The pond apologises for this interruption to the usual Sunday meditation service, but the pond had no choice ...
You see, Polonius went there with his prattle...
Four Corners accused the intelligence agency of failures over the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, relying on witnesses with axes to grind.
By Gerard Henderson
There was Polonius, bizarrely presenting himself as an eyewitness to the ABC's show - with no axe to grind! - when in reality he grinds his ABC axe almost every week, and has been grinding away for decades ...
It's also bizarre that Polonius should take time out to defend ASIO when every time they're given a chance to shine, the spooks routinely shoot themselves in the foot.
In typical reptile fashion there was no link to the show, so here's a link for those who missed it...
And there's 49 minutes of the Sunday gone ...
The pond never links to ABC shows, but Polonius gave the pond no choice.
That done, and with the pond handing out bans all over the hive mind shop, there's not much else of note in this weekend's lizard Oz offerings.
The pond could have spent time with Linda, offering a role model for Susssan if she's looking for a spot in the hive mind ...
The newly appointed Liberal leader will soon find, just as Sussan Ley did, he will be only as strong and successful as the team he leads.
By Linda Reynolds
On the other hand, Linda is a fourth rate drop kick, a token bit of window dressing who failed in a crisis, and who now keeps doing a Karen.
As the pond featured the third rate onion muncher drop kick yesterday, that's more than enough.
Just to prove the pond's point, this is how Linda wrapped up her essay ... consider it a teaser trailer for that intermittent archive link ...
...This latest coup will have been no different. It does present yet again an opportunity for the party to reform, but the party must stop looking for a quick fix based on a leader alone. Instead the party must to look to enduring principles of leadership and team cohesion to underpin party transformation.
When I was a young officer, the army taught me valuable leadership lessons that have served me well in my army and political careers. Lessons readily apparent across our armed forces and just as relevant in politics, but not always so readily apparent in the parliamentary Liberal Party.
The most important leadership lesson for the federal Liberal Party today is that all leaders, no matter their potential, require both the time and the unqualified support of their team to succeed.
In Taylor’s case, he must now be afforded what Ley was not: time to develop as a national political leader with the unwavering support of both the parliamentary and organisational wings of the party.
But time is not the party’s friend. Today, with a primary vote under 20 per cent, the hunt for a Messiah must end. The ideological battle also must end. The Liberal Party – at all levels – must find the will to transform itself into one that addresses evolving societal and electoral realities.
The Australian electorate is very different from that 80 years ago. Organisational transformation is never easy, particularly in a largely volunteer organisation.
However, the party does have a blueprint for change. A blueprint to be found in successive election reports has clearly and consistently explained why the Liberal Party continues to move further and further away from the government benches.
Change will be even tougher to start after the next election, where the temptation will be yet again to find another Messiah for an ever-diminishing party.
But there is still time for the new leadership team to foster genuine unity in both the parliamentary and organisational wings of the party and initiate genuine reform.
While winning the next federal election is a herculean task, it is after all the Liberal Party’s sole reason for existing.
Linda Reynolds was a senator for Western Australia from 2014 to 2025.
The sole reason for existing?
So if they lose the next federal election, they should cease to exist?
And if he's not the Messiah, is he just a naughty boy?
Completely clueless, in a rhetorical way ...
On the other hand, a reader kindly pointed the pond to the venerable Meade's Weekly Beast last Friday ...
‘Inhaled with my groin’: The Australian’s Wuthering Heights review makes a splash
The venerable Meade carried on ..
Not everyone agrees. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave the movie two stars, writing: “It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion”.
Perhaps Gemmell wanted to make a splash after landing the role of chief film critic for the rebranded Culture section at the Oz. Both Gemmell and the former ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams have been dropped as weekly columnists, as has the former literary editor and chief film critic Stephen Romei.
The cuts at the Oz are starting to show. When David Stratton and Romei were writing for the old Review section, the paper would publish between five and seven film reviews. Now they are down to a couple. But the real cuts have been to the once fine literary section, where the book reviews have shrunk from seven pages to between two and four under the literary editor, Caroline Overington.
