It being Wednesday, the pond knew what was coming ... the bitch from hell would be back, and doing her usual Lehrmann matter schtick ...
Strangely the reptiles offered a serve of low-grade Rice in the far right, highly desired top of the world ma position of the digital edition, but never mind, it was red card day.
The pond can only express contempt for Dame Slap so often before exhaustion set in, and even worse, she turned up again, like a bad penny, in the comments section below the fold ...
Two Dame Slap splashes, a serve of rice and a couple of lizard Oz editorials and the lying rodent?
Luckily the pond had a fall back, because yesterday there was a fine tag team out and about ...
At least the tag team made the pond realise the error of its ways. Usually the pond calls reptile offerings "angertainment", but really they're in the "feartainment, we'll all be rooned" genre ...
Just look at the frenzied fear in the eyes of the character hired from stock photos to accompany Mein Gott's dissertation ...
'
The pond was terrified at what was to follow - just like the wild-eyed, sweaty model in the snap.
Sadly there seemed no way that Mein Gott could ever provide inspiration to the poetry muse, but hey ho, into the valley of fear we go, with saucy doubts and many alarums, and probably a dot point listicle...
Yes, he's The Signal-Man, conjuring up terrifying ghosts ... (if Mein Gott sounds too tedious to continue, there's always Project Gutenberg).
Sorry, the pond doesn't know brought on that arcane reference, except perhaps sheer fear at the prospect of a dot point listicle ...
Perhaps sensing this, the reptiles offered a snap of another business model to help Mein Gott ...
Feeling lucky, the pond decided that as a bonus, it would tackle "Ned". Sure there would only be more "feartainment" and no inspiration for the poetry muse, and it raises a pungent question - would the pond be better off with a void than with a "Ned" offering?
Talk about rhetorical overdrive. There's something about "Ned" in his dotage that goes beyond Chicken Little terrified by clouds... he's a veneer stripper and a fierce backlasher, at least in his own lunchtime.
The pond immediately knew that the only way through this forest was some cartoons on other matters ...
Perhaps a cheery evocation of a future wherein good citizens could have fun nuking the country ...
Not FDR, that Commie swine, and then the reptiles couldn't help themselves ... they had to feature a snap of a couple of long lost politicians, who feature almost as many times in the lizard Oz as images of the terrifying ghost of Gough ...
There were a couple of other huge snaps to break up "Ned"s veneer-stripping ...
Yep, it's a tough time to deliver a few one liners about "Ned" when there's all that noise coming from the audience.
Never mind, because the pond stripped out those snaps, "Ned's" piece turned into easy to navigate short gobbets ...
As America re-makes the world get again, surely that's a cue for a celebration of the re-make ...
Let the pond assure terrified readers than there's nothing more frightening than erupting paradigms. Your average boil or pimple is one thing, but an erupting paradigm is positively volcanic, almost priapic in its intensity ...
Sorry, sorry, of course the pond is taking "Ned's" dire warnings to heart ...
The Empire Strikes Back?
As the pond recalls, that's a reference to sci fi space opera first seen in country in 1980 ...
The pond felt itself in the grip of a weird time warp, but on the upside, "Ned", and so the pond, had managed to avoid any mention of the ongoing genocides ...
Just don't look to the reptiles of Oz for a new compass.
And then came the push to the summit, the last gobbet that needed to be surmounted before relaxing at the top of the "Ned" Everest and enjoying the view, perhaps a little traumatised, but also triumphant at having made it ...
Ah, that powerful and emerging insight ... and what form might those alarums take?
Why, it's ancient ghost returned to haunt the reptiles ...yep, it's the lying rodent, and the reptiles were too bloody lazy to even find and put a thumb photo in his splash ...
Talk about disinterring aged bones so that we might hear a voice from the crypt, and to make sure that we all got the message from this """, the reptiles sent the lesser member of the Kelly gang and another lizard Oz hack to do a gloss ...
Strangely then they could find a picture of the lying rodent in statesman-like pose, or perhaps the chair was just a way of keeping balance ...
Really? The best the reptiles have got is trundling out little Johnny to talk up Hawke and Keating?
Really? What about the splendid visions of Captain Spud? You know, that nuking the country to save the planet thingie ...
By this time the pond thought it might hop in the car and drive a few miles to pick up a newspaper and read about the splendid reptile visions on offer for anyone over eighty ... back to the future, or at least to 1980.
And so to end with the Rowe of the day, and a reminder of another circus altogether much more fun than what the reptiles offered this day, what with the lizard Oz's key feature being yet another bitchy slapdown while contemplating the Lehrmann matter, by a truly reprehensible inhabitant of Planet Janet ... carrying on like a mugging creep lurking in a side alley ...
As usual, it's all in the details, and there are plenty of details, but one detail made the pond wonder if the immortal Rowe happened to be a Jimmy Kimmel or Jon Stewart viewer ...
Pfft indeed .... it's been a pfft sort of day with the reptiles ...
Ooh, the Chinese are already reconnoitering:
ReplyDeleteNorthern communities rattled after Chinese boat arrivals walked into Australia's unfenced Truscott air base
https://www.msn.com/en-au/travel/news/northern-communities-rattled-after-chinese-boat-arrivals-walked-into-australia-s-unfenced-truscott-air-base/ar-AA1nwOy9?
And they managed to dodge all of the patrol drones !
Or do we reckon they might have come just for some of these:
ReplyDelete"A culturally significant Australian nut dating back to the Jurassic period could have a big future on the global food stage after new research confirmed its substantial health benefits."
