In which a sleep-deprived pond can barely keep eyelids open with Acme matches as Dame Groan does her thing...

 

Poor Ukraine, still being persecuted by a war-mongering sociopath but is anyone noticing? 

Sure the Graudian still keeps a live page running, the latest Three people killed in Russian shelling of Kherson, says Ukraine – as it happened, but the sheer scale of the collective punishment and war crimes and ethnic cleansing and hospital slaughter and the din of reptiles cheering it on is a constant distraction ...

Then there was the tragic loss of Suella, and the revival of one of the greatest fops and epic losers (except when it comes to nifty share deals) in the shape of David Cameron. 

The pond couldn't help but fixate on Sky (the real Sky in the UK) and that famous cat amidst all the comings and goings and stayed up far too late, and then woke up early in the morning to read John Crace's Sunak searches the gene puddle of Tory talent … and finds David Cameron.

The Graudian was wall to wall in its coverage ... and there was much fun to be had: Simon Jenkins with When the solution to your problem is David Cameron, you know you're in deep trouble, or Polly Toynbee's Suella Braverman is sunk, and so are the Tories: a party of nihilists, led by a loser.

But is she sunk? Hasn't she promised to resurface and have words to say?

It was such high drama, comedy if you will, that the pond didn't have time to keep up with news from America, yet there was high comedy there too. 

The mango Mussolini, having gone full Adolf in his use of 'vermin', naturally there was Campaign Flack Has a Deranged Response to Trump's 'Vermin' Comment. 

And what about Salon's Mike Johnson's "biblical” economics: Using Christian nationalism to "enhance plutocratic wealth", as Government shutdown looms as new speaker struggles to control hardliners ... and that's before even talking about Eric's revival of Mona Lisa evaluations ...(sssh, don't mention the Atlantic City casinos).

It was all too much for the pond ... what it needed was a quiet life ...

Luckily it was Dame Groan day, so the pond could tiptoe past ancient Troy standing solid with war crimes and collective punishment and ethnic cleansing via massive displacement, and offer up yet another compendium of socks and stockings, the boring off or silly of same ...

Only a FAQ Groan opener with the usual spin, but speaking of electricity, the pond did appreciate a correspondent sending in a link to the ABC's yarn ...Tamworth celebrates 135 trailblazing years as Australia's first with electric streetlights ... but there was also a good yarn in the Graudian where Tamworth had an interesting first ...Letters to Vernon Marshall, a groundbreaking gay rights advocate in rural Australia ... amazing when you realise that this is the sort of rat's nest that could vote in a Barners spruiking faux family values ...

In Tamworth in 1972, the 62-year-old accountant Vernon Marshall took out ads in the local paper to advertise a support group he’d started.

Marshall was gay. He had lived through Nazi Germany and immigrated to Australia, landing in Tamworth in the 1950s. He rented a post office box to give supporters and attenders a place to write to, in lieu of giving his home address.

That group was called the Camp-Gay Liberation Movement Tamworth and the newsletter was provocatively called Coming-Out. Though short-lived, it was one of the earliest LGBTQ+ organisations in regional Australia.

The local postmaster sought advice from higher-ups on whether Vernon should be allowed to keep his mailbox, worried that it would be used for homosexual acts. Vernon replied that would be very difficult to perform a homosexual act in a mailbox.

A police detective also warned the local paper off running Marshall’s classified ad advertising the PO box. Marshall arranged an interview with the officer to push his case, and won. The newspaper ran his ads again and the fledgling organisation took flight.

It was five years before the first Sydney Mardi Gras. Dianne Minns, the co-chair of First Mardi Inc and one of the original 78ers, said Marshall was “very lucky he was able to take out an ad”.

“I think it was very brave of Vernon to do that newsletter, and very lucky that he got to use the PO box – there were other gay and lesbian organisations at the time who didn’t have that luxury,” Minns says.

Vernon distributed one copy of his newsletter in March 1973. No further editions have been found. It’s not clear whether he began writing under another pen name, or stopped writing entirely. He died in 1984, a few months before homosexuality was decriminalised in New South Wales...

Just that one line made the pond's day: ...(it) would be very difficult to perform a homosexual act in a mailbox.

The pond's fertile mind immediately began to imagine the ways you might manage some sort of sexual act in a mailbox. No doubt Barners has some ideas ...

There's more to the yarn at the link, and for some reason the pond was reminded of the story of a couple of gays who built a McMansion up a back road in Nundle and lived out their lives there, not far from where once the pond's relatives had roamed wild-eyed with German or Irish accents ...

Oh okay, anything to distract because we all know what will come in due course ... pesky, difficult, uppity furriners ruining things for Dame Groan ... but first ...

Yes, yes, all that, and a few snaps too ... suitably downsized ...

... but back to that matter of the pesky, difficult, uppity furriners, not that Dame Groan wants to ban all furriners ... just a culling of the herd ... because, consider the options ...there's simply nothing else to do but blame the bloody furriners ...

How many times can Dame Groan carry on like this before the reptiles notice that she's turned into a weird form of cannibal, cannibalising herself each week to churn out the same guff? 

Frankly if the world wasn't such a mess, the pond would have switched off long ago, but anything for the quiet furriner herd culling life ...

Now on with the culling. Not everybody of course, more a decimation than a Gaza-style slaughter ...

And so to the question that always torments the pond ...what to do for a bonus? 

Not easy with the pond having red-carded all the collective punishment mass murder mob. To be honest at one point the pond thought of an entry showing how things could get truly weird ...with Nick Schager offering a review in the Beast, Drugs, QAnon, and Mummified Corpses: This Cult Doc Has Everything (sorry, paywall)... featuring Amy Carlson, native of Kansas ...