A spokesperson for The Australian said the masthead was “modernising and expanding its culture, arts, and entertainment coverage through a new multi-platform Culture vertical led by Milanda Rout, investing in video, newsletters, and fresh voices”.
“New columnists include Charlotte Ree, who has joined The Australian Weekend Magazine as a columnist under editor Elizabeth Colman. Results have been very strong, with audience growth and subscriber engagement accelerating.”
The venerable Meade provided a little titillation by showing the Oz splash ...
But why stop at a tease when you can go all the way, plunge in deep so to speak?
The header: ‘Inhaled with my groin’: A five-star Wuthering Heights; In Emerald Fennell’s hands we get the essence of women-directed sex. Sex through the female gaze. What women actually want. It’s dark. It’s filthy. Brace yourselves.
There was no caption for the accompanying montage of short clips from the film, which seemed to suggest you could take it orally as well as inhaling in the groin (why the groin?)
the fold or depression marking the juncture of the lower abdomen and the inner part of the thigh
also : the region of this line
Is it too bold in reptile la la land to speak of v*ginas? (*google bot enhanced)
Then it was on for young and demented old:
Strap yourself in. You will either love this or hate it. Bronte purists beware, but BookTok will go crazy for it. Me? Be still, my churning 14-year-old heart. After the clit-tease of a muscular marketing campaign we now get the actual product, ripe for Valentine’s Day. A film of such gleeful power it may well liquify your innards just watching it.
I inhaled this latest iteration of Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel not with my heart (as with the 1939 Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version,) nor with my head (the dour, overly earnest 2011 one), but with my groin. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s fresh interpretation has electrified the franchise. I suspect it’s going to be huge, drawing in the knowing young women who made Barbie, Six the Musical, Titanic and Taylor Swift such massive fangirling successes.
There were plenty of visual distractions designed to enhance the feeling that you were keeping light-headed company with a bubble-headed booby, Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in “Wuthering Heights,” a Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
The multiple orgasms exploded line by line ...
Yes, this film is garish, outrageous, clashing and clanging, but it also taps into an authentic representation of female longing, female desire. Oh, it’s a dark, filthy, cackly little world in there, and Fennell portrays it, precociously. Yet it’s the suggestion of sex, the possibility of sex, rather than actual sex; because for many women it’s all in the mind, and she knows it. There’s no nudity. It is the eroticism, for a woman, of male hands running through the viscosity of cracked eggs under bedsheets. Of a lover’s digit in the cave of a mouth. Of secret fingers entwined at a funeral. Of a man pressed into a woman’s back, hands covering her eyes and mouth, as she listens to her first sexual experience through the floorboards beneath. And yes, it’s in a stable, and yes, whips and bridles are deployed.
And what of the casting, madam, what of the descriptions of Heathcliff in the novel, what are we to make of those?
"A dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire.
"It’s a cuckoo’s, sir—it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil."
"Dirty, ragged, black-haired child."
"That—the gypsy—the ploughboy?"
Ah, never mind, in King Donald's America that would be a step too far, and is best left to other versions.
Fennell has imagined the dark recesses of the mind of a reclusive, Victorian clergyman’s daughter, and brought female sexual longing into astonishing life. Every generation gets its cinematic version of Bronte’s book and this is the most visceral, most sensual yet. It sucks the marrow from the love story while nodding to the daring tone of the novel (Emily’s sister, Charlotte, noted the vulgarity of the language in her sibling’s confounding shock of a work.) This was writing to get the world talking; Fennell knows all about that.
Pause for another distraction, as the pond contemplated the unerring ability of the reptiles' AI to chose precisely the wrong framing for the thumb illustration, Our chief film critic has been blown away by the latest blockbuster romance sweeping the world.
Gemmell was all in on the kink, suggesting she might have been up for the execrable writing in Fifty Shades of Grey ...
For those hoping for some kind of fealty to the book, be prepared. There are no Wuthering tropes of branches knocking against windows, restless ghosts or desecrated graves. No memorable songs that touch the skirts of Kate Bush (sorry, Charli xcx). Nor is there an abusive brother, or indeed the entire back half of the novel. We don’t see intergenerational trauma dripping down the line, nor the curdling domestic violence of a Heathcliff turned sour.
