Greetings from comrade Dan's purgatory, adjacent to limbo and fitted with doors to hell ...

 

The pond couldn't help but notice that yarn in The Graudian, News Corp profits dive 75% as Rupert Murdoch-owned company hints at AI future, though the pond did appreciate correspondents reminding the pond that herpetology studies are a kind of permanent hell from which there is no escape, no matter how much the pond flits around on the FREE socialist Melbourne tram system.

Okay, they're only free in the CBD, but (a) unlike Sudneigh, there are trams, and (b) there seems to be one every minute or so in the CBD. Not that it does you much good if you want to go shopping in Bourke street before 10am. The socialists take the early morning off, as if it's some kind of August sun in Cuba ...

As for the reptile saga, the lede said it all: Poor result weighed down by lower print and digital advertising at News Corp Australia, a division that includes flagship newspaper The Australian.

The pond resisted the desire to gloat in an unseemly, slobbering, slavering way over the complete uselessness of the lizard Oz, and saved that pleasure for the kicker:

“We are already in active negotiations to establish a value for our unique content sets and (intellectual property) that will play a crucial role in the future of AI.”

The company’s Australian arm recently disclosed it was producing 3,000 articles a week using generative AI.

So the pond's modest proposal to clone all the stars in the reptile pantheon and replicate them using AI is already well under way, and truth to tell, the reptiles are now so accustomed to re-parroting themselves and joining in a hive mind murmuration of reptiles, that who could possibly tell the difference between a genuine reptile piece (genuine in the sense of certifiably fraudulent and full of lies) and an AI imitation, trained to replicate said fraudulent lies?

Meanwhile, for holyday reading, the pond has steered clear of the many Trump indictments, the complete corruption of SCOTUS and trip-loving Justice Thomas (we're not talking that kind of tripping), and the increasing weirdness of US politics of the GOP kind, and settled down with Ian Parker's profile, Eric Adams's Administration of Bluster (possible paywall).

One of the things about having the app is that you can take the magazine in digital form pretty much anywhere, and it was a ripper read. Such a brazen, inventive and bold liar:

...Adams often brought up Joe Dispenza, the author of such books as “You Are the Placebo” (2014). Adams told me that Dispenza is still one of his favorite writers. Dispenza, a chiropractor by training, writes self-help books that draw on his scientific reading. “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” (2012) proposes an interconnectedness among people, across time and space, akin to quantum entanglement in particle physics. (Adams has publicly referred to quantum entanglement.) The book cites a paper that Leonard Leibovici, an Israeli medical researcher, published in the British Medical Journal in 2001. Leibovici had directed prayers, from afar, toward a randomized sample of hospital patients with infections. The results appeared to show that prayed-for patients had done better: shorter infections, fewer deaths. Dispenza doesn’t note that Leibovici’s paper was published in an annual holiday issue featuring experiments on absurd topics: unicycles, lost teaspoons. The absurdity in Leibovici’s paper, which was plainly satirical, was that he’d studied retroactive prayer: the measured infections had all run their course, fatal or not, years before Leibovici offered prayers. Dispenza tells readers the experiment shows that “our intentions, our thoughts and feelings, and our prayers not only affect our present or future, but they can actually affect our past.” Extending the self-help truism of creating a better future, Dispenza dangles the possibility of creating a better past.

It seems that it's almost de rigueur for everyone in US politics these days to be an aspirational mango Mussolini ...only in Amerikah ...

As for news of freedumb in Tamworth and bush bullshyte summits, the pond would rather be indulging in that crackling cracking crispy pork roll from Heartbaker Bun Mee, not to mention the abundance of sushi rolls. 

Sure, the pond's helping depopulate the world's oceans, but as the fish are going to end up deep  fried, where's the harm? Ocean heat record broken, with grim implications for the planet.

Old news, the pond concedes, but it's so good to be free of the baleful reptiles ... and while this is how they see Collins street ...

... the pond thinks poor old John Brack wouldn't recognise the joint ...

Even with the chill designed to test a Sydney-sider, there's an energy in the streets that's beguiling. They were talking about it back in 2018 in The Conversation, How a three-decade remaking of the city revived the buzz of ‘Marvellous Melbourne, and the buzz still seems to be there, though there seems to be an enormous number of furriners about, which is to say non-Anglo-Saxons, the source of all the Dame Groan misery and despair. The pond had the pleasure of telling one party of lost tourist souls that being from Sydney, the pond knew nothing of this arcane and exotic place.

There have been a few downsides. On stepping out on to Spencer street, the pond was appalled to see that the evocative concrete blocks, bedecked with spontaneous art works, had been banished, and replaced by stainless steel bollards, offering a soulless modern city look. Where's the down at heel tattered hippie Brunswick street look in that? (The pond knows the people responsible for the blocks, consider it a leg pull).

And the attempts to tear the city's heart apart to install a metro system continue apace ...

(this image is licensed by the pond under Creative Commons, on the basis that if you're creative, you'll have nothing in common with it)

... though the pond considers it a feeble effort, because in Sydney they destroyed not just the heart but the soul, with that LA obsession with roads and motorways ...

As for the decadence, it was just up the road, and the pond used its patented flare filter to catch the essence of comrade Dan's faux socialism ...

The glittering south ... and the pond remembered back to the time it attended the massive premiere of that massive hit Ned Kelly, with the likes of Steve Bracks. Where is he now?

And then there are the lurking signs that this city is full of heresies. Why even as the pond waited for its crackling pork roll, it was besieged by images mocking the house of mouse...

Wait, that was just inspiration taken from Ron DeSanctus, or was it to do with RonDeSquid?

Meanwhile, the pond has given up the reptiles with tremendous ease and speed but is still looking up the infallible Pope ...

... and the immortal Rowe ...

And what about the inspiring inspiration for that one?

As always, it's in the detail, with the cat among the pigeons ... the pond felt an almost irresistible urge to shout Tamworth style, duck's on the pond, cat's on the king, queen's in the chaff bag ...

And just what are those three poles in the background. A sign that the construction of parliament house was shoddy, or a sign that Aboriginal totems could be stripped of all identity and made to look like bongs?