In which the pond gets distracted and takes some time to get into the Groaning and the blathering Bro ...

 

The pond regrets that mad uncle Elon came down from his attic to ruin Twitter. The pond has never belonged, and rarely bothers to go there, but every so often a correspondent reminds the pond of the fun its missing.

That link to the good Senator's tweet led the pond to the Prof's tweet and old news in the Graudian of a desire to block Rennick recruits and keep out cookers ...

There were many comments to savour ...

Errm, the esteemed senator has a Bachelor’s in Commerce, a Master’s in Taxation Law, and a Master’s in Applied Finance. This makes him uniquely qualified to argue financial derivatives with you…oh wait, thermodynamics isn’t quite the same thing is it?

And there was a cartoon ...

It's an oldie but a goodie, and that's how you can waste time on the full to overflowing intertubes, and frankly it's more fun than reading about racists on parade in Tamworth ... but Barners was always a One Nation kind of guy, and never went over to Coledale. 

Oh Tamworth, Tamworth, to think you once had Tony Windsor and occupied the centre of the known universe ...

Meanwhile, Marina Hyde was having her usual fun, asking What do you, a real person in the real world, want?

Well for one probably not reading about Chairman Rupert cruelly jilting the wannabe bride, and allegedly - allegedly - because he didn't like her clap happy evangelical ways, which is a tremendous horse laugh, given the way that Faux Noise has milked the clap happy tribe for decades ...

What else? Well the pond did enjoy the news that a whole tribe of Faux Noise-makers would be ending up talking in court, and attention to Kari Lake becoming Baroness of Arizona led to the pond learning a little history about the wild west ...

And the pond still retains a taste for apocalyptic scribbling, and there it was on full blast in Sidney Blumenthal's Every indictment will make Trump stronger - and Republicans wilder ...

If anyone should have known better, it was Murdoch. His media properties now veer from slavishly outraged defense of the accused Trump on Fox News (“Witch-hunt!”) to trashing him in the New York Post (“Bat Hit Crazy!”) to puffing DeSantis in the Times of London, not widely read in Iowa or New Hampshire. The ruthless operator has been outplayed. Murdoch, who takes no prisoners, is Trump’s prisoner.

And he's a cad, a bounder and a jilter! 

But sigh, with a deep sob, enough of the fun and the distractions, what's on the top of the digital page of the lizard Oz this day?

No surprises, the snake oil salesman in court, with his lawyer doing his great impression of a used car salesman - always be closing - and what a stroke of luck, no Dame Slap as she returns to rabbiting on about the Lehrmann matter and so earns a red card from the pond ...

The Newspoll result also came as no surprise, because the reptiles let that news loose last night ...

What the fuck? Does this mean that the lizard Oz and the whole damned reptile stew has lost its potency? The bloody country gone red and mad and completely ignoring Barners, One Nation, News Corp and sundry other bigots?

As for the mango Mussolini and yesterdays outburst by the Bro, as a reader noted, what to add when TT has said as much as is needed?

Oh dear, this is turning into a Seinfeld post, but surely there's something below the fold ...

Why there's Penbo keen to nuke the croweaters. Have at it, the pond says, let them and their clocks all glow green in the dark.

And what's this, Dame Groan on a Wednesday?! 

The reptiles do know how to keep the pond in business, and all the more so what with the talk of that intense drought in Spain, Climate change: Catalonia in grip of worst drought in decades.

Who better than Dame Groan to explain why nothing should be done, with a jolly good groaning ...

Splendid stuff, though it seems these days the reptiles don't even bother tagging their snaps, provided it's a photo of the earth being dug up and despoiled. Big trucks, vroom, vroom ...

But then they went too far, and slipped in a snap of chortling greenies showing thumbs up, and the pond knew it would set off an exceptional groaning and so cut it down to size ...

Please, what we need is a bloody good snap of a mining town ... preferably with large Freudian phallic chimneys jutting into the air, thrusting purposefully at the atmosphere ...

Excellent, what a chimney, and by this point, it will be apparent that the pond has nothing to say about the keening and the wailing and the groaning, except to observe that the Groaner would say all that, wouldn't she?

The pond was more worried by the reptile illustrations. They wouldn't sneak in a shot of a smirking, chortling, laughing with glee greenie doing their best to ruin the planet and Dame Groan's digestive tract?

Eek, they did, they did, the entire country in ruins, and perhaps the planet, and all they can do is smirk, or perhaps talk about the rain not falling on the plains in Spain ... in Spain, in Spain ...