We see something far kinkier, yet true to the essence of the book. It’s all licking, fingering and flayed emotion, everything imagined and implied. And there we have the essence of women-directed sex, the new sexuality for the screen. Sex through the female gaze. What women actually want. Playful and tender. Foreplay and suggestion, rather than thrust.
This is Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (note the inverted commas in the Mills and Boon-esque movie poster), not Bronte’s. The film begins with the rhythmic panting of possibly climaxing sex – we’re not sure – which turns out to be a hanged man, with erection, in death’s throes. Ah, Emerald-land, here we go again. Back in the shocky, schlocky stew of Saltburn’s sweat.
Forget the alliteration, couldn't the reptiles have shown the poster and shown what a schlocky rip of Gone With the Wind that it was?
Instead the reptiles trotted out another still from the show ...A scene from "Wuthering Heights" a Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
But Fennell’s work is more interesting than mere spectacle. This is Wuthering mashup; she picks out the book’s slithery innards and fleshes out her very own beast. Extracts a clear, clean narrative from the knotty text, a galloping storyline for our new, shortened attention spans. And also some circuit-breaking humour from a novel cruelty-soaked.
Yet can two Banana Benders, with sunshine in their bones, deliver as Britain’s most romantically doomed couple? Well, this era now has its Scarlett and Rhett, its Jack and Rose, because Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s chemistry blows this film off the screen; possibly aided by a cultural shorthand of familiarity from the state that brewed them both.
Yes, teeth are too white and physiques too glowing for the howling, 1840s Yorkshire moors (especially the bloom of Robbie’s post-baby body), but who cares, this works. Novelistic concerns around Heathcliff’s ethnicity and Cathy’s hair colour and age are swept away in the cheek of the pairing. This feels right. Explosive. Canny. Although Robbie’s received-pronunciation accent is a little jarring at first, she’s a fine heroine who does Cathy proud.
Yet Elordi is revelatory as every woman’s first, bad-boy love, the one your mother hates. He delivers another breathtaking performance after a hypnotic Frankenstein’s monster, with depths of sensitivity to that beautiful face. He’s rapidly becoming one of the most exciting young actors on the planet, and gives a glimpse of wet white shirt here that annihilates the memory of Darcy’s Colin Firth.
The wet dreaming continued with the snap, Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights,” a Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
There was just a final panting to go:
Over-stylised costumes by Jacqueline Durran and sets by Suzie Davies speak to the story, to its vastly differing worlds. We’ve got the Earnshaw farm’s earthy gloom, all eviscerated animals and blackened interiors, then the dewy artifice of Thrushcross Grange with walls replicating Cathy’s skin, blood-red floors and clothes of the cheapest satin, latex and lurex. Fennell often demonstrates distaste for the wannabes and pretenders crashing into her rarefied toff world (see, also, Saltburn), and Thrushcross Grange has never been interpreted quite like this, with all the nouveaux riche signifiers of non-U wealth. But once again, it works.
It’s cinema as visceral experience. A fever dream of lust and letdown and the loneliest sex in the world, within marriage; then the most connecting, ever, full stop. The movie is soaked in a yearning that females of all persuasions will recognise. Here’s to our inner, liquid howl of want.
There’s no cautiousness to this, just as there wasn’t to the original novel. How can women filmmakers smash through the tight little bro club that bestows platforming and pay cheques upon certain clubby projects? With daring audacity, with bolshie irreverence. And here we have it. The aim: to be fearless. Bronte was. Fennell is.
Right now she’s one of the most commercially interesting directors in the world, alongside Greta Gerwig. They’re making art of provocation, wit and deep thought. This is my first five-star review, and I can’t wait to see what this filmmaker tackles next.
★★★★★
That said a whole lot more about Gemmell than it does about the film, but it did remind the pond why it never bothers with any of the lifestyle nonsense used as window dressing for the hard right ratbags that occupy the top of the digital edition.
