The pond won't hear a bad word about Dame Slap. We can learn a lot from Dame Slap. She's what you get when the reptiles insist on visiting planet Janet above the faraway tree ...
And that sadly is the end of the Dame Slap experiment for the moment, because look, someone let the bromancer out on a junket, and he's gone and done a Rish!
But before getting to the bromancer, due homage must be paid to the dog botherer, and reading hm these days verges on the surreal ...
Isn't it enough that each week the dog botherer suffers for the voice? Now he turns full-throated republican, and the reptiles have given him a header mangling Gough's fine words about the gee gee. Has the world gone mad?
And now back for a final gobbet full of absurdist capers ...
No need for words when you've got that image in mind ...
And so as promised to the bromancer, who seems to have headed off to London to observe the King, but somehow ended up with the Rish!
It would be entirely wrong of the pond to ruin the moment by mentioning the unseemly fuss going on in the Graudian ...
Well it might be wrong, but it is fun, and it certainly helps the pond deal with the reeks ...
Indeed, indeed, and Brexit has done wonders for the British economy and as for those ratings, lest some stray reader think the pond is just quoting the Graudian, here's the Financial Times ... (possible paywall)
But when he gets a whiff, the bromancer is a most excellent brownnoser, and this performance features some exceptional brown-nosing ...
It might have been interesting to ask Rish! about this story, Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers struggle to adapt to life in the UK: survey, but brownnosers only purport to raise contentious matters, so that they can then be more assiduous in their brown-nosing ...
And yet ... please allow the pond a little Graudian ...
There's a lot more, that video actually works if you follow the link, but the pond must follow the brownnoser ...
Not to mention logarithms and quadratic equations, and yet, and yet ...
The pond just had to slip that in because look what's coming up ... a snap ... and if you blink, you might almost mistake Rish! for Nick ...
Meanwhile, on another insecure planet, there was a special Friday Crace ...
Now the pond isn't going to get into a debate about the precise meaning of "decimated", because the original mutinous Roman legion meaning of killing one in ten has evolved into a more general sense of killing fields and widespread destruction, and speaking of that it's important to move on to these cracking Crace lines ...
...Tory MPs had started openly arguing with one another. Kelly Tolhurst was certain it was unrealistic housing targets that had done for the Conservatives. Charles Walker thought the Tories hadn’t built enough. John Redwood insisted the losses were all because of the party not being nasty enough to foreigners and abandoning the Liz Truss economic model. Really. Rehman Chishti – remember him? The leadership contender with just one supporter – thought voters had been put off by the kneejerk, dog whistle politics of Suella Braverman.
Shortly after 8am, Rishi Sunak appeared outside Tory party headquarters. Things weren’t as bad as everyone was making out, he insisted. People loved the core Tory message. Just that they had forgotten to vote for it. And there had been a stunning success in Bassetlaw where the Tories had picked up about four seats on a Labour-dominated council. Really. The one disappointment was that efforts to stop the wrong people voting with the new photo ID rules had not made as big an impact as he had hoped. Maybe next time.
And so, entirely unmoved, it's back to the brown-nosing ...
nstead please allow the pond to appreciate the struggle of British people to get by in these difficult times ...
But it's not all gloom. There's always Larry ...
Instead, so much brown-nosing, and by one so skilled at the art, and yet so little time in the end, because the pond has reached the final gobbet and hasn't had time to celebrate the English economy and the 'coronation bounce', per the NY Times (paywall) ...
The country — businesses and households alike — could use some respite. For much of the past year, the British economy has been stagnant. Its inflation rate is the highest in western Europe, food prices are about 20 percent higher than a year ago and households are feeling the cold grip of a deep cost-of-living crisis.
Energy bills at The King Charles have doubled and food costs have jumped. Increasing the number of customers, for example with cut-price meals on quiet days, has been the only way the pub has been able to battle soaring costs. Business has been good, Ms. Anchor said, but efforts to draw people into the pub can’t let up. The coronation weekend is an unmissable opportunity.