This part of Catalonia has not seen sustained rain in two-and-a-half years. In early March, the reservoir's water level had dropped to 8% of its capacity, down from 55% a year earlier.

"I've never seen it so empty," said Agustín Torrent, a 70-year-old man who has lived nearby his whole life and who came to look at the church. "It's sad when you've seen [the reservoir] full before. But that's the way it is. It's climate change and anyone who says it doesn't exist, I don't know what you can say to them."Although Catalonia's situation is particularly worrying much of the country is facing similar challenges, particularly in southern and eastern areas. In mid-March, reservoirs in the Guadalquivir basin of Andalusia averaged 26% of their capacity, one point below the Catalan interior, and in the south-eastern Segura basin they were at 36%. That compared with 83% capacity in parts of the northwest.

In March, Spain's meteorological agency AEMET declared that the country as a whole "continues in a situation of meteorological drought which began over a year ago".

Not all droughts are caused by climate change, but increased heat in the atmosphere takes more moisture out of the earth, making dry spells worse. The world has warmed by about 1.1C since the beginning of the industrial era and temperatures are expected to keep increasing unless there are drastic cuts to emissions.

In Europe, regions like Catalonia - which is situated on the Mediterranean Sea - are particularly exposed, according to Miguel Manzanares, a Barcelona-based meteorologist who studies extreme weather events on the continent.

"The Mediterranean area is one of the most vulnerable areas when it comes to climate change," he said, identifying countries such as France, Italy, Greece and those in the Balkans as being at high risk. "The Mediterranean Sea is a closed sea, creating its own atmospheric environment."

So where does that bloody rain fall? Well not in Spain, in Spain ...

As for that It's climate change and anyone who says it doesn't exist, I don't know what you can say to them, sorry old man, you just enjoy the groaning and the fucking of the planet, and then you quickly reach the final gobbet of groaning, and at last there's a dinkum snap of clean, pure, innocent, neigh virginal Oz coal ... designed to send the reptile readership into a frothing, foaming, coal-loving frenzy...

Dear sweet long absent lord, thar the groaning blows, with blather about hard-nosed analysis and "real world considerations" ...

The pond had thought Marina Hyde was just joking and having a little fun, but with a few quick edits, her thinking could be applied to down under real world issues ...

What do “people in the real world” care about? It is a question as old as failing government or bad journalism itself. Yet, crucially, it is something that you – a person, in the real world – are not cleared to answer yourself. Instead, it needs a groaning lizard Oz scribbler to inform you what you care about – and, much more frequently and much more dismissively, what you don’t care about. Once these permissible areas of giving-a-toss have been delineated, the groaning lizard Oz scribbler who told you what they were can get on with the long process of not fixing them, at the end of which they will tell you that those problems are fake/niche/latte-based because, out there in the world where you never go, people aren’t talking about them.

Or perhaps just set up shop in another country with less restrictive rules, so that the fucking of the planet can continue unabated ...

And with that, time to move on to the bromancer ... just because he's there ...

What's weird about this? No, it's not the language, though the pond would usually say to the bromancer, 
"don't be such a fuckwit," because, as correspondents have noted, he's routinely a fuckwit ...

No it's that focus on a few words, and the apparent discovery that Enid is being overwritten, a process that has gone on for decades, even as the pond sticks to Dame Slap over Dame Snap, because as usual the bromancer has the cart before the horse, and apparently is completely oblivious to the ongoing work of Ron DeSanctus, the GOP, and barking mad fundamentalist evangelicals... close kissing cousins to the Taliban and the mad Mullahs of Iran ...

Why not mention Judy Blume: book banning now much worse in US than in 1980s?

Well yes, the US Taliban have been busy, and not just with book banning, but with ideological and doctrinal insistence on what can be taught ...

...Blume said she was also worried about censorship in teaching. Florida introduced a bill last month that may limit discussion of menstruation before the sixth grade and the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is proposing to restrict conversation about gender identity and sexual orientation in schools.

“I mean, that’s crazy. That is so crazy,” Blume said. “And it is so frightening that I think the only answer is for us to speak out and really keep speaking out, or we are going to lose our way.

“I mean, there’s a group of mothers now going around saying that they want to protect their children. Protect them from what? You know, protect them from talking about things? Protect them from knowing about things?

“Because even if they don’t let them read books, their bodies are still going to change and their feelings about their bodies are going to change. And you can’t control that. They have to be able to read, to question.”

Meanwhile, the blinkered bromancer blathers on, apparently enraptured by fat jokes ...