And they aren't macadamias, they're bunya nuts
https://www.msn.com/en-au/health/other/the-bush-superfood-growing-in-our-backyard-for-over-140-million-years/ar-AA1ntXVk
Queensland kids grew up hammering Bauple Nuts on bricks, to extract the edible portions. Yes, they were of the genus Macadamia, but they originated on Mount Bauple, and could be bought in the small town of that name, and that was the only name we knew for the actual nut, until good ole Yankee marketing decided to go with Macadamia.
DeleteWill be interesting to see if the newcomers continue to be known as 'Bunya nuts'; I think 'Araucaria' is unlikely as a marketing name, but stranger things have been inflicted on us.
Yar, my recall was that like most Aussie things that maybe the Abos knew about, we'd totally ignored the 'macadamia' until it was picked up and selectively rebred for eatability in Hawai'i. Where it was then renamed because it was their nut then.
Delete"He knows a suburban newsagent?" Oh yeah, the suburban wonders once called 'a licence to print money' because all they had to do was sell a whole bunch of dead tree newspapers every day. And they employed a whole lot of 'casual' workers to do it. Such as myself as both a paper-round deliverer and occasional fill-in street corner seller.
ReplyDeleteOh those were the days when nobody cared about us poor, exploited part-timers starting at age 10 or 11, getting up at about 4:45am to be at the shop by 5:15 because we had to get the papers delivered in time for the working stiffs to have a read at the breakfast table before trotting off to their regular, full-time jobs.
Now newsagents are disappearing all over the place - hardly any left except, like bank branches, at the larger shopping centres and malls - their stationery supply lines taken over by the likes of Officeworks and supermarkets. Oh, gone are the days - what do 11yo kids do for pocket money now ?
Ah - the happy days of the 'tied' newsagency, with its delivery territories, determined ultimately by the publisher, and which were part of the asset value of the shop, readily saleable. Two industry segments that were not included in Barwick's simon-pure trade practices intervention, under Menzies, were tied newsagents and suburban milk 'runs'. The milk runs were excluded from the reach of Barwick's Act because of the then Country Party; the newsagents because of a then rising media mogul - son of Sir Keith Murdoch. Rupert regularly invoked the 'mum and dad businesses' who had their 'life savings' in their newsagencies, delivering those early morning deliveries - right up to when Rupert saw that he could move many of his print editions, at much less overall cost, through the expanding supermarkets. And the 'life savings' of those who thought they had bought an income with the newsagency, steadily evaporated, with virtually no compensation - and no more stories in reptile media about the doughty little capitalists who saw to it that your morning paper hit the garden path at the crack of dawn.
DeleteAh, bring back the good old days of Gordon and Gotch then. All the Rupert changes came after my newsagent time which ended when I completed Matric (as we called Year 12 back in those very innocent days).
DeleteRowe on Trump trial is superb.
ReplyDeleteWith any luck that pfft will turn into a poof, as in; The Usual Suspects (motion picture), spoken by Verbal (Trump) (Kevin Spacey - appropriate casting):
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone." Wikiionary - Poof
Verbal everyone. Tick
Tricky devil. Tick
Unusual suspects around? Tick
Doesn't exist. I wish!
Dorothy, declaration of interest - as subscriber to ‘Crikey’ I have a tad more of J Winston Howard’s highly selective memory about Labor governments and tariffs. Of course, it suits the Rodent to invoke a myth that Hawke/Keating went against long Labor commitment to policies that were against the broader economic welfare of the nation.
ReplyDeleteThat supposed long commitment actually had been discarded ten years before Hawke, when, in July 1973, one E G Whitlam announced that all tariffs would be reduced 25% across the board - on the following day.
This was not a brain snap by Whitlam - it had been developed over several weeks by a group guided by Fred Gruen and Brian Brogan, with some from the permanent public service, but notably NOT senior treasury official John Stone, who the Government simply did not trust with confidential information. That decision was justified by Stone’s later foray into elective politics, by way of being confidant to Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
The Rodent also seems a bit shy about his own position on tariffs. No less an authority than Gary Banks, of the Productivity Commission, in one of the rare talks he gave that included the odd hint about what governments might do to promote productivity, tells us about the response of the Howard/Costello duo to the 2000 Productivity Commission recommendation to phase out all tariffs. Banks tells us this in his Bert Kelly Memorial Lecture of 2013. He puts it quite simply - Howard and Costello ‘rejected out of hand’ the recommendations of the Productivity Commission.
But then, to be fair, it was more a tradition of Coalition Governments to be forever adjusting tariff, and other, regulations on trade than it was for Labor. When Whitlam announced the 25% reduction across the board, that action was lambasted from the then Opposition, and much of the media, as proof of the economic vandalism of that administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Design
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Early_history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Keynesian_economics_out_of_favour_1979%E2%80%932007
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Howard#Federal_Treasurer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way#Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization#Doha_Round_(Doha_Agenda):_2001%E2%80%93present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_financial_crisis
There's lies, damned lies, and the things that politicians say/claim. Yeah, especially the 'Onest' ones. And remember that reptiles are just non-elected politicians.
DeleteOh the joys of the "free market":
ReplyDeleteWhy are power bills more expensive, when new data shows wholesale energy prices have fallen?
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/markets/why-are-power-bills-more-expensive-when-new-data-shows-wholesale-energy-prices-have-fallen/ar-AA1ny1Vn?
"The regulator's Wholesale Markets Quarterly Report for the first quarter of 2024 shows that wholesale energy prices have fallen about two thirds from recent highs in 2022."
"However, she said there were several reasons why those savings were not passed down to consumers.
One was due to the extremely high price volatility in the market, she said, due in part to aging, unreliable coal-fired power stations and inflated global coal and gas prices.
Ms Silcock said retailers had to absorb the risk of 'high price events', such as repeated breakdowns at the Callide C coal plant near Biloela, which caused prices to skyrocket."