In which the pond endures a Groan, but the bro comes good with chill Blainey moments ...

Bizarre, in the usual reptile way of defining bizarre as a word, an action, a deed, a thought, a headline ...

Hats and caps off to Rosie. 

It takes exceptional skill to twist the gist of Twiggy's NPC appearance into  "Forrest blames green move for executive exodus".

The Greenies loved his green moves, and if you read the gist of what Twiggy had to say in a more reliable paper, Twiggy himself was blaming others, as in Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest labels Coalition push for nuclear energy 'bulldust' and a 'new lie'.

Naturally Rosie couldn't go there. The reptiles are a key part of the bulldust machine.

Oh okay, it was just so the pond could find a way to segue to the immortal Rowe ...

As for the deeply irrelevant Murray, being channelled by the corporeal Korporaal, there can be only a few responses allowed to the mention of 'woke' in a headline in the lizard Oz, and this is one of them ...

And so to Media Watch and that letter ...

There were a number of reptile amusements in the show ... not least the one about the water ...

BRIDGET BRENNAN: The Federal Government is set to spend $205 million on the first water buy back since 2020 as Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek looks to deliver on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. - News Breakfast, ABC, 15 February, 2024
Yes, the Feds have bought back the rights to 26 gigalitres of water per year from New South Wales and Queensland — or about 1/20th of what it takes to fill Sydney Harbour — which should now flow down the Murray instead of being used for agriculture. 
But according to The Australian, it’s going to cost a fortune, with the paper claiming it will work out at a mind boggling $129 a litre.
Which, The Australian pointed out, is a: 
… mammoth cost … - The Australian, 15 February, 2024
Sure is. And on ABC Adelaide the station’s breakfast hosts agreed:
JULES SCHILLER: … $129 a litre! 
SONYA FELDHOFF: If we’re paying as much for water, well comparatively as much for water as we are with petrol, something’s going wrong there … - Breakfast with Sonya Feldhoff and Jules Schiller, ABC Adelaide, 15 February, 2024
$129 a litre for petrol? Memo to self: don’t ever fill up in South Australia.

It reminded the pond of why it stopped listening to the ABC or watching it, at least the segments purporting to deal with the news or provide a breakfast distraction.

Too often lazy ABC cardigan wearers would reach for the comfort of a lizard Oz tree killer story as a way of providing a distraction. 

Too often they'd recycle some bogus, reprehensible reptile angle, too often the pond would think about writing a letter, only to remember that snail mail long ago died ...

...how did The Australian screw up? 
Essentially by turning the sum upside down and dividing into the wrong thing, thus ending up with the number of litres you get for a dollar, which is — wait for it — 129. 
And were the Oz and the ABC the only ones to mess up? Well no. The National Farmers’ Federation used The Australian article to attack the water buybacks in a social media post, which they have now deleted. 
And the lesson here? If it sounds too crazy to be true, it probably is. Or as Andrew said in his complaint to the station:
This was a completely inaccurate article … There should be some editorial control before presenting it as fact to ABC listeners.  - Email, Andrew, 15 February, 2024
Or indeed to readers of The Australian which made the mistake in the first place. 

Never mind, speaking of the genocide, the most notable thing about the reptiles is the way that they've stoutly managed to avoid reporting on it. 

A bit like the current Victorian bushfires - and the dangers of mentioning climate science to the demographic - so the lizard Oz becomes the black hole of news ...

There's simply no room at the inn for stories of The New Yorker kind, The humanitarian catastophre in Gaza can only get worse ... (paywall).

This week, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Humanitarian Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine released a report that attempts to project how many people will die in Gaza in the next six months. The authors estimated what are called excess deaths, which includes deaths owing to Israel’s war campaign directly and also those caused indirectly, owing to factors such as disease and a lack of access to medical care. They modelled for three possibilities: if the next six months of the war are similar to the first three months, if the war escalates, or if there’s a ceasefire. If the war stays its course without escalation until early August—with Israel bombing densely populated areas, and blockading food and medicine—the researchers project somewhere between 58,260 and 66,720 excess deaths in addition to the more than twenty-eight thousand deaths that the Gaza Ministry of Health reported in mid-February. (That number is currently more than twenty-nine thousand.) If the war escalates, the authors project that that death toll could rise to between 74,290 and 85,750 excess deaths over the next six months. (Their escalation scenario makes projections based on the highest single month of casualties.) Even if a ceasefire begins immediately, the researchers project between 6,550 and 11,580 more people will still die over the next six months, than if there had been no war. (For each scenario, the higher number includes deaths from possible epidemics.)

