In which, after the Ēostre high, the pond is left with the usual reptile grind, made worse by it being the day when fools stalk the land ...

The pond has had an inordinate number of drop-outs of late, producing this sort of note from the supplier.

Notes on this NBN work show "This service may experience a partial or total loss of connectivity as a result of a known network issue."
Usually they are looking for a faulty NBN NTD somewhere in the neighbourhood which is impacting the network but this does take time to hunt down and resolve.

It's not the provider's fault, it all goes back to Malware, but there will come a point soon when the pond will be shut down for the day, while hapless minions bid to sort out the gremlins in the works.

Pressing on through the debacle known as Malware's NBN, the pond has noted a recent depressing increase in hits. Luckily this mainly seems to be bots of the Googlebot and Applebot kind (though the pond does occasionally wonder who on earth is on Microsoft Azure? And never mind Vladimir from the Russian Federation, no doubt anxious for news of sociopath Vlad the impaler).

The pond does its very best to make sure it keeps a low profile. It carries no advertising, never has, never will (so when loons scribble about site value, the pond has to stifle a simultaneous laugh and yawn), and its contents remain a mystery to search engines, incapable of mastering the code that requires an ability to connect the dots, and understand that Dame Slap means Planet Janet means ... or that "the bromancer" refers to an ancient, passionate, manly, almost Spartan affair between the bro and the onion muncher. (Say what? Who did what with whom and when? How often? Were adults allowed to watch?)

This shorthand confuses any bot, and only elect members of the Illuminati understand the lingo ... and the use of caps also means that the Wayback Machine's occasional snaps of the pond miss out on much.

Such is life and the quest for digital immortality.

But why so furtive and secretive? For starters, the pond is involved in the filthy, dirty, vile business of herpetology studies ... what if some young person from Texas or Florida happened to stumble upon it? It could ruin their minds and lives in a way that not even their Guvs might be able to manage ...

And for seconds, who in their right minds would want to attract attention to the reptile droppings that soil the page this, and every other, day? 

Talk about a post-Ēostre bummer, a chocolate hangover (and these days an expensive climate-change affected habit at that). 

So the pond is back to the daily grind of the Caterist and the rest of the rabble, with the Major proudly positioned in the much esteemed and desired extreme far right perch at the top of the digital edition ...

The only other things to note was that there was no Dame Slap sauce to accompany the serve of Rice in the Lehrmann matter, and poor simplistic "here no conflict of interest" Simon was finding joy in the west, but was still in a state of a bridge too far gloom ...

Down below there was nothing to inspire ...

Cackling Claire? At a pinch mebbe, if the alternative was a lobotomy. Jennings of the fifth form defending the indefensible? Nah, nothing there to distract. Simplistic conflicted Simon still gloomy and the meretricious Merritt agitated about coal? Forget it Jake, it's reptile town.

There was nothing for it, but to return to the grind, and as the years have gone on, the Caterist has become increasingly a grind. You can't even double pump the clutch to do a gear change, such is the relentless grinding and cranking on about renewables...

The pond can't begin to count the times it's reminded correspondents that the Caterist and the MRC have had their snouts in the federal government trough, getting nice little earners, some cash in the paw to help them along.

So there's no point poking at that hypocritical pig in a poke again ...

It was a blessed relief to be able to downsize the snaps, including one of Malware, the pond's current bête noire ...

The only other question was when this dreary man wold finish his tedious, entirely predictable, down with renewables, up with coal rant, with nary a hint that he'd stick the coal in the fundamental place where it would serve some useful purpose ...

Why does he always whine so? Why hasn't the MRC used its funding to stimulate innovation? Surely they could invent a perpetual motion whining machine and then go on to lead useful lives? Ditto the IPA. If they spent as much money on innovation as on whining, the country might have turned into a Scandinavian miracle.

As it is, the constant whining in turn results in the pond being forced to whine, which is as good a reason as any to offer one final gobbet of coal-loving renewables bile, and be done with it ...

Week after week, he churns this stuff out, and is as useless to the planet as a wet Pommie exile wick ... and so the pond must turn to the top of the pile Major, this week offering an outing for two dicks ...

The pond is beyond over the use of "Orwellian", shamelessly borrowed from a socialist, and the parading of the dicks, and even more so the orange Jesus, though the reptiles insisted on snaps of him and dark Brandon ...

Is the Major too dumb a bird to hear and understand a dog whistle when he hears one? It seems so, though Reuters here has a tidy list of recent mango Mussolini dog whistles, including blood poisoning, vermin, the aforesaid bloodbath, animal immigrants, criminal blacks, apocalypse now and dictator on day one ... with the bloodbath routine cunningly deployed to offer implausible deniability of the kind lickspittle GOP knaves and the Major fall on like famished thieves in the night ...

The Major thinks all this dog whistling is fine...

Which leaves the Major as the very definition of tone-deaf stupidity, and in danger of losing his soul, because he should have mentioned how his redeemer was going to save him ...

Come on down redeemer, with your special offers ...

The pond usually wouldn't quote Maureen Dowd, scribbling Donald Trump, Blasphemous Bible Thumper for the NY Times (paywall), but it did enjoy her recycling of Axelrod's line about the orange Jeebus violating 11 of the 10 commandments ...