What a relief. There was a time when the pond, always politically incorrect, used to make Billy Bunter jokes about Akker Dakker ... until the pond got over tabloid relics of the AC/DC kind ...

Meanwhile, as the bromancer chortles away at fat jokes ... on another WaPo planet, A new book-ban fiasco in Florida reveals the monster DeSantis created... (sorry, WaPo paywall likely)

Why didn't the bromancer rail and rant at this? Sadly the reason is obvious enough ... he can't bring himself to attack Ron DeSanctus or the GOP doing a mad Iranian mullah Taliban routine ...

What to do? Well there's always comedy and satire, like the attempts to ban the bible and Florida Dems Try to Use Ron DeSantis’ Book Ban on His Own Book (sorry, Daily Beast paywall likely) ...

Florida educators’ struggles to adapt to the law’s confusing rules have received national attention for their apparent absurdity.

In February, for instance, Duval County schools removed a book detailing baseball legend Roberto Clemente’s life—based on its references to the racial discrimination he faced. The fiasco prompted DeSantis to assert that schools were overreacting to the new guidelines.

In that vein, Driskell and fellow Democrats identified 17 instances in “The Courage to Be Free” that could potentially violate Florida law.

For instance, DeSantis used the terms “woke” and “gender ideology” 46 times and 10 times, respectively, both of which could constitute “divisive concepts” the governor has argued should stay out of curricula up to the college level.

On page 125, DeSantis—who asserts he wrote the entire book himself—describes students being forced to “chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice,” an outdated claim from a proposed ethnic studies curriculum for K-12 students at a California school district.

The same page also references a video showing “dead black children, dramatically warning them about ‘racist police and state-sanctioned violence’ who might kill them at any time.”

DeSantis describes systemic racism on page 127, along with a summation of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” both of which have already constituted grounds for removal in Florida school districts.

The book has several depictions of violence, another category under the law that can prompt formal review. That includes a graphic depiction of the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) at a congressional baseball practice in June 2017, as well as descriptions of “BLM riots” with references to looting, assaults against police officers, mob violence, and deaths...

You've got to laugh, and don't get the pond started on the bible. Murder, rape, pillage, the sort of thing Vlad the Impaler loves, and the Song of Solomon a vile exercise in pornography, once you get to realise what the fruit and veggie bits are on about ...

For those who never came across David Plotz's 2007 piece for Slate, The Bible's Sexiest Book, a sample ...

Chapter 3

A delightfully steamy passage: She’s in bed at night and she can’t sleep, so she gets up and wanders the city, seeking him out. (See: Patsy Cline, “Walking After Midnight.”) She finds him, brings him back to her mom’s house, and … well, you’ll have to imagine the rest.

Solomon’s wedding procession comes to town. He’s riding in a palanquin, and he has seriously pimped his ride for maximum scoring: “He made its posts of silver, its back of gold, its seat of purple; its interior was inlaid with love.” Inlaid with love, O my! On the back, Solomon attached a bumper sticker: If this palanquin’s a rockin’, don’t come a knockin’.

Chapter 4

It’s the guy’s turn to give the compliments. Either he’s not as good a poet as she is, or you talked differently to girls back in the day. “Your hair is like a flock of goats … your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes.” Your brow is like “pomegranate split open.” “Your neck is like the tower of David.” You’re so beautiful—your hair looks like goats! Your forehead is a pomegranate—a fruit that resembles, um, acne. And you have a neck that seems to be made of brick. Hmm. These lines wouldn’t go over well at my house.

The most famous of his bodily tributes is: “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” This one isn’t exactly insulting, but it’s confusing. Fawns are bony, muscular, and jumpy—which is not how I would describe breasts.

He calls her a “locked garden.” She takes up the metaphor, enthusiastically! “Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.”

Chapter 5

This is probably the hottest passage in the song. Her beloved is knocking on the door. Then he “thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt.” How do you say “Penthouse Letters”in Biblical Hebrew?

She praises his good looks. Her compliments, unlike his, withstand the test of time. He’s “radiant and ruddy.” His hair is black like a raven’s. His cheeks “are like beds of spices … his lips are lilies … his arms are rounded gold … his legs are alabaster columns. …” Is it any wonder the lady digs him?

Oh dear, the pond is all hot and bothered and almost Groaning with pleasure, and so to the good news which is that The Canberra Times has at last realised they have a winner in the infallible Pope and are using him to attract attention to their newsletter ... 

Early access to the infallible Pope of the day? Shut up and take the pond's data already ...