In which Polonius emerges yet again from behind the arras, accompanied by a couple of female lizards of Oz ...

 

Thought for the day: Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside. George Bernard Shaw.

Speaking of the dull, the useless and the inane, prattling Polonius will soon arrive, and make a day at the seaside feel like bliss, but before then, please indulge the pond, so the pond can evoke its weekend routine.

After the initial bout of Saturday herpetology studies, the pond can settle back and take the chance to interact with the real world...

The pond might read Katharine Murphy, gushing in the Graudian, Peter Dutton is the exploding fire hydrant of politics, pushing his party to the angry fringes and electoral oblivion.

...Boosh fans would say the Liberal leader went full Tony Harrison. During his regular Thursday morning outing on 2GB – conversations where Peter agrees with Ray (Hadley) and Ray agrees with Peter (Dutton) – Australia’s alternative prime minister characterised the non-partisan humanist values of inclusiveness and tolerance as “the woke agenda they” (they being Albanese and Labor) “are pushing out”.
During another heartwarming public outing, Dutton felt Albanese had been “captured by elites, by people particularly on the east coast”. (For clarity, Dutton was on the west coast when he shared this theory. For context, Dutton wants to win back seats in WA and push Labor into minority government or worse after the next election, so best quarantine west coast elites from any opportunistic sledging.)
Albanese (according to Dutton) was busy sucking up to CEOs and chairs of publicly listed companies “who crave popularity and who want to tell the public what they think they want to hear so that they can be popular on social media”. The prime minister was “hanging out with Alan Joyce, red carpet events and, you know, they’re besties having dinner together, all the rest of it”. The Liberal leader also harboured a more specific feeling that the prime minister had failed to amend the wording of a proposed amendment to the constitution to enshrine the voice to parliament “because Alan Joyce and others were telling him not to”.
I don’t know Alan Joyce, so I have no idea if the former Qantas chief wonders how he went to bed one night as a besieged Irish-Australian airline executive and woke up as George Soros in a graphic novel penned by Peter Dutton. I would if I were him. Given Joyce appeared to be fully extended trashing the Qantas brand, he might also be curious about how he managed to squeeze in supplying cheeky legal advice about the constitution while downing magnums of Dom Perignon and shovelling in canapes at secret soirees of the wokerati.
Mysteries really do abound. But here we all are, irked and mildly concussed on planet Big Angry Feelings.
In Trumpian tradition, Dutton also chose his own facts this week. He declared at one point Labor had let 105,000 asylum seekers into the country. Experts pointed out 94,260 of the 105,000 had turned up on the Coalition’s watch.
He also didn’t seem to mind contradicting himself in the space of a few minutes. Dutton thought Albanese was obsessed by the voice. He also thought the prime minister was obsessed with drumming up distractions to the voice...

The Woke Agenda ... Captured by East Coast Elites ... George Soros in a graphic novel penned by Peter Dutton ... Planet Big Angry Feelings... secret soirees of the wokerati ... why it's the lizard Oz to a T ...

The pond always makes sure to catch up with the venerable Meade, top notch herpetologist ...Daily Mail misconstrues Ray Martin’s contempt for ‘nonsensical’ no slogan and Ampol fuels Walkley scholarship

Who'd have thought the pond would have a kind word for Ray Martin?

Ray Martin was clear about his contempt for the slogan “If you don’t know, vote no” when he spoke last week at an Indigenous voice to parliament yes rally. “What a stupid, nonsensical slogan that is,” the veteran TV presenter said. “If you don’t know, find out what you don’t know. What that asinine slogan is saying is if you’re a dinosaur or a dickhead who can’t be bothered reading, then vote no.”

Luckily the pond rarely bothers with the Daily Snail, wilfully misreading the quote, but always bothers with Miranda delivering an exceptional Hydeing to Lozza Fox in Through a Ulez camera, I spy the vandal who chopped down Laurence Fox’s career. It looks a lot like him ...

This week she managed to weave one of the pond's favourite movie quotes into the magic...

While they were searching his house, Laurence did a live speech into his laptop camera – but devastatingly failed to make it a version of the famous tears-in-rain monologue out of Blade Runner. You know the one – “I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion ... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate …” Just imagine Laurence’s version: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Cars having to do 20mph on the Tower Bridge Road. Men who aren’t allowed to see their kids – they know why – taking 19 goes with an angle-grinder to disable a camera in Chingford … All those moments will be lost, like tears in rain …” I mean, come on – HOW DID HE MISS? This, let’s face it, was always the problem with Laurence as an actor. Simply didn’t have the instinctive brilliance in the moment.
It was while he was in custody that the police told him he’d been let go by GBeebies. Again, great to see the Met going above and beyond – in this case performing the duties of a theatrical agent – but we do have to wonder if their time might now be better spent solving actual crimes. After being released on bail, Laurence emerged brandishing a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Just incredible perspective. I don’t know how he follows that. Maybe quoting Hannah Arendt at a nightclub doorman who won’t let him in...