Perhaps it's best left to 14 year olds and Gemmell. The pond has had its ups and downs, wotthehell, wotthehell Archy, but there's a dance in the old dame yet, toujours gai, just not this one ... (pdf at the archive)
Still going fillum buff does give the pond a chance to note that it's been looking at some old, much treasured shows, including The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (not the terrible remake).
What a great Noo Yoik outing it is, with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau and Martin Balsam in great form. Gesundheit!
The pond even allows the hokey special effects to pass, just so the mayor can be harassed by Tony Roberts, the money can hit the street, and the caper can hit the third rail (lordy, lordy he can actually act).
And last night the pond watched Wag the Dog for the nth time.
The pond can recall that at the time it was deemed a little too far-fetched and cynical, a satirical outing with too many movie references, thanks to the presence of Dustin Hoffman doing any number of great routines (that was nothing).
But now, with a reality TV star in the White House ruining the planet, it feels neo-realist and prescient, and if anything, way too understated.
Speaking of King Donald, the howls of pain are now so loud the pond is almost impervious, the effect the demented King wants...
Look at poor old Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker, embarking on yet another listicle in "If We Don't Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don't Have a Free Country" (*archive link).
Inter alia ...
Or maybe it's as simple as this ...
But the pond supposes it should stick to its Tootle tracks, and return to the lizard Oz to see the lizard Oz editorialist welcoming the beefy boofhead ...apparently he's as robust as a character in Wuthering Heights...
Yes, and he'll put a stop to those infernal whale-killing windmills!
Poor old Susssan, already a feather duster, was now just a bit of rubber on the road, roadkill dragged to the side with a pious sigh ...
They wish him well?
Within a week they'll be in full campaign mode ...and the lettuce will be waiting to spring into action.
And so to the bonus, and if the pond can do Gemmell, then the pond can certainly do garrulous Gemma ...
The header: ‘Degrees mean nothing now’: I’ve given up on graduates - give me grey hair and war wounds instead
As cheating becomes the norm and the ‘magic of learning’ is lost, we have birthed a generation of entitled graduates ill-equipped for the workforce. A radical course correction is vital, but there’s a silver lining
The caption for a truly dire stock photo: Candidates waiting for a job interview. In the real world, actions come with risk, responsibility and consequences. There’s no fake it till you make it here. Picture: Supplied
That stock photo should have warned the pond it had made a near fatal mistake, that and the warning that Gemma, in her grating way, was going to grind a good five minute read out of her uni and youngling bashing ...
First there had to come a boast about how brainy she was ...
It has been 38 years since I started university. Not being content with going to one university at a time, I attended two: Curtin University and the University of Western Australia. My substantive degree (English, politics and history) was done at Curtin while I studied Italian language at UWA.
The latter decision mostly was about maintaining fluency in the language of my heritage, but it was also influenced by lazy afternoons on UWA’s Oak Lawn, Friday night parties in the law courtyard and, for me at least, the peace and solitude of the Reid Library. Oh, Curtin was OK, but that meant going south of the river. For those unfamiliar with the quirks of my hometown, Perth’s north-south rivalry goes beyond tribalism. I am forever north to the core.
Back then, the Curtin campus was still quite underdeveloped. It was sandy and a bit dusty, but those were great years. Formative and fun times. Apart from developing a love for kebabs, I accidentally got myself elected to Guild Council on a Labor-Unity ticket during the dying days of compulsory student unionism.
Once, going to university was just as much about the campus experience as anything else. A far different world from the one described so chillingly by Ros Thomas’s expose on cheating in higher education in The Australian Weekend Magazine last Saturday.
Reading it, I recoiled. You hear stories about this kind of thing but I never imagined it being so grim. What a terrible indictment on so many. What a pitiful window into the generation we’ve raised and, by extension, those who’ve raised them.
Imagine going to university and regarding cheating as the pinnacle. How sad to be a person who actually seeks not to learn. I can’t help but feel disdain for the parents, caregivers and teachers who, somewhere along the line, haven’t done their jobs. Do you think values just form themselves? Something has gone fundamentally wrong here.