Inter alia ...

...Amy’s downfall was brought about by a combination of endless substance abuse and habitual ingestion of colloidal silver, the latter of which turned her literally blue. As Jason and followers Hope, Aurora, El Moyra, Little Buddha, Erin, and John explain in Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, this alarming condition—as well as her sore-covered skin and scrawny frame—were symptoms not of a medical problem, but of Mother’s godly sin-shouldering work. Olson’s docuseries benefits from the candid participation of these true believers, whose commentary exposes the depth and breadth of their shared delusion. All of them come across as severely damaged people desperate for escape, a good time, and solutions to their dissatisfactions and problems, as well as a bit of kindness—on multiple occasions, speakers recount how the simple act of Amy saying “You’re brilliant” convinced them to trust in her divinity.

Buoyed by these interviews, as well as copious videos shot by Amy and her brood before and after her death, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God offers an unvarnished peek inside this insular community, demonstrating people’s stunning capacity for concocting and embracing ridiculous ideas as a way of coping with unhappiness and trauma. Through the participation of Amy’s mom Linda and sister Tara, Olson details the cult leader’s rocky childhood with an abusive stepmother, weight and body image issues, lousy and violent boyfriends, and the ensuing displeasure—as a wife and mother to multiple children—that drove her to seek solace in a wacko fantasy involving regular conferences with Robin Williams and the rest of the Galactics crew (Michael Jackson, Gene Wilder, Christopher Reeve, Tupac, Kenny Rogers, John Lennon, etc.).

Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God is chock-full of insane pronouncements about “ego energy,” Amy’s “etheric meetings” with Robin Williams, her standing as “literally like the resurrection of Jesus,” and Amy and Jason’s status as “twin flames”—because, apparently, always online Amy was borrowing concepts from other loony cultists. Director Olson doesn’t have to strain to condemn or ridicule because the material at hand does the work for her. The sight of Love Has Won folks sitting around watching Mrs. Doubtfire, for instance, encapsulates both the humorous absurdity and pitiful sadness of this entire affair, which pinpoints loneliness and suffering as prime motivators for cults’ creation and success.

At the same time, it serves as a stark “Say No to Drugs” cautionary tale about excessive use of hallucinogens and alcohol, whose brain-addling effects helped facilitate a descent into madness that no sober, stable mind would ever accept.

But when you think about it for a nanosecond that's just the United States, a land devoted to the weird, almost as weird as being a cult follower of Dame Groan ... and besides, England has the Tory party.

Instead the pond was distracted last night by Media Watch, in particular the bit about windfarms ... and Captain Spud sounding yet again like a right royal twit, backed by attendant lords, ones that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince, no doubt, easy fools, deferential, glad to be of use, full of high sentence, a bit obtuse, at times indeed, almost ridiculous ...

..last month, Opposition leader Peter Dutton was in Port Stephens urging locals to save the whales: 

PETER DUTTON: When you look at the whales and the mother and the calf that we saw out there, the dolphins, all of that is at risk because there’s no environmental consideration of what these huge wind turbines — 260, 280 metres out of the water — will mean for that wildlife and for the environment.  - NewsDay, Sky News Australia, 24 October, 2023

And Dutton’s new-found passion for marine mammals is matched by The Australian, whose environment editor Graham Lloyd has warned: 

In a country that loves its beaches and oceanic way of life, dead whales are never going to be a poster child for sustainable living.  - The Australian, 21 September, 2023

And on Sky News a pod of hosts and guests have echoed these fears, including Rowan Dean: 

ROWAN DEAN: Not only is it outrageously expensive but it will kill our whales.- Outsiders, Sky News Australia, 24 September, 2023

Prue MacSween:

PRUE MACSWEEN: … they’re prepared to destroy the environment to save the environment. That’s what they’re saying they want to do. - Credlin, Sky News Australia, 18 August, 2023

And coal champion, Matt Canavan: MATT CANAVAN: Well, Peter, I never thought I’d be coming on your show and desperately arguing to save the whales. I didn’t think that universe, those planets would align …- First Edition, Sky News Australia, 19 September, 2023

A little later, little Timmy Bleagh appeared, and the pond did a little digging and sure enough just after Xmas in 2002 little Timmy announced ...

It is my ambition to one day eat whale for Christmas lunch.

Now the solution is at hand. He can wander down to the beach, pick up the beach kill allegedly produced by wind farms and take it back to the barbie ...

In all the low comedy, and amidst Media Watch's constant reminders it was all a furphy, with links to prove it, the pond was mortified to realise it might have missed a valiant effort by Lloydie of the Amazon.

Truth to tell, the pond couldn't remember - a bit like Ivanka in the witness box, these days the pond can't recall a lot - but what the heck, where's the harm in running an ancient Lloydie, just to help save the whales?

It turned out that it featured the usual Lloydie of the Amazon guff, and it also featured a snap of a prized nuke the planet loon ...

At this point the pond realised that the reptiles had singularly failed to pay attention to a real federal government scandal, and that the pond would have to leave that work to cartoonists, as often happens with reptile coverage ...

Okay, okay, enough of that, back to Lloydie of the Amazon for a final ancient gobbet ...

Of course if you revert to Media Watch, you'll soon realise that Lloydie of the Amazon is peddling nonsense in his patented fear-mongering style ... but what else can you expect from a man without a shred of shame or self-awareness, nor any understanding of the harm that he does?

And now, having run through an assortment of cartoons already, why not finish with a James O'Brien sampler, wondering what it all means ...

There's more at the LBC Channel of course, this is just a taster for those yet to catch up with his openers. Every so often the pond fantasises about calling in and asking James to explain Britain and how it ended up where it is ... but luckily there's always dinner to distract...