Anything's possible in these amazing times, including the Caterists returning their grant because money never fixed anything ...

Well indeed, and there's nothing more to say about that, which is why a visit to Rowe here can keep conversations and arguments to a modest necessity and no more.

It's possible that conversations are also terse in the poodle's home this day as the wrestling man, the gorgeous George of SA politics attracts the eye, even if he passes as gorgeous Nick ...

But it was tempting to rant at length at the way Media Watch revealed the full enormity of Beating up the banquet...

How does Simon Benson sleep at night? Easily, twisted and piked like a crooked man, while taking down the thoughts of Tony Abbott ...

And so we passed from this ...

To this ...

The pond knew it was a beat up from the horse's mouth the moment it saw the tweeted shots of Abbott with McCain and posing next to fellow war criminal Henry, but it was nice to have the full enormity of the white anting, the back stabbing,  the media conniving, and the truth of the no wrecking, no undermining, no sniping lie revealed, even if it was a week late...

Ah well, it would be too much for anyone to expect Abbott to accept a job as a human rights envoy. Perhaps as an envoy for ongoing political treachery? Or perhaps he could make a job sharing offer to run the UN with former Chairman Rudd?

And yet, this very day, the reptiles were at it again today ... this time using a third party to maintain the campaign of rehabilitation and redemption ...

Turnbull needs Abbott like a hole in the head, Ms McGregor, and the same can be said of the country. 

Why not take a squiz at the distorting, dissembling ways of the Bensonist Terrorists, eager to foment revolution, before seeing redemption in the notion that the man isn't flirting with the Australian Liberty Alliance. You mean we should take comfort he's also not flirting with the neo-Nazis and the Stalinists?

That other column is by Sarrah Le Marquand, taking a break from her duties as a rocket scientist to do her 18C duties, showing that the passing around of the kool aid at the water cooler keeps all the reptiles on the same song sheet ...

The pond merely includes it as part of its record-keeping, because today is always Caterist day, and we must move on to that rich, rewarding experience ... and what a ripper it promises to be ...

Indeed, indeed, but the pond felt a need to provide one necessary exclusion, one obvious exception.

Spending of taxpayer money will build a better Menzies Research Centre, and it will build a better lifestyle for the Caterists, and so in that - admittedly rare and exclusive way - it can be said that spending will build a better society.

But that - if the pond may speak in the now accepted style of ABC personnel - is a terribly unique exception.

Now we have our special government grant, we must move on to explain why for others it would be a terrible and tragic thing ...

Indeed, indeed. Now the pond has met a number of young things in recent years who have been through the private school system. 

The one thing they all commented on was the way that the capitalist system had deprived them of good pools, fine gymnasiums, first class library and online facilities, computers, nicely kitted out science rooms, and so on and so forth. It seems the remarkable faith in the doctrine of the bracing impact of poverty embraced by private capitalism has seen a blossoming of the "let them eat gruel and wake up at 4 am to study" philosophy that has gripped the private education system like a viral fever ...

It seems that private schools offer exemplary evidence that money's got nothing to do with schooling.

Of course this poverty in early years leads to a healthy philosophy of the "fuck you Jack, I've got mine, and the Caterists have got their taxpayer grant, so what's your fucking problem Jack? And Jill?" kind ...

Let us see how this philosophy unfolds, as the Caterists explain in more detail ...

Indeed, indeed, and there's no need for any satirical flourishes, because the pond was immensely moved by the offer of the Caterists to return their taxpayer funding, and for schools such as Kings and Scots College to divest themselves of their lavish lifestyles and live as humble scholars in imitation of medieval monks ... it being perfectly clear that spending too much on health and education is a clear waste of time, and we would be much better off living as our Asian neighbours do ...

Their offer to lead the way almost reduced the pond to tears.

Well you can write that sort of guff when you're the recipient of a splendid bit of taxpayer funding ...

And so to the rest, and what's the bet that Tony Abbott, already mentioned up above white anting way, will once again raise his ugly head from the mire? Will the hagiography ever die?

Indeed, indeed. In these troubled times, it seems that the purpose of government appears to have been lost, but a nanosecond's contemplation could remind us of its true and genuine purpose. 

It's not to waste money on those losers out at Mt Druitt ... it's to lavish a grant on the Menzies Research Centre, ...

That's what government was put on earth to do, and think of the social outcomes. A happy Caterist scribbling copy for the reptiles ... that's really what it's all about ...

And so to a Pope, and a whole gallery of papal jokes here, as good as the news that the frail Pellist can now never return to Australia ...

There might be a downside to the Pellists not making this current trip, but the upside is that he can never return, at least not with a straight face and without enduring incredible odium ... though it's true that the odious man has resolutely refused to acknowledge the odium he generates. 

Perhaps the way forward is to follow the lead of his spiritual son, and do a Tony Abbott lunching with Chairman Rupert and Obama, and perhaps posing for a snap next to a war criminal ... the Terrorists would be sure to honour such noble deeds with an EXCLUSIVE.

Is Paul Sheehan certifiably insane?

(Above: this day the pond's anger meter is set to an astounding JEB! low. Please clap, and more here).