Click on a couple of the links in that yarn and there's more woe ... (paywall)
And there's the odd bitter Pill to swallow ...(paywall) ... you're worse off, just accept it ...
The Bank of England’s chief economist has a harsh message for Britons: “Someone needs to accept that they’re worse off.”
The economist, Huw Pill, said on a podcast that there had been a reluctance by workers and companies in Britain to accept that they were poorer, primarily as a result of Europe’s energy shock.
Instead, he said, workers are trying to pass along rising costs to employers by demanding higher wages, while companies are passing on their higher expenses to customers. That “pass-the-parcel game,” he said, is generating inflation that could be persistent.
Mr. Pill, who is responsible for the analysis that the central bank uses to make its interest rate decisions, made the comments on “Beyond ‘Unprecedented’: The Post-Pandemic Economy,” a podcast series by Columbia Law School. The episode was released on Tuesday.
The remarks have fallen flat in Britain, which has grappled with a cost-of-living crisis for the past year. The annual rate of inflation has been stubbornly above 10 percent since last summer, much higher than in the United States and Western Europe. In response, the central bank has raised interest rates to 4.25 percent, the highest since 2008, with the effect of higher rates on mortgages and other loans.
Household energy bills are more than double what they were two years ago, while many households also struggle to afford groceries. Food inflation is about 19 percent, the highest annual pace in more than 45 years.
The comments were quickly followed by indignation.
“You need to accept you are poorer!” The Daily Mail splashed in large letters across its front page on Wednesday, adding that Mr. Pill earned £190,000 (about $237,000) a year. (Bank of England data showed that he was paid more than £88,000 from September 2021, when he joined the bank, to the end of February 2022, with additional benefits, implying an annual salary that year of about £190,000.) Other newspapers had similar headlines.
Mr. Pill joined the Bank of England from Harvard Business School. He previously worked at Goldman Sachs and the European Central Bank.
Oh it's splendid times and so to the last brown-nosing gobbet ...
He's unique? That's an extraordinarily unique bit of brown-nosing, but it sets the mood for an immortal Rowe ...
Look, there they are again ... it's a veritable haunting ...
Did the Dog Botherer actually write all that ? Really? REALLY???
ReplyDeleteI’m looking forward to a cage fight between Doggy and Our Henry.
Thankfully, normal service was resumed with the Bromancer’s epic grovel. Mr Sunak obviously has a lot of concerns at the moment, not least his Party’s appalling local election performance (it’s fascinating how in the UK they’re treated as having real implications for national politics, unlike here). So it must have been a welcome respite to spend a couple of hours with a colonial bumpkin who would happily accept any old guff from Rishi as gospel truth, and transcribe it accordingly. If only his local journalists were so gullible!
Anonymous - keep some popcorn to hand, because our Dog Bovverer is already in a kind of cage fight. Before a smaller crowd than can be mustered on the after-deck of the Flagship, but what it lacks in audience, it makes up in ferocity.
DeleteIt is happening over at ‘Quad Rant’. The Ranter is one of their regulars, Peter O’Brien, who has a book to flog, with the catchy title ‘The Indigenous Voice to Parliament? The No case.’, which he conveniently, and modestly, characterises as ‘an invaluable primer explaining why the Voice must fail.’ (published by Connor Court, of course, with foreword from David Flint, of course).
O’Brien starts with ‘In a recent Weekend Australian, Chris Kenny quoted me from a Quadrant Online article. In doing so he seriously misrepresented my position, and he also demonstrated a lamentable lack of understanding of our Constitution.’
From there, it goes on in familiar ‘Quad Rant’ style, rapidly descending to ‘he said, I said.’ - or, as is often the form of these ‘Rants’ - ‘he said, and, while those might have been the words I used, they have been placed in a different context to suggest that I am making quite the opposite case.’ I do wonder if Editor-in-Chief Windschuttle gives seminars on such patterns of writing.
O’Brien then impresses the extent of his outrage with ‘Three times, via the Letters Editor, General Enquiries and Editor-in-Chief, I offered my response to The Australian, only to have my request totally ignored. So, Chris Kenny will have to read it here.’