The pond usually drops in on The New Yorker - must make use of the sub - though the pond isn't that swept up in the AI craze or James Somers' How Will A.I. Learn Next?

There's always something at The Bulwark, even if it's just the daily serve of Charlie Sykes' morning shot, The Media Mutes Trump's Crazy ...

The pond doesn't mean 'just' in a negative sense. It's just a way of saying there's usually other yarns to read. T

here's always plenty of links to tap into the pulse and the pond has a soft spot for whatever turns up in the cheap shots ...

Of course it helps to know where a dingbat like Ari Fleischer comes from - the Comical Ali of the Bush years - just as it's helpful to have a little background on a useless clown of the Scott Morefield kind, with that toilet bowl beard and his own website ...

 

Thus fortified and refreshed, the pond is ready to return to its herpetology studies, and to the inane dullness of Polonius, scribbling about New Zealand.

The pond can never understand the reptile fixation on New Zealand, yet here we are yet again ...

As Polonius droned on, the pond wondered what the real game would turn out to be. After all, Jacinda Ardern is long gone, and if you wanted a recent spectacular political flame out done in remarkably short time and flamboyant style, you didn't have to look very far ...

There had to be something more to this Polonial outing than the reptiles' standard bizarre fixation on the fush and chups mob ...

Ah of course, that's why Polonius ignored the current mike drop ...

He wanted a convenient Kiwi leftie patsy so he could have yet another go at Dictator Dan, because the reptiles can never expunge the deep fear and loathing they have for the comrade ...

There is one ever increasing certainty in current politics: the ability of Polonius to bore the pond rigid, and offer up truisms of the most pompous Polonial kind ...

Perhaps in other days Polonius might have blessed us all with a history lesson, reminding us that in the first days of federation up to the great war, Australia had no less than six PMs in 14 years, with Deakin having three goes at the job and Andrew Fisher having another three gos ... (here)

Then with his attachment to resounding banalities, he could have assured us that there are increasingly fewer certainties in contemporary democratic politics, or period ones too ...

And so to a bonus, and there were slim pickings ...

The pond realises that the Angelic one has a loyal following, what with her fixation on Xian hospitals. 

The pond hearkened back to a reader comment on 28th September to show the loyalty of her followers ...

Yesterday I took an acquaintance for treatment at North Canberra Hospital - until recently managed by the Catholic Church as Calvary Hospital, and the subject of several hysterical articles by the Blessed Saint Angie. I was stunned. Despite what I’d been led to expect by Angie, the walls were not plastered with images of Lenin, Marx, Kim Jong Un and ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr (who surely must have moved up the list of New Corp public enemies with the retirement of Dictator Dan). Staff had not swapped their scrubs for Mao suits. While things took a while, it was no slower than you’d expect in any other Emergency area, the staff were excellent and there was no requirement to spit on the Bible or join the Greens before receiving treatment. Indeed, the Catholic-themed names of some parts of the hospital have not been changed to those of former ACT Labor Ministers, the couple of vaguely Catholic monuments I spotted had not been smashed to rubble, and most surprising of all, I didn’t see any brave groups of Catholic clergy or parishioners loudly protesting against what is now clearly a temple of godless atheism. Is is just barely possible that Sister Angie was slightly exaggerating in her writings?

Sadly there's little to inspire in this outing ... the Angelic one seems to have gone cold on Calvary ...

The pond has harped many times before on the mindlessly moronic nature of the lizard Oz illustrations ... with the one above typical ...

iStock has so much to answer for, as does the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department.

It's why the pond is inclined either to self-mutilation, or at least to cartoons on the topic ...

It's why the pond goes with so many cartoons, just to get through the usual fundamentalist Catholic guff about the family ...

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

And so to a massaging of the data by the Angelic one ...

On the upside, the Angelic one usually keeps it short, so the pond could also slip in garrulous Gemma, not for the comment, but because the pond needed some interstitials for some left over cartoons ...

Ah, the old inflation routine ... see Inflation worse under Coalition than Labor, contrary to Morrison's (and Gemma's) claims for that one ..

As usual, the pond decided to aggregate the illustrations ...

There were other things the pond wanted to celebrate in a visual way ...

Meanwhile, conflicted Gemma kept on with the navel-gazing and fluff gathering ... the pond suspects that

Back in the real world, things were going spiffingly well, thanks to manly men ...

And then it was back to the grind with Gemma ...

Oh FFS, can't we have something more interesting than this endless navel-gazing? What about a witch hunt?

And the pond did like this one. Unlike a good painting, especially in the impressionist style, where you have to step back from the canvas to appreciate the way the whole comes together ...

This one worked best in miniature if you wanted to read the message ...

And with that the last of the interruptions, it was time for a final gobbet of Gemma, with the pond forlornly hoping that at the end she would announce that this was no work for a woman, and she was standing down, doing an Oreo or an our Gracie, so a man could take her place ...

As usual, the pond got it wrong. After all that, she still intends to go on scribbling, and dammit, the pond intends to go on interrupting with cartoons, with Tom Tomorrow offering a final word, or picture, as you will ...