In which the pond confesses this Sunday meditative study guide for students of reptiles is a sorry mess, with prattling Polonius and garrulous Gemma to blame ...

 

1920! Antony Green: "Terrible result"! Did the pond care who won or lost? Not really... just a blip on the radar, but oh the pleasure, oh the pain of being a reptile, because that headline should really have run "Lizard Oz team suffer humiliating loss in Aston", and yet still they keep on trying with Penbo doing over the voice, the umpteenth bit of reptile blather on the matter, and double tax warnings of an EXCLUSIVE kind ... and yet, and yet ...1920!

Moving right along, by now, the pond takes it as a given that serious herpetology students will have completed their required reading by the weekend.

Can anyone have forgotten their obligation to read the Weekly Beast, always an essential for reptile arcana?

...when Obama took aim at the Murdoch empire for creating polarisation in western society and for making people “angry and resentful” his (Chairman Rupert's) editors gave the comments a wide berth.
Daily Mail Australia reported: “Barack Obama takes a brutal swipe at Rupert Murdoch – slamming Fox and Sky News Australia: ‘Making people feel angry and resentful’”, but no one at News could see a story.
While the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian, and international media reported the president’s swipe, readers of the Murdoch mastheads were left in the dark.
“There’s a guy you may be familiar with, first name Rupert, who was responsible for a lot of this,” Obama said at his Sydney event.
“He perfected what is a broader trend … it’s now a wild west and a splintering of media. In America, it’s Fox News, here I guess it’s Sky.”
It’s not that they didn’t notice, well the Daily Telegraph did anyway, dispatching their chief reporter to ask Malcolm Turnbull if he was to blame for Obama’s comments.

There was even a repro of a tweet from Malware, saving readers the need to plunge into uncle Elon's mess.

And there was a reminder that the week before, students could have read News Corp columnists opt for bothsidesism on Nazis at anti-trans rally, handy research for what's about to follow with Polonius ...

With Marina Hyde back, students should also take of Now we know: in Trump’s fantasy comeback, he’ll be wearing handcuffs.

Attention is indicated.

And students must pay scour news services for news of impending comedies ...

How else to understand the full import of an item such as Rupert Murdoch took direct role in Fox News 2020 election call, filings reveal?

The pond notes all this because sometimes the assigned course work at the lizard Oz can get exceptionally tedious ... and today is one of those days.

It's true that nattering "Ned" seems to have disappeared from the lizard Oz this weekend, but still there'll always be some burdensome, onerous substitute ...

The pond has no idea why Polonius would want to return to the scene of this particular folly, nor why he should exude concern and compassion for Moira, a barking mad fellow traveller with barking mad loons, but here we are ...

Something of a ranter? The thing is, Keen, aka Posie Parker, has a history of attracting Nazis and mingling with them, and it would have taken Polonius and Moira a nanosecond to do a little research ...

...She has further courted controversy after praising far-right campaigner Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) in a Feminist Current podcast.

She was interviewed by the far-right network Soldiers of Christ Online, and appeared in a video alongside Jean-François Gariépy, a prominent far-right YouTuber who calls for a “white ethno-state”, according to PinkNews. Other guests on Gariépy’s show have included former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Parker has claimed that she did not know the people in question were far-right when she spoke to them.

Parker was also accused of using a Barbie doll wearing a Nazi uniform as her profile picture on the social media site Spinster.

Standing for Women’s protest in Newscastle on January 16 sparked controversy after one of the speakers – Lisa Morgan – quoted Adolf Hitler to attack trans rights.

“Do you know the big lie? The big lie was first described by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf … The big lie is that trans women are women,” Morgan told the people at the Parker-organised demonstration.

And a protest in Brighton’s Victoria Gardens in September last year also saw controversy after LGBT activist Oliver Waterhouse was physically assaulted.

Police witnessed the event and arrested 50-year-old Craig Thomas over the incident, which the court was told came after Waterhouse shouted “fascist” at the Standing for Women crowd through a megaphone.

In 2019, another gender critical activist and blogger, Jean Hatchet, posted an article laying out why she would not "be 'standing for women'" after a clash with Parker.

She said she had raised concerns about the right-wing links which Parker was fostering during a trip to the US, but was ignored. 

Hatchet wrote: "I kept asking about these right-wing links. My questions were either ignored or met with 'It's not a problem for me'. Posie said she is happy to work with anyone and will freely say so. I am not."

