In which Polonius refuses to blame the ABC and the world didn't come to an end, and JC refuses to talk about SloMo's brilliant work for y'artz ...

 

The pond likes to show its workings and this was its choices at the start of the weekend, leading into the Sunday meditation...

It's easy to see why the pond often ends up a Dolly threadbare coat of many colours ... there's grating Gemma doing a Maude Flanders, "won't somebody think of the children?" and the pond simply didn't have the heart to go there ... 

As for Clegg, she would say that, wouldn't she, and here the pond should confess that whenever it sees 'Clegg' it somehow transposes the world into Clag, in memory of ancient Tamworth school days ...

It's a Freudian slip, but easy enough to understand when looked at a little more deeply ...

Eek, it's a miracle the pond only conjured up Clagg as a way to gum up the works.

Having done the bro's not so crypto-inclination to authoriarianism and fascism yesterday,  naturally the pond turned back to the reliable prattle of Polonius, as it always does when in a pickle and searching for a Sunday meditation.

As always, the pond could wait with bated breath for a bashing of the ABC for failing to give Polonius his own show on RN ...

First up the pond was astonished to see that truly wretched artwork, an attempt apparently to recreate the glories of the lizard Oz graphics department in its heyday ...

Second, there was that note about a "compliant media", which verges on the defamatory. The HUN called out by Polonius as "compliant media"? And what of the lizard Oz, which presumably sells a few digital subscriptions and fewer tree killer copies south of the border ...

The pond gaily tripped past that adulatory reference to Hitler-admiring, pig iron shipping Ming the Merciless - the pond would expect nothing less from Polonius - but began to grow nervous about a timely slagging and a shagging of the ABC.

Was this perhaps the first time in recorded Polonius history that the legendary scribbler failed to draw attention to the way there's not a single genuine conservative at the broadcaster, namely hm?

The next gobbet might provide a clue ... or might just be the usual standard, tedious Polonial roam through ancient history ...

Hmm, Krogered again, as if there hasn't been more than enough Krogering already.

Might not the state of Victoria be attributed to the fixation on a peculiar form of football and an addiction to fried dim sims with soy sauce in corner stores?

It's a tribal thing, and the pond always resented being asked which team it barracked for, and when living in North Fitzroy used to tell punters that the game hadn't been worth following from the day they tore down the Lions and the Bloods ... they knew they were guilty as hell and immediately retreated to their desk.

Okay, it's a funny state, but can the cockroaches boast, given that we seem to have a barking mad right intelligentsia at Holt Street and in the Sydney Institute, with both varieties unhappily both too strong and too tedious to challenge ...

At this point, the pond became very nervous. There had been a splendid bashing of comrade Dan, proving that Polonius read the lizard Oz as well as listening to the ABC, but what of the ABC? There was just a short gobbet to go ...

And that's what gets up Polonius's nose. It isn't just the rest of Australia that thinks he's a tedious old bore, and a pompous fart, apparently Victorians do too, and pay no attention to him.

Of course the obvious question to ask is why comrade Dan first ran with the Empire games as a panem et circenses routine, when everyone knows it's just minor league rorting, not up to the major league the cane toads will see with the Olympics ...

Getting out of the Empire games showed belated wisdom; getting into them was an error of judgement.

Never mind, there's an immortal Rowe to hand to report on the stage of play ...

And so to the real bonus. Those with long memories not fogged by a Polonial encounter will recall that the oscillating fan has been out and about offering some "hard truths" about education, as opposed to some hard legal news, of the kind Peter van Onselen loses breach of contract case brought by Network Ten ...

Too rich and the pond can't stop referencing it, what with the Amalfi coast copping a mention ...

...Zooming into his hearing last month from the Amalfi coast in Italy, Van Onselen said he had not read the non-disparagement clause in his redundancy contract after being reassured by the Paramount human resources executive Anthony McDonald that he could disparage Ten in various circumstances.
“I used the phrase, ‘If the CEO was caught fucking a goat and the rest of the media was piling on then surely I would not be precluded from doing the same,’” Van Onselen told the court.
“I remember Mr McDonald being reassuring and saying something to the effect of, ‘Of course, hopefully it won’t come to that.’”
McDonald told the court there had been no such conversation.
Ten’s counsel, Arthur Moses SC, questioned the commentator about the phone call, saying he was using a “fabricated” memory to “get away from the impact of the non-disparagement clause”.
When Moses asked if he had read the final redundancy document before signing it, Van Onselen replied: “No, I did not.”