It's the question on everyone's lips, but the pond only asks it in a clinical, scientific way ...

Is Paul Sheehan certifiably, clinically, incurably insane?

This isn't some frivolous, light-hearted, trolling question.

The pond has plenty of evidence. There's the matter of the unique water affair, which can still be found online here, and here, and here, and here, and while looking it up, you might also stumble across Has Paul Sheehan Written the Worst Article Ever?

And then there was the way that Sheehan confessed to paying an insanely expensive price for sourdough bread, while imagining that anyone would pay attention to his economic prescriptions. Tighten the belt while tucking into the sourdough?

Oh okay, the pond fesses up ...

All we were doing was trolling for attention in a way which it seems has now become de rigueur in the Fairfaxian style sheet, and with two splashes to try to sell the goods:

Yep, it is just pathetic attention seeking, of the trolling kind.

Inter alia, the foolish magic water-loving, sourdough-devouring fop answers his own question this way:

I don't think the Prime Minister is insane. In fact, I think we are fortunate to have, as Prime Minister, a merchant banker with a sophisticated grasp of finance and a keen knowledge of China's economy.

The pond, however, must keep insisting that Sheehan is certifiably, incurably, clinically insane.

The most base trolling is not a way to attract attention to a serious opinion piece, and only the barking mad would think otherwise

This is not the way to lead people to discuss an increase in the GST or other taxation matters, this is in fact the lowest common denominator on the full to flowing intertubes, even lower than listicles - and patrons of the insane Sheehan will remember that he's also a dab hand at listicles, as in Ten anti-anti-commandments and Lord Monckton's verbal bombs ...

Of course much later Sheehan would manage to mingle the Paris climate conference and the need to decelerate, or perhaps even reverse carbon emissions, with a pet water buffalo.

Yep, from celebrating Lord Monckton to having an anxiety attack about the sheer scale of carbon emissions by the  livestock industry, as can be read here, with forced video.

If not clinically insane, then surely barking mad, teetering about like a cock on a weather vane ...

But speaking of weather and climate change and climate science, the pond is distraught.

The pond searched high and low through the lizard Oz this day, and found not a trace of Maurice Newman.

Now Moorice on a Monday, in which the world's greatest climate scientist explains assorted UN conspiracies, has become one of the high points on the pond's calendar, and to be cruelly deprived of the treat has induced a profound depression.

All that's on offer this day in the way of spectacular climate insights is the thoughts of Little Timmie Bleagh ...

Sadly Little Timmie isn't a patch on Maurice, and his wit is a little lower too ...

Reasonably enough, with that question answered, Marshall is now taking steps to throw most of the CSIRO’s climate researchers out on the street like common circus midgets.

Because you only have to mention midgets for Little Timmie to burst into gales of climate science laughter ...

Oh sorry, that'll set Timmie off for the week.

To be fair, Little Timmie knows how to draw exactly the right scientific analogy ...

Perkins-Kirkpatrick continued: “Research in any field does not, and cannot stop after an apparent question has been answered.” Actually, in most fields research does stop once the central question is answered. Otherwise video referees at NRL matches would never go home; they’d remain in their reviewing suites forever, endlessly examining the same disputed try.

Thugby league! Such an exact analogy to the scientific process and methodology. If only we'd known, we could have sorted climate science in a trice with a video review and a third referee.

But of course Little Timmie, well known as a denialist, does in fact dispute the disputed try. Long after the match, long after everyone's forgotten everything except the punch up, the finger up the bum, and the pissing on the couch after the game, Little Timmie is still disputing the fucking try.

Even within the same piece, the incontinent lad can't resist another spurt ...

Economic and political priorities have shifted, in Australia and around the world. Climate change has been declining as an issue of public concern since peak panic in 2006, when Al Gore’s dishonest documentary An Inconvenient Truth succeeded in spooking so many gullible saps.

So climate science is solved and sorted and needs no funding, except what Al Gore can offer, and so Little Timmie will refrain from talk of warmists and gullible saps ...

And if you believe that, why the pond thinks you might be clinically, certifiably, incurably insane ...

Oh and naturally the Daily Terrorists also feature the Bolter getting agitated about Malware.

This is news? The Bolter has been blathering on about Malware since the day of the coup, and always striking the monotone note of feral hatred, such is his man love and his man yearning for the lost days of the wall puncher ...

Yet when the pond went looking for some kind of alternative relief, even the dog botherer offered none...

The trouble is, this could be summarised in a line. Hedley Thomas a saint, Tony Jones a wicked man.

The further trouble is that the dog botherer doesn't waste a nanosecond on the way that titanic dinosaur Clive was a creature of the Queensland LNP, much loved by all - or at least his money was - until he fell out with his fellow ferals ...

Yet Clive was still in good enough odour for the rough Brough to dally with him, or so assorted stories suggested as late as November, as can be read in Clive Palmer revives explosive claims against Mal Brough over James Ashby affair, with forced video, and Clive Palmer says Mal Brough asked him to help 'destroy' Peter Slipper ...

Oh they loved his money when he still had some, and they scrambled to paw and clutch at him in the same way some unseemly types did with Gina.