Hatchet also raised concerns about a connection with The Heritage Foundation. She wrote: "They advocate keeping poor women in marriages they wish to exit in order to solve the social problems those women 'cause' government. They say abortion harms women. They say they will help [Donald] Trump to 'drain the swamp'.

"I don't care what these people think about trans ideology. That cannot be separated from the things they do and advocate that specifically harm women."

She also commented on Parker's praise of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson), saying it was a "massive insult".

Not to mention that she's a far right bigot in other ways, and that all this has long been known, and that for all of that Moira didn't do any research and went there, and so was left with a sob story about her suffering as an explanation and as a way of trying to wriggle out of trouble ...

Is there a Tommy Robinson in the house?

Wouldn't have been simpler to scribble something like ...

Moira wrote: "I kept asking about these right-wing links. My questions were either ignored or met with 'It's not a problem for me'. Posie said she is happy to work with anyone and will freely say so. I am not."

And it could have ended there and then. But it didn't ...

Why Polonius would chose to take a stand on this particular bridge might be bemusing, until you realise that it's all the fault of the ABC ... as it always is ...

And what of Polonius, criticising a fellow Liberal for taking a stand against bigots and far right loons? But how could he, that's the pack he likes to run with, and right now they're all in a desert of their making and their choosing... (The Saturday Paper)

And at this point, the pond's weekedn reptile studies fell apart ...

There was no chance to do a Florida ...

And frankly Dame Slap has gone kinda funny. In the last few months, all she's been able to do is rage about the voice and such like, and today, perhaps as a break, perhaps because she realised that the obsessive-compulsive monomania was unhealthy, she turned to being a TV reviewer ...

The pond could only take so much, and so cut short the offering which began this way ...

Gwynnie is, of course, an easy target. Colbert has dined out for years using her to flog his patented Covetton Brand, in business since back in 2015 ....you can start by buying a counterintuitive yet elegant suede coaster for $175 and finish off by purchasing a one-of-a-kind antique sofa, which was “lovingly reclaimed from an artisanal curb in Brooklyn.”

But between the loud, lewd, vulgar, portly women Dame Slap goes on to celebrate, and that snap of a smirking Gwynnie, isn't Gwynnie a little closer to the mark to the anal retentive, obsessive compulsive Dame Slap?

Just asking ... and so having begun at the beginning, here's the ending, still on about messy women as a salve ...

And yet, is this yet another job for Freud, as a prim and prissy former lawyer feels the urge to break free?

Dear sweet long absent lord, time to move on ... the pond realises that dress shouldn't be used as an indicator, and yet how indicative are indicator dresses ...

If that's exuberantly messy, if that's full Gargantua and Pantagruel, if that's wiping your bum with a goose's neck, then the pond needs to spend more time in Ikea or some Swedish wood-littered nightmare ... but then the pond lives in a place where tottering books pose a constant threat to life and limb ...

So to the lizard Oz editorialist .... if only because students should stay on top of every form of climate science denialist manifestation ... the sort that exude from the reptiles like methane or ectoplasm ...

The pond has been slow to start its Sunday meditation cartoon-led recovery, but now seems a good time ...

It's surely admirable the way the reptiles manage to get into bed with big oil and big gas every chance they get ... no matter the country, no matter the hard facts clichés that cascade from reptile keyboards ...

They'll never give up on their love of dinkum, clean, virginal, pure, innocent Oz coal ...

And so to garrulous Gemma, if only because the pond needed some spacers and fillers for its cartoon-led recovery ...

Oh dear, the pond can see where this is heading ... pronouns, trans folk, all the usual ...

The only tedium is having to endure the interstitials ...

Such a deeply unhappy possum, and naturally looking for ways to blame, and people to blame, and luckily there are plenty around ...

Now back to the cri de coeur and whadda know, Polonius and gabby glib Gemma are on the same bigoted page ...

Actually it's bill-signing women telling other women to sit down and shut up and have kids that might be the problem ...

Still, things are on the move ...

And that's where the pond must leave brooding Gemma with a final gobbet ...

Oh dear, already long forgotten ... the endless feuds and the put downs ...

"There is something in my book to offend absolutely everybody. I am proabortion, pro the legal use of drugs, propornography, child pornography, snuff films. And I am going after these things until Gloria Steinem screams."

The speaker -- at nonstop, sewing-machine speed -- is Camille Paglia, contrarian academic and feminist bete noire, and her 1990 book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press), is the most explosive tome to emerge from academe in quite some time. The book is about many things -- paganism, pop culture, androgyny, sexual conflicts -- but what has drawn the media with magnetic force is the author's contempt for modern feminists. Paglia writes with freshness and blithe arrogance, and she does not hesitate to hurl brazen insults. She accuses author Germaine Greer, for example, of becoming "a drone in three years," sated with early success. Susan Sontag is another victim of celebrity. Princeton feminist Diana Fuss's output is "just junk -- appalling!" (Time)

Or what about this in The Graudian?

