterist is a floodwaters in quarries whisperer ...

See how it's done? And dammit the reptiles did it again, sticking in yet another snap of comrade Bill to interrupt the Caterist flow, so what else could the pond do but downsize it ...

Then it was at last back to the Caterist, because there's nothing that so agitates the federal government's grant cash in the paw man than others having a go at getting some cash in the paw ...

How can the Caterist recognise a cash-guzzling, sloshing gravy train? If you need to ask that, you haven't been paying attention to all the cash grants featured in the pond this past decade, showing all the loot that the Department of Finance has handed to the Menzies Research Centre over the years ...

And so to another illustration designed to make the Caterist seem an even longer exercise in suffering ...

At this point, for no particular reason, in the middle of the Caterist's heroic defence of potatoes, the reptiles inserted a gratuitous snap of assorted signs, and the pond snapped again ...

What's the point, reptiles, except to interrupt the Caterist's passionate defence of potatoes?

And so to a final gobbet, and those who made it to the end can be pleased there was no patented Caterist climate science denialism this day ...

As always, it's called projection, and that talk of a surplus of conceit is projection on a grand scale. 

As for that line about assisting Department of Finance heritage grant recipients to become more self-sufficient over time, rather than rewarding those who can't get enough funding from their Liberal party masters, sorry, the pond is plumb out of irony, and instead offers this defence of potatoes as its closer ...