What made this so risible to the pond?
It was the incredibly sh*tty images that the reptiles had dug up to accompany the screed. (*google bot enhanced).
Mediocrity doesn't even begin to conjure up the ways that this visual crap assaults the eyes ... Imagine going to university and regarding cheating as the pinnacle. How sad to be a person who actually seeks not to learn. Picture: News Corp
News Corp wanted to take credit for that drek, that junk, that slop? How sad to be an alleged news organisation seeking not to upgrade its graphics department to barely human.
Perhaps it was designed to match the thinking ...
As for the university administrators who have had ample time to prepare for this onslaught, let me offer a few suggestions. Stop offering everything online. Get students back into a classroom. Enact a minimum in-person attendance requirement. Make the degree come with a cost other than dollars. Stop making universities the educational equivalent of a safe injecting room.
Outside of things such as medicine, engineering and the like, can someone please tell me what the point is of a university degree?
Um, so you can sound like Our Henry and sound like you swallowed a dictionary of ancient times? Not even the Lynch mob is worth a listen? (Someone please tell the hive mind).
For 23 years this coming July, I’ve been an employer of some incredibly bright, articulate, hardworking, university-educated young people. They came to their interviews with curiosity, prepared, and it was often a difficult task to discern who would be the best fit for us. That’s the context, and it’s important.
As any employer knows, you go through cycles of a business in which the structure and dynamic change. People move on to new opportunities and you respond to that change within your own team.
Four years ago, that was me and we decided to hire a fresh out-of-the-box graduate. Everyone has to start somewhere and I felt a conviction that providing that start for someone was part of showing leadership.
For my good intentions, I was introduced to a cohort underwhelming and underprepared as compared with what I had previously experienced. Great CVs, fantastic even, with strong academic performance. But come to the point of interview and it was like opening your Christmas stocking and finding it full of coal.
At this point the pond gave a deep sigh of relief.
The pond has endured some tough times as an employee and delivered some tough times as an employer, but thankfully never had to endure the likes of this sort of self-satisfied preening, made even worse by the dire quality of the visual distractions, We need to stop making universities the educational equivalent of a safe injecting room. Picture: iStock
Couldn't the reptiles have dug up a snap of Curtin, so we could see where Gemma got injected with her self-satisfied stupidity? Or perhaps some other red brick uni (as the newer concrete monstrosities were once called), instead of snatching at a snap of Sydney Uni?
Then it was on to more relief that the pond had never been a youngling forced to endure Gemma's interrogations:
“Tell me what attracted you to this role, and to this industry?” I asked one applicant.
There was a long pause. She leaned back in her chair as if to stretch after a long nap.
“Yeah, I dunno.”
“What will YOU do, to guarantee I succeed in this role?” one candidate asked me.
“I can guarantee you will have every opportunity to succeed, whether you do or not is on you,” I responded.
They did not get the job.
There were variations on this theme, times a dozen or more.
Now, I’m not saying the people I interviewed were cheating but neither do I know they weren’t. I do know that experience sealed the deal for me as an employer. Degrees mean nothing in my game.
What an incredibly stupid non sequitur.
Now, I’m not saying the people I interviewed were cheating but neither do I know they weren’t.
Now the pond isn't saying that Gemma is being deliberately obtuse, but the pond doesn't know if she wasn't. (Make sense of that if you will, if you can).
But the pond did wonder why she still carried the aura of a cult item with some pond correspondents ... especially as the illustrations continued woeful and dire: Young people don’t know or don’t care that they’re missing out on the magic, the wonder of learning. Picture: iStock
Ye ancient cats and caricatured AI slop. That represents the magic, the wonder of learning?
The pond has groaned on occasion about the strange ways of vulgar youff, but has seen this sort of whining go on down the generations, and has come to understand that most of it is envy, because youff always has youff on its side, and that's one thing you can never get when you turn into a hardened, "it's all chaff to me", sergeant major caricature ...
...are you experienced?
Or have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have
I know, I know you probably scream and cry
That your little world won't let you go
But who in your measly little world
Are you trying to prove that
You're made out of gold and, uh, can't be sold?