A ghoulish speculation, but an attempt to cope with the genocide going down. 

What do the reptiles offer instead? Risible devotion to Benji and his barking mad fundamentalist mob ...

"... at least provides a draft for discussion"?

Revert to Media Watch letter above and don't collect refugee aid from Australia while heading there...

Meanwhile, there's nothing to detain the pond in the lizard Oz headlines, though possibly some ABC breakfast host somewhere in the land is seizing on them like a famished refugee ...

The reptiles are already spinning the Dunkley campaign and the bouffant one has been elevated to the favoured far right slot to to the spinning?!

And the liar from the Shire is blathering about a valueless void, as if the pond hadn't already had enough of the Hillsong mob ...

“One does not need to share my faith to appreciate the virtue of human rights, and nor am I suggesting that,” the former prime minister said.
“But equally, we should be careful about diminishing the influence and voice of Judaeo-Christian faith in our Western society, as doing so risks our society drifting into a valueless void.
“It is about respecting each other’s human dignity through our creation, by God’s hand, in God’s image, for God’s glory, where each human life is ­eternally valued, is unique, is worthy, is loved and capable.”

Even ancient Troy, allocated the task of performing the obituary, had a tough time ...

...Cabinet and party management also matter. Secretly organising to be sworn into multiple ministries was a significant breach of Westminster convention and Morrison will be judged very harshly for this. They should have been disclosed to parliament and to his ministerial colleagues, and gazetted. Transparency, accountability and responsibility are bedrock democratic principles, and he breached them all.
There were other errors, false starts and missed opportunities. Howard said the previous government “baulked at major economic reform”. He thought it was a mistake not to seek to legislate its national integrity commission and resolve differences over its Religious Discrimination Bill. And he thought the Morrison government failed at the last election to present “a clear policy manifesto for the future”.
The holiday to Hawaii as Australia was gripped by summer bushfires in 2019 is another blunder but it is often forgotten that Morrison recovered his poll slump during the pandemic. Still, the images of Morrison forcing Australians to shake his hand remain seared into public memory. The trainwreck that was Robodebt remains a black mark. He did get the Coalition to adopt a net-zero emissions target by 2050 but the path was long and tortuous.
The response to the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins could have been handled much better. Morrison seemed to have a problem identifying with women, empathising with them and being responsive to calls for better standards of public behaviour. Howard thought Morrison’s attack on Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate was appalling.
All prime ministers have a shelf life. What can be perceived as a strength – being “a bulldozer” – can become a weakness.
The assault on Morrison’s character cannot be ignored. Emmanuel Macron called him a liar; Turnbull said Morrison lied all the time. Some of his colleagues, as revealed in ABC documentary series Nemesis, never trusted him.

That's because he was a notorious liar, a serial misrepresenter, a fraud, true to the values of Hillsong Xianity, much inclined to blather about the bible, rarely reading or following it with any understanding of what was being said ...

Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths: But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

And that's more than enough about the notorious liar from the Shire. Who else shared space with ancient Troy this day?

Oh dear sweet long absent lord, it's Tuesday, how could the pond have forgotten. It's migrant bashing day with Dame Groan, as beloved a ritual as snake-bashing day in Springfield ...

It must be done, but it were best done quickly ...

We've heard it all before, and the pond has noted the monomania, the obsessive compulsive fixation just as many times before. 

The pond these days only indulges in the ritual to pander to the Dame Groan cultists ... don't blame the pond, blame them ...

Even the sole illustration was as dull as a drab in a ditch... (dutch in the Kiwi language) ...

