A wag at Salon dubbed 2025 the year of the hive mind, mainly on the basis of shows such as Pluribus and Sinners (those with a taste for bad 2024 action flicks might want to throw in the profoundly inert Jason Statham blathering about the bad queen bee’s spawn and the need to protect the hive in The Beekeeper).
Of course none of these match the hive mind at the lizard Oz, which launched a truly despicable jihad to round out the year.
Now a new year looms like a pox and soon it’s back to herpetology studies - in due course after the pond has finished its high country tour.
Meanwhile, may the happy holydays continue for correspondents trying to crank up the energy for the exhausting, debilitating business of yet more reptile wrangling …
Oh, and enjoy the view…
Buckle up. If anyone thought 2025 was a bummer, 2026 is shaping up to be a doozy, with a high quota of cockies at large, and reptiles determined to act as galahs …
A screen cap of a survey recently featured in a David Pakman YouTube video …
Buckle up!
And here’s that Salon link …
https://www.salon.com/2025/12/29/from-sinners-to-pluribus-2025-was-the-year-of-the-hive-mind/
Mmmmph …hive mind …
Ah, Corryong: one of the many places in Victoria I've never even thought of visiting ... Though I have at least passed through Wodonga-Albury.
ReplyDeleteNice pics DP, and Happy New Year to all (except you know who). Apologies to Zager and Evans.
ReplyDeleteGoodbye Year 2025 (Extortium Interminus)
That was year 2025
And Trump is still alive
But let us scrutinise
His decline…
In the year of 2025
Donald never told the truth - he always lied
But all the lies he thought of to say
Were the ones we heard yesterday
In the year of 2025
Trump’s swollen paw was hard to disguise
Shaking hands he said gave him a bruise
But now there’s bruising on his other hand too
In the year of 2025
Trump’s mouth was hanging down to one side
And as he walked, his gait was askew
That’s what a limo ride with Putin will do!
In the year of who knows when
If God’s a-comin’ She oughtta make it by then
And when She looks upon this world in its ruin
She’ll presume that it was Donald Trump’s doin’...wo!...wo!…
And a happy New Year to you, Kez. I don't know how we'd ever interpret this world without your wise commentary.
DeleteThank you Kez!
ReplyDeleteDorothy, trust Corryong is as good as I found it, some years back, in the company of people who waved artfully-tied arrangements of feathers over the waters, to try to interest trout. One of those activities that, even if it does not produce the claimed outcome, does commit one to a day in relative solitude, in pleasant surroundings.
I mentioned that your comments on the interests of larger ‘fish’ - whales - down the highway had taken me again to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Tale of a Tub’. Swift, of course, has comments there about what he would have been amused to call ‘hive mind’.
In his ‘Digression Concerning Madness’ he writes, of certain ‘philosophers’ -
‘For what man, in the natural state or course of thinking, did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height, of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.’
Swift offers the rhetorical ‘Now, I would gladly be informed how it is possible to account for such imaginations as these in particular men, without recourse to my phenomenon of vapours ascending from the lower faculties to overshadow the brain, and there distilling into conceptions, for which the narrowness of our mother-tongue has not yet assigned any other name beside that of madness or phrensy.’
And wraps up, a little further on ‘it is a fatal miscarriage so ill to order affairs as to pass for a fool in one company, when in another you might be treated as a philosopher.’
Over to others to think up their own nominations for those of this age who have so ordered their affairs.
So much wisdom over so many generations - well, since we had a plentiful supply of printed books and schools to teach us how to read them - and yet so little accomplishment or progress.
Delete"Time doth flit; oh shit"...Dorothy Parker
ReplyDeleteWishing all a safe and Happy New Year from your fellow ex-pommie colony of New Jersey.
DP, I always enjoy your pictures, thanks.
I suspect my refusal to no longer pay the Trump Danegeld tariff on the Aussie import Loon Pond is the reason it has been embargoed from my in-box for the past fortnight.
If only DP and her crew here would mend their ways and get on the MAGA bandwagon.
Then each of you cut a check for the new Trump - Joyce Golden Ballroom wing of The Lodge and its bob's your uncle, Loon Pond is back in my morning mail!
Chadwick, since GrueBleen has kicked in a fast 2 grand, I know you'll double that at least.
Thanks pal.
Just a picayune 2 grand from me, JM?
DeleteJM - the BBC world news, this very morning in Oz, told me of a new meme coin, to be issued by 'Trump Media', through the Crypto.con exchange. All attested and confirmed by one Devin Nunes, who, appartently, is right up there with the Trumps. So - I guess some quantity of them could constitute my h'mbl contribution.
DeleteThe tricky thing is knowing when to buy on your behalf. That same BBC item could not avoid noting that the Trump, and Melania, meme coins had dropped to about 10% of their claimed value. Separately, and I think it was David Pakman who observed, those 'tokens' were at a point where anyone trying to work their way to private audience with King Don (well, anyone who did not have a letter of intro from Vlad) by buying a couple of $mill of those tokens, to confirm their bona fides, would have to be in the market for some little time to amass enough of them to represent any value in equivalent greenbacks.
Or should I wait for Ericoins? Barronbucks??
But we will be there for you.