The pond can imagine an advanced higher ed course with the oscillating fan, with contracting the topic of the day. Lesson 1: read and understand the contract. Lesson 2: there is no lesson 2. 

Reading and understand the contract is a good enough lesson, and if you can't do that, why do you think anyone should listen to you parrot on about education? 

But much as the pond was gripped by the desire to explore the completely clueless oscillating fan's thoughts on education, there was a better offer tucked out of sight, though likely to appear later on in the weekend ...

Stop right there. The pond was triggered by that sight of La Trobe, and the pond heading out there, only to think it had landed in Flinders University. More to the point, how could an alleged university prof cite a work without providing a link?

It wouldn't have been hard to do. "The End of the English Major" is easy to find and if you haven't used up all your New Yorker free clicks, outside the paywall.

It's a much better read than the thoughts of JC, which isn't surprising but has to be said, though the pond wouldn't have called a 27th February 2023 piece recent ...

It's another example of the reptiles' "walled garden" fixation - here be no links to take punters out of the lizard Oz cellar and see the light emanating from other parts of the world - even if the NY piece was suffused with gloom ...

...As I watched, he labelled the start of the graph “1958”—the year after the Soviets launched Sputnik, when the National Defense Education Act appropriated more than a billion dollars for education.

“We’re not talking about élite universities—we’re talking about money flowing into fifty states, all the way down. That was the beginning of the glory days of the humanities,” he continued. Near the plummeting end of the parabola, he scribbled “2007,” the beginning of the economic crisis. “That funding goes down,” he explained. “The financial support for the humanities is gone on a national level, on a state level, at the university level.”

Shapiro smoothed out his graph, regarded it for a moment, and ran the tip of his pencil back and forth across the curve.

“This is also the decline-of-democracy chart,” he said. He looked up and met my gaze. “You can overlay it on the money chart like a kind of palimpsest—it’s the same.”

Bear that talk in mind, as JC, also suffused with gloom, tries to roll back the rock and consider the problem ...

Actually there's no need to go back to Queen Vic ... if you want the bloody dagger in the library, why not just revert to the Graudian?

And so on, and how did that work out? Cue the Graudian again ...

It was Dan the man Thehan wot done it, with clap happy SloMo and the gang, but JC isn't interested in the sordid behaviour of his mob, he wants to offer up grandiose blather about "Western Civilisation" like a pig in shyte (shitten if you want to sound Chaucerian) ...,confusing and conflating the "great works of Civilisation" by not mentioning anything outside Europe, and going off into an ecstatic mystical musing, as if a koan has never crossed his narrow mind ...

Wasn't the main point of Newman's life to have a dinkum mate and wife?

..."It's not unreasonable to think he might have been homosexual," says the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of My Life with the Saints. "His letters and his comments on the death of one of his close friends are quite provocative."

That friend was Ambrose St. John, a fellow convert and Catholic priest. Newman described St. John as "my earthly light." The two men were inseparable; they lived together for 32 years. According to John Cornwell, author of a forthcoming biography called Newman's Unquiet Grave, St. John helped Newman with his scholarship, translations and more.

"Even doing things like packing his bags before he went away, making sure he was taking his medicine, making sure he kept dental appointments, that sort of thing," Cornwell says. "So it was almost like a wife, but without the marital bed."

When St. John died in 1875, Newman was devastated. "I have always thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's," he wrote, "but I feel it difficult to believe that anyone's sorrow can be greater than mine."

Just before his own death, Newman made a strongly worded request -- not once but three times -- that he be buried in the same grave with his lifelong friend. (NPR)

Wouldn't it be better to note what really illuminates an individual's life, bringing self-understanding and inspiration, not to mention packed bags and medical appointments kept? You know, like Thomas Jefferson keeping Sally Hemmings for a bed companion ...