One would have to be a fairly determined news avoider not to clock, at some level, that Madonna has just turned 50. Never mind that life expectancies have risen in the developed world, and living to one's half-century is not the achievement that it once was; this is Madonna's half-century, and attention must be paid.
The interesting thing, however, is how vitriolic much of this attention is, and where that vitriol is coming from. Take Camille Paglia, for instance, writing in Salon last week of the "horrifying paparazzi pix of Madonna's wan face looking as resculpted as a plastic doll", and of the "brassy" cover image for Madonna's latest CD, Hard Candy, "with that ostentatiously exposed crotch and hard-bitten face lolling its tongue like a dissolute old streetwalker ... still hammering at sex as if it's Madonna's last, desperate selling point." Or Julie Burchill (not one, it is true, to be relied on for a consistent or fair point of view), who began by inveighing against Madonna's "vile veiny hands, that sad stringy neck - yuck!" then proceeded to bring up the crotch shots in Madonna's 1992 book, SEX. "Visions of that greasy muff, which one could easily have fried an egg on without benefit of oil, haunt me till this very day." Germaine Greer, writing in the Sun, called her the "elderly mother of Lourdes, nearly 12, Rocco eight, and David Banda, nearly three". Since when did elderly mother (of a 12-year-old, meaning she was 38 when she had Lourdes) become a term of insult? At least two of these women would call themselves feminists.

And speaking of Burchill, what about that war, noted here?

...The contradictory, fragmented, confrontational temperament of the 1980s was best embodied in the Burchill question: ‘Is this decade at the end of the world, or just another excuse for a party?’ Of course, for many British feminists, the 1980s did signal an end to the imaginary unity of a single sisterhood. Julie Burchill and Suzanne Moore were part of the generational challenge. The dispute, however, did not reach public attention until Moore and Germaine Greer engaged in a feud within the pages of the Guardian newspaper. Burchill became embroiled as a fellow member of lipstick feminism.
Burchill had a closer involvement with an even more controversial figure in feminist theory and politics. She entered into a ‘fax war’ with Camille Paglia who, like Wilhelm II, approached every problem with an open mouth. Paglia and Burchill exchanged faxes about the nature of journalism and academia, questioning the meaning of writing in public. Faxes are odd textual sites: private correspondences that invoke mysteries about origins and end points. Those who send faxes do not know the context of reception. Those who receive faxes do not know how many hands have touched the communication at the starting point. The resultant text is a private correspondence that has been removed from the shield of an envelope. The faxes by Burchill and Paglia were published in full by The Modern Review and other international papers.
The repartee between the two women was fierce and ugly, but in the cat-fight the working class little Englander came out stronger and smarter than Paglia, reducing the academic to a pompous, elitist intellectual who knew little about the rules of the street. Paglia’s greatest insults included calling Burchill “completely unknown in America.” Obviously, for Paglia, being completely unknown in America is the most effective scorn to be poured on a writer. Yet for those who see Paglia as intellectually over-rated, arrogant and politically naive, Burchill’s reply seemed justified. After receiving three faxes filled with venom from the American professor, she replied
How you of all people can complain of my ‘malice’ is a complete mystery to me. Now you know how Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi and all the others must feel every time you spew up your spiel to a waiting world. I’m here to tell you that you can’t come on like a street tough and then have an attack of the Victorian vapours when faced by a taste of your own style … Don’t believe what you read about the English; our working class, from where I am proud to come, is the toughest in the world. I’m not too nice. I’m not as loud as you, but if push comes to shove, I’m nastier. I’m 10 years younger, two stone heavier and I haven’t had my nuts taken off by academia.
Paglia’s reply was … well … embarrassing.
I could have helped you far more than you could help me. I am read and translated around the world from Japan to South America, and the basis of my fame is not journalism but a scholarly book on the history of culture. You are a very local commodity, completely unknown outside of England, and you have produced nothing of global interest .
Burchill merely replied, “I’m very glad you’re big in Japan.”

There's symmetry for you ... the lizard Oz editorialist is big on Japan...

As for the rest, it turns out that garrulous Gemma is just a second-rate yowler in a long running series of cat fights ...

And so to end with some of the matters the pond didn't manage to cover ...