So uh, are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
You can end up sounding like Dustin Hoffman's producer in Wag the Dog ...or like Gemma ...
Thomas’s piece is equal parts horror story and tragedy. I found myself raging as I read. Not only at the shallowness of it all but also the fact these young people don’t know or don’t care that they’re missing out on the magic, the wonder of learning. The sense of fulfilment and pride that comes from wrestling with hard things and prevailing. The feeling that comes from having your brain and your world enlarged. The brain muscle you build as you do hard things and keep doing them.
As a now extremely rusty classical pianist, I can confirm that AI can’t do the practice for you. It can’t make you proficient in every exercise contained in the wondrously torturous Hanon: The Virtuoso Pianist. There is a strange feeling of accomplishment that comes with mastering those scales, error free. Trust me, I know.
Education is a gift. It is a ticket out of poverty for so many around the world, yet here in Australia we appear to have devalued it so much that cheating is treated as a fait accompli and universities are behaving as if they are without options.
You can sense the resentment, the bitterness, the raging at the dying of the light. So she mastered some tinkling of the ivories, and now she has rusty fingers. Who cares?
The reptiles compounded it by slipping in another snap ... In Kabul, girls return to class following the Taliban’s previous order to shut secondary schools. Access to education is a precious gift, a ticket out of poverty for so many around the world, yet here in Australia we appear to have devalued it so much. Picture: AFP
And it's vulgar youff that's devalued education and isn't aware what's happening in the world?
Here's the thing. You can't cite - incorrectly - what is happening in Afghanistan as a way of bashing local heads. Or you can pay attention.
The pond was reminded of that old game parents played - how you had to eat your vegetables because others were starving in the world.
The pond remembers being told by one victim of that torment how she put her food in a parcel and took it down to the post office to ship it off to Asia...
Perhaps someone could ship off the reptiles?
But the pond digresses, it's time to wrap up Gemma's jihad ...
Is it any wonder? I mean, personally, I doubt that the same university “educators” who presided over the cancerous spread of Jew hatred on campuses around Australia have the wherewithal to face this problem and deal with it.
Put that another way.
I mean, personally, I doubt that university students in Gaza have the wherewithal to face this problem of ethnic cleansing and deal with it.
Fixed, and time for a wrap ...
It’s perhaps the ultimate show of privilege that middle-class Australian kids should be so indifferent about their access to education when it is denied to so many in other places.
In Afghanistan, girls and women are strictly forbidden from secondary and higher education by the governing Taliban.
Um, that's not what the caption said... back to the wrap:
Meanwhile, in Australia, young women boast about how they can get away without doing the work. God, the shame of it all.
Now we're appealing to mythical deities? As if She could help? For the sake of the long absent lord, wrap it up ...or head off to a fast food joint, and act as a role model (minimum wage of course, and age limited):
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Australia, we need a radical course correction.
To the students who spoke to Thomas for her piece, on the one hand I applaud you because nothing disinfects like sunlight. Good on you for fessing up.
But I have another message for you, too. Good luck getting a job, kiddos. You’re living in a fantasy land, one without consequences. Good luck when you come face-to-face with the reality of being paid to do a job, then not being able to do that job. In the real world, actions come with risk, responsibility and consequences. There’s no fake it till you make it here.
There is a silver lining, though. In an AI world, where shortcuts are king and knowledge scant among the upcoming professional classes, I’m seeing a resurgence in demand for the “old guard”.
As an employer, I’m looking for experience. Give me a hint of grey hair and healthy dose of life’s war wounds. Give me instinct formed through years of being in the trenches. Give me wisdom that can’t be acquired any other way. That’s where the value is.
With those appalling images as part of her content, she has the gall to rag AI shortcuts and scant knowledge?
Nah, the pond can do without a dose of Gemma. Especially as her piece is littered with AI slop of the most wretched kind ... down there with her thinking, and that blather about the need for war wounds.
And so to a couple of distractions. This one features Kermode on that film ...
Polonius - grinding away at his axe for all those years - yet it’s still so blunt and ineffectual.
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