Never mind, at this point the reptiles slipped in the usual obligatory cheap snap from what's left of the graphics department ...

Then JC could crank it up again ...

There's a lot to unpack there, and the pond isn't into unpacking or packing for the likes of JC, but that blather about Cambridge and Oxford folk armed with classics majors immediately struck a chord. Who wouldn't want a bunch of idle prats to run the country?

Thoughts of fatuous fops worthy of a Python sketch, the Bullingdon club, the impossibly wet David Cameron and Boris the pompous Latin-spewing clown car crash immediately spring to mind ...

It's easy to see why the pond was triggered, but JC kept on going ...

There's a lot of unhappiness there, but the pond let it all pass over, and moved on to the next gobbet, because JC was picking up steam about new fangled modern thingies and such like...

Actually Campion is a cult home to Catholic cultists of the fundamentalist kind, but no matter, the reptiles sought to distract the pond with a very big snap of Will ...

It so happens that the pond latest toilet reading has been Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age, Simon Forman the Astrologer, by A. L. Rowse, featuring a staggering amount of fornication, carefully hidden by Latin words, and mention of Shakespeare reminded the pond of another problem, this one Florida based...

At least five Shakespeare plays feature major characters cross-dressing: "The Merchant of Venice," "As You Like It," "Twelfth Night," "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Cymbeline." Exposing students to cross-dressing was outlawed in Florida by the fatuously named “Parental Rights in Education” Bill. At least 10 other Republican-controlled states have passed similar legislation.

Then there’s sex — real sex. Can’t teach "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet," "Othello," "All’s Well That Ends Well," and … oh, hell, might as well come out and say it: Shakespeare has no place in Florida school curriculum. Chaucer, too. The Wife of Bath’s Tale? Are you kidding?

Perhaps the most insane, and cowardly, law Florida has proposed would require anyone who criticizes Gov. Ron DeSantis on the internet to register with the state. This is a Soviet law. Even Newt Gingrich, who is greatly responsible for poisoning U.S. politics, called the proposal “insane.” Not to mention unconstitutional.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow quoted University of Tennessee psychology professor Patrick Grzanka in an excellent column this week: “Forget about accountability. There doesn’t even have to be internal consistency to the legislation so long as it promotes hate.” Grzanka describes the recent slew of neo-fascist Republican proposals as “‘a kind of legislative waterboarding’ by the political right to generate backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. progress that many see as ‘a massive threat to white Christian heterosexual values.’”

Elizabethan men in frocks on the stage was one of the running gags in the TV sitcom Upstart Crow, but speaking of banning, it got a bit more serious than that, per The Independent ...

Over 150 books have been removed from a large, Orlando-area Florida school district, including classics like The Scarlet Letter, Paradise Lost, and The Invisible Man, as school officials review materials for sexual content under the state’s restrictive book ban laws.

According to a teacher keeping track of books that have been temporarily pulled for review by the Orange County government, titles by Shakespeare have been restricted to only 10th through 12 graders, while other popular works like The Fault in Our Stars, Into the Wild, and Catch-22 have been put on the restricted list because of sexual material.

One teacher told The Orlando Sentinel she was “gobsmacked” when she saw Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was among the restricted works.

A Midsummer Night's Dream? Odd's bodkins, the pond did that one in third year at Tamworth High back in the day.

It's pretty hard to encourage an interest in Shakespeare if it might see you get sent off to the slammer, which is pretty much on a par with the Taliban loving Twitter (how else to celebrate their latest moves to make women invisible?) and the Talibanisation of the United States, with a Taliban-like love of asserting women have no rights over the bodies ...

As one cartoonist put it ...

Up against this sort of movement, JC's last short gobbet was a spectacular failure to remove the rock, or even the mote in his eye ...

Shakespeare needs teaching?

One teacher told The Orlando Sentinel she was “gobsmacked” when she saw Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was among the restricted works.

Possibly almost as gobsmacked as the pond feels reading JC ... and that mention of the Bible being a closed book naturally prompted the pond to celebrate with a cartoon, because reading the Bible and following it has long been in the breach more than the observance ...

And here's a couple more celebrations of cultural triumphs ...

And there's always Tom Tomorrow ... capturing the reptile mind set ...