Meanwhile, the Major had moved on to the "couple of Dicks" part of the proceedings ...

The pond has already said what it's needed to say about the tireless dinkum Aussie veg grifter Dick ... and is so tired of noting that the Major has been a major climate science denialist, and was, back in his days as editor, responsible for turning the lizard Oz into a haven for climate science denialists. 

Why spend time with that dinkum grifter Dick, when there's a much better grifter to hand ...

Elmer Gantry, the pond's favourite film about grifters and born-again sharks ... perhaps another serve?

And so to the two dicks, the Major dick and the dick Dick, in a final gobbet ...

Indeed, indeed, in reptile la la land, there's no need for fact checking and there's no need to stray outside the bubble of the hive mind ...

And so to the latest moral panic and for that, the pond can thank cackling Claire, getting her knickers in a reptile knot yet again ...

The pond should first offer a disclaimer. It isn't on Instagram, Twitter, which some loon dubbed X, Truth Social, Facebook, etc., and so has no knowledge of influencers, even those who've turned their back on influencing and sought out a quiet pivot life, or decided to flog books promoting ways to stop being an influencer, a meta-form of influencing.

The pond leaves all that to vulgar youff, and so Claire's state of indignant hysteria is water off the pond's back ...

It goes without saying that cackling Claire is a devotee of colonialism, prefers homophobia and transphobia as a lifestyle choice, and is totally down with white supremacy, while she's also bigly keen on the patriarchy and the pussy grabbers ...

She's certainly not in any form of business and probably aspires to be the sort of woman celebrated in Sophie Elmhirst's New Yorker piece The rise and Fall of the Trad Wife ...(paywall)

Nifty illustration ...

... and droll content ...

,...Pettitt, who is thirty-eight, is a self-proclaimed “trad wife,” one of the earliest and best known in a burgeoning movement of women who spend their days taking care of their homes and families and documenting their activities on social media. Her fame was assured in 2020, when, on a BBC News video, she discussed her ambition to serve her husband, but her desire long predated that moment. After all, the contours of a traditional marriage, in which the man goes out to work while the woman stays home to cook, care, and clean, were shaped many decades ago. Pettitt, like a lot of the trad wives who fill various social-media platforms with photographs of outdoor clotheslines, has an intense nostalgia for the postwar period. “If you put me in a time machine back to the fifties, I’d have it made,” she told me. “Everyone wouldn’t be asking me when I’m going back to work.” Her point ran a little deeper: that era, she believed, was the last time the housewife was celebrated. She appeared in ads. Her domestic rituals inspired magazines. Whether she was happy was not for Pettitt to say, but “at least she was seen.”

For readers of Betty Friedan or viewers of “Mad Men,” the idea that the interior life of a mid-twentieth-century housewife could be anything but tormented is strange, but the trad wives want to reclaim the role and show it as a source of pride and happiness. Though many trad wives voice suspicions of contemporary feminism, there is no singular model. The current queen is Hannah Neeleman, a homesteading mother of eight, who milks cows, bakes, dances, and takes part in beauty pageants, to the delight and incomprehension of her followers. Some, like the American Estee Williams, a quasi-Marilyn Monroe with white-blond waves and a cinched waist, advocate marital subservience. Others, like the Australian Jasmine Dinis, sell Biblical womanhood affirmations. One, the Canadian Gwen Swinarton, has pivoted from making porn videos for OnlyFans and A.S.M.R. content for YouTube to the trad-wife space. (In a recent TikTok testimony, she credited the transition to God.) Then there are more openly political, like Abby Roth, who splices mothering tips with anti-abortion content.

Pettitt, the O.G., is a rare Brit and a purist. She never had commercial aspirations for her content. Instead, she is more the movement’s house intellectual: she wrote two books with no intention of making money, she told me, but to put something out in the world for girls like her. (The books, which her husband, Carl, helped her to self-publish, “certainly don’t pay the mortgage,” she said, but cover the odd grocery bill.) In the books, she set out her Christian beliefs and principles of womanhood long before the new generation of trad wives began filming themselves saucily kneading sourdough. Pettitt has watched the rise of the younger trad wives with fascination, then alarm. “It’s become an aesthetic, and then it’s become politicized,” she said, of the movement in its new era. “And then it’s become its own monster.”

Sorry, the pond can't get into the monster bit - this is just a sample - but it did offer the trad wife illustration as a way of contrasting what the remnants of the castrated lizard Oz graphics department drummed up for Claire's indignant cackle...

Presumably the aged demographic is meant to collapse and go head down into their parritch, but the pond was left wondering, is that the best they can do to induce a moral panic of the cackling Claire kind?

Meanwhile, the genocide continues apace ...

The pond thought it should mention it, because you won't find mention of the current killing fields in cackling Claire ...

You might wonder if cackling Claire more broadly sees herself outside empathy and humanity, but the pond will leave that for others to decide, because there's only one gobbet of home duties chores to go ...

Defenestrated? The pond thought that skill was left to Vlad the impaler, ably supported by the GOP and the orange Jesus, and if not defenestration, then surely killer units roaming Europe ...

As for taxpayers funding a revolution, taxpayers fund the Caterist and some of the other think tank mobs. 

Just settle back, relax, let the post-Ēostre deflation take control, let the hysteria go, remember, the government is just here to please ...