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?
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Or what about this in The Graudian?
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?
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 ...
Benso absolutely nails it, goes deep journalist by revealing "Labor's longer term strategy: to portray Peter Dutton as a destructive and divisive oppositional force".
ReplyDeleteWhat is Benso accusing labor of here? Of using the exact perception of Mutton Dutton, a brand he's toiled at for years to achieve, and simply pointing to it? Or would he rather Labor started sharing lies about Dutts? "Dutton is a constructive, consultative leader. no-one listens quite as well as he does".
Nope, if you start twisting the truth, you lose credibility.
Polonius: "Roshena Campbell - a talented barrister" Is that 'damned by faint praise', or isn't it ? And then, speaking of Pesutto's ABC session with Sarah Ferguson: "it is unlikely the Liberals will return to office in Canberra or Melbourne any time soon if the likes of Pesutto use valuable media opportunities to criticise fellow liberals." Umm, "the likes of" ? Now that's just a sly insult in anybody's language.
ReplyDeleteBut the bit about criticising fellow Liberals - notwithstanding that Deeming isn't exactly the first Liberal ever to have been criticised by other Liberal(s) without causing the Liberals to lose or fail to gain office - then what impact exactly did the ABC interview have ? is Polonius trying to say that if only Pesutto had spent the time praising Campbell then this "talented barrister" would now be the MP for Aston ?
Trivia - I understand Ms Campbell, Talented Barrister, is also wife of James Campbell, the intensely boring Political Editor of the Age/SMH. He is memorable for his appearances on 'Insiders' only because he gives the clear impression that the does not start to think about what he intends to say until he has half a minute to mull the Speers question over in his head, then mentally draft a reply, then stop after a few sentences to reconsider. Truly more boring than Polonius was, back when he lolled on 'The Couch'.
DeleteToday's Mr Ed: "Australia may be a lucky country but we already lag far behind in the global race on new energy." No better opportunity, I said to myself, to throw this in:
ReplyDelete"While previous attempts have run into maintenance issues - having to vie with the eroding and powerful force of the very waves they are attempting to capture – Wave Swell Energy has developed an oscillating water column design that promises to turn Australia’s coastline into one giant energy source."
Harnessing wave power in Tasmania
https://www.power-technology.com/features/harnessing-wave-power-in-tasmania/#:~
Heading off overseas GB.
Deletehttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-29/world-leading-wave-swell-energy-trial-wraps-up/102159078
Tells you all you need to know about Australia.
They always do 'head off overseas' Bef, because as Mr Ed pronounces: "We must recognise the bigger global picture and not be swayed by hubris or thinking we can solve the global problems of climate, security or energy on our own." In short: not enough moula in Australia ! Go west, young man, go west (though Japan is actually east).
DeleteAh well, might as well retrieve this from the pool room
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_PdHNSlZsw
It's not true that there's no planning behind the LNP, it's just not the political party doing the planning. There's the christofascists
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-07/religious-right-roadmap-infiltrate-liberal-party/101611840
and the Murdoch press - read the entire Pond archive.
The Labor party, on the other hand, is under near control by the fossil fuel industries, and under the total control of the US of A who see us as a sort of Asian forward base.
All very cheery, but at least we can wallow in schadenfreude for a while. If Morrison jumps we may be able to rinse and repeat.
"Mr Killin also decried the election of "homosexual MP" Tim Wilson." Oh yeah, the ex-IPA lad who was an even worse Human Rights Commissioner than the current one. He was going to be one of the bright young saviours of the LNP, wasn't he. But got rolled by a teal at his first election as an MP.
DeleteNow here's Ms Tog-ninny: "I was born into a family where women worked. My Nonna Pina, Mum and my beloved Aunty Rita all worked ..." Oh wau, that's really something, isn't it: a family of "working women". No such thing had ever happened before in human history, had it.
ReplyDeleteSo clearly she wasn't born into the upper middle or upper class, because then a woman's work was just to supervise the household: the cook, the housekeeper and the maid. Oh hang on, that's Nonna, Mum and Aunty, isn't it. But at least they weren't nurses, or stenographers or filling up the typing pool or serving at the counter or in the topless bar. No, they "were senior rather than subservient".
And it would certainly take the likes of Gemma T to know what 'subservient' means.
- and, for all that, it was the standard Ton-yee-nee column - identity politics. One day she might be persuaded to write about someone else - that is, if she has ever managed to direct her attention to the life of any other person.
DeleteOh - GB - thank you for the Goon Shows, they really lifted my weekend.
Pleasure, Chad. They were two of my very most favourite Goon Shows (to which I had listened from about the time the ABC began to rebroadcast them).
DeleteFrom Helen Lewis in The Atlantic:
ReplyDelete"Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as “the America of America,” but to a Brit like me, it’s more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ron-desantis-florida-state-politics-gop/673489/
:)³ Gold as good as the Goons ... though she should have mentioned the crispy bacon all Australians enjoyed before the war ...
DeleteBut I think she might have actually meant "...to the 19th hole."
Delete