The actual content beyond that is as facile and tedious as most of what is dropped into ‘Quad Rant’ these days, and I would feel bad if any of those who come to the Pond for enlightenment, or sport, were to read beyond O’Brien’s challenge, simply because I had drawn attention to it.
Reason for raising it here is to show that our Dog Bovverer is seen as slipping so far from the ‘conservative’ position on The Voice, that he is about to star in a few cage fights. He might want to ingratiate himself with an experienced attack dog or three, because O’Brien’s words attracted 39 responses (a big number for one of these Rants). Not one of those responders would direct a thumb upward for our lad’s survival as O’Brien stands with caliga firmly on his throat.
O'Brien: "he seriously misrepresented my position". Now surely that's a reptile first: they'd never do anything like that, would they ? But "he also demonstrated a lamentable lack of understanding of our Constitution.’" - now that's more like it, we get a lot of that kind of thing from the reptiles.
DeleteThis is GTP4_Obrien with hallucinate set to 11 - 'Quad Rant'.
Delete"‘Quad Rant’ style, rapidly descending to ‘he said, I said.’
"they have been placed in a different context to suggest that I am making quite the opposite case."
Training data. Always the problem.
Touché Anonymous - I must try harder to keep up with the 21st century. I can get confused writing about an 'O'Brien' because of his prominence in '1984'
DeleteDoggy Bov: "...the contempt that is bred from familiarity." Oh my, but those reptiles really do engage in endless 'projection', don't they.
ReplyDeleteDoggy Bov: "If the Windsors desire longevity for their privieged lifestyles and roles, they would do all they can to keep their personal thoughts, peccadillos and diversions out of public view." Yeah, let people invent their own irrationalities about people they never get to know anything real about: the British Royals. It certainly worked a treat for that American form of 'royalty' of fairly recent times: the movie stars. And all those rock musos like the Stones and Beatles too.
ReplyDeleteBut I do have to ask this: how much 'longevity' will that achieve ? If it doesn't manage to wipe itself, and the whole planet, out over global heating, then what is the timeframe we're talking about ? Now it's said that mammal species (us !) have a lifetime of 1 to 2 million years before going extinct. So assuming that our species (homo sapiens) came into existence about 200,000 years ago, it has somewhere between 800,000 and 1,800,000 years to go.
So, will the British Royals 'keeping themselves to themselves' allow them to rule for that long ? Or does maybe the whole 'royalty' thing only have maybe a 1000 years more of life, no matter what Charles III and his descendants do. How many coronations can be fitted into 1000 years ?
Oh, but Doggy Bov: "...during a brief stint at Scouts as an eight or nine-year-old." No, Doggy Bov, at that age it was just Cubs mate, not Scouts. Scouts came when you reached puberty and switched over to apprentice adulthood and started taking an interest in Girl Guides.
Anyway, it really is all only ceremonial, isn't it: the "sovereign" (now the preferred designation out here in Aussieland, apparently) does not issue orders that must be obeyed, that's now the province of politicians. So wherein lies the problem ?
As I understand it, most of the bullishi - - err, ceremony originates from the nineteenth century. Sure, they drag out a rock stollen in the 13th century and some other bric-à-brac, but most of the stuff dates back less than two hundred years when it was necessary to rehabilitate the reputation of the royal family. Queen Victoria was in effective retirement after the death of Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales was out on the tiles and the minor royals were doing what they do best - scandal, scandal, scandal! (Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Street_scandal or, more recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincora_Boys%27_Home).
DeleteWhat better distraction than some frocking up? It must work because the Windsors have survived whereas their more politically powerful relatives have ended up in exile or a shallow grave in some cases.
What a contribution by the Bromancer: yes, he is a supreme brown-noser, isn't he. But then the acrobatics of Rishi is incredible too in respect of "never say anything negative, it will only distress the electorate." Well it's worked a treat in sundry wars, hasn't it.
ReplyDeleteBut other than that, not a thing worth commenting on in the Bro's whole paean.
So it goes.