Luckily there were only two gobbets to go before the pond could turn to an amusement du jour ...

On and on she groans, but the pond was just pleased and relieved to arrive at the final gobbet ...

An optimal policy setting would see Dame Groan's obsessive compulsive clock reset so that every so often she scribbles about something other than the dastardly furriners ruining the country ...

And now for the amusement, and astute eyes will have already noted that the bromancer has brokered a temporary truce in his war on China by Xmas ... and has turned into a Swiftie, in a way that is truly demented and delightfully weird ...

"I confess to not having been a Swiftie".

Does that stop the bromance from cashing in and offering the world his insights?

Nah, but it means that you have to cop mentions of the likes of Mick and the Stones and Whitney, because the bro doesn't have the first clue regarding what he's scribbling about ...as these snaps prove ...

Usually if you get a scribbler dealing with cultural matters, you might end up with an Ari Melber on The Beat.

Say what you will about Melber - the pond usually says little - he really does like the music he constantly references, and can drop a lyric into a conversation at the stroke of a chord ...

What's a nice Jewish boy doing channelling rappers? Never mind, he really likes the stuff ...

The bromancer? 

He's totally naff, he's more a Billy Joel, Elton John, Supertramp sort of guy ... and that explains so much about the guy. Now the pond isn't going to bore you about the time the pond went to a Frank Zappa concert and emerged totally deaf. The pond is going to bore you with the bro ...

Ye ancient cats and completely irrelevant dogs ... all that's needed now is for the bro to side with Paul McCartney ... the sugar sweet side that needed a brace of Lennon and even then is hard to swallow

Lord knows what vulgar youff makes of this abject tosser, this blathering bro  ...

... yet on and on he went ...

Oh sweet Jaysus, oh dear long absent lord, it's just so the bro can indulge in his usual fundamentalist Catholic fix ... and the illustrations are looking pretty ancient too ...

What about the good old days?

Turned out she hadn't even listened to the record, but she had met him...

How did the pond end up here, remembering Godard, Sympathy for the Devil and all the rest of it? 

Blame the bro. He hasn't the first clue what he's scribbling about, but it never stops him from scribbling ...

"Entirely invented in America"? Well no, not really. There's a lot of Africa in American music, but much like everything else in the world, inconvenient truths are routinely disappeared by the reptiles ...

And then in a classic case of transference, Why Taylor Swift is an antihero to the GOP turns into this ...

Does the bro realise just how idiotically irrelevant he sounds?  When it comes to music of the moment, he has become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal ...

That reference to Blainey was the capper.

Naturally the pond had to follow up, and naturally it turned out that Blainey was equally clueless, and had to resort to writing about the Victorian religion of football ...

The pond has excluded the snaps of Taylor Swift bar the first one - there's no reason to demean her by way of association - and offers this for the record ...

It's long, but if the pond can run an Alabama judge's learned remarks then it can run with yet another scribbler who can keep a straight face scribbling "I'm half ashamed to admit that I had rarely heard of Taylor swift until she arrived ..."

FFS ... but does it stop him? Did the reptiles stop him? Did they get someone under thirty to offer their thoughts? Did they get a woman? Yeah nah ...

Oh just give it away. "Having not been to a pop concert"? Can't we just cut straight to the footie ...

Now we've got to talk about the partnership between Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle? Or perhaps Paul McCartney being an Xian?

Bring on the footie ...

It's beyond tragic, all the more so as all those Swiftie snaps,  trading off so to speak, result in short gobbets ...

Oh FFS ...and still, in his dotage, he dribbled on ...

Anyone who watched the Media Watch piece on Taylor Mania would realise that everybody and his dog and the HUN and the Terror and the whole rabid Murdoch pack have done their best to cash in and fellow travel ...

 ...but the level of cluelessness in these offerings by the dog botherer and Blainey made the pond realise that peak reptile stupidity wasn't just confined to climate science and the Gaza genocide.

They'd hump any old or young leg for a column ...

That's way more than enough and the pond regretted it started, but as we're doing ancient references, this is one that vulgar youff will find zooming over their heads ...