Happily, life always gets more interesting when a fetid gang of rats fall out amongst themselves and air their dirty laundry in public ...

And what a gang of rats is the LNP in Queensland ...

Now the pond has no time for the way that Tony Jones simpered through his interviews with Clive. They were pathetic, but they did at least free up the pond from the habit of dropping in on Lateline.

But sadly Hedders, for all his valiant efforts, barely laid a finger, let alone a glove, on Clive.

It was Clive himself who brought Clive down. Hedders, for example, had nothing to do with this immortal photo, juxtaposed against Clive's treatment of his workers ...

In this context, the dog botherer's suggestion that his inquisitors have been reading Hedley Thomas verges on the completely delusional (others might say it's certifiably, clinically, incurably insane, but the pond will leave that to others).

Clive's inquisitors have been looking at the books, and the state of the world's stagnant resources market ...

Others have been looking at the way Clive dished out money to Clive, which to the pond is barely distinguishable from the way Clive once dished out money to the Queensland LNP ... since both exercises were about the greater glory of Clive ...

There's something astonishingly risible about a newspaper hack thinking that the world revolves around what they scribble ...

The dog botherer still seems to think that baiting Clive is some sort of national sport. Some sport, if you happen to be a stiffed employee ... but then Little Timmie gets a laugh out of throwing midgets around, so what would the pond know ...

Well that just leaves time for a Rowe meditation on another folly, and more properly formatted Rowe here ...

Can-can-cancelled, and the grievances surge to the surface like a pulsating alien emerging from the belly ... if you can handle that image ...

Perhaps it was watching the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra over the weekend that made the pond think so fondly of this Rowe cartoon (and more properly formatted Rowe here).

Yes, the streaming was working for once, and the Berlin Philharmoniker app was giving the Venezuelans away for free, and they were pounding away at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and being an agile multi-tasker, at the very same time, the pond was reading Gary Wills saying everything the pond has only thought, in his review of E. J. Dionne Jr’s Why the Right Went Wrong, under the header The Triumph of the Hard Right, currently in The New York Review of Books, and outside the paywall for the moment.

Quick, rush to read it here, while the pond prepares a few quotes, because Wills' thesis is easy enough to grasp: 

The sense of betrayal by one’s own is a continuing theme in the Republican Party (a Fox News poll in September 2015 found that 62 percent of Republicans feel “betrayed” by their own party’s officeholders). The charges against Eisenhower were repeated against Nixon, who brought Kissingerian “détente” into his dealing with Russia and renewed diplomatic ties to China. On the domestic front, he imposed wage and price controls and sponsored the welfare schemes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

Well yes, indeed, and even as The Insiders returned to the ABC, and the Bolter was nowhere to be found, one could sense that the rage machine would be cranked up to 11, and not just with a sense of betrayal by one's own (where is that renewal letter?), but also by the perfidious others who had caused the ratings calamity.

Betrayal everywhere, and the suffering is immense. Cue more Wills:

To be on the right is to feel perpetually betrayed. At a time when the right has commanding control of radio and television talk shows, it still feels persecuted by the “mainstream media.” With all the power of the one percent in control of the nation’s wealth, the right feels its influence is being undermined by the academy, where liberals lurk to brainwash conservative parents’ children (the lament of Buckley’s very first book, God and Man at Yale). Dionne shows how the right punishes its own for “selling out” to any moderate departures from its agenda once a person gets into office. 

Well, yes, and so to the great agitation and the much unhappiness stalking the land.

What is it with the Bolter?

He purports to be an agnostic, but here he is falling over himself about Pell.

As for the image that got him so agitated, he links to Quadrant, here.... which purports to provide a link to the story. Except on the pond's browser, no link below appears.

So the pond had to do an image search, and landed here, which explains that the image in question is signage featuring Pell, placed outside the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

The same sign also turns up here, and is actually credited again to Joel Carrett of AAP, and again with the note "Protest signage featuring Cardinal George Pell outside the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse."

Now let's overlook the phrasing of the sentence - is it the protest signage or the Cardinal who's outside the Royal Commission? - to marvel at the way that the Bolter is suggesting that this sort of coverage of protests etc, should not take place.

Remember that the next time you read one of the ranters ranting about 18C.

Why is it so funny?

Well the post just below that one was this one ... and it's all about free speech, which presumably doesn't include AAP images ...

Oh it's just too piquant. Simply too piquant muh dear ...

A rant about an image, following hard on the heels of a rant about authoritarian sanctimony, prying hypocrisy, preening victimhood, stifled debate, a plethora of examples of the new wowserism, and so on and so forth ... with brave flourishes of the "intolerados" kind, and a celebration of the right of footballers to piss on couches and pollies to go the grope ... and a plug for a comrade's ramblings, out now. Because grievers always get together to unite in their grievances, or so Wills suggests.

Wills naturally provides American examples - with the current bizarre GOP exercise going down, what else could he do? - but these are easily translatable to the Australian experience ...

Joe Scarborough claims that the Republicans have continually oscillated between moderates and extremists. But he could find only two stellar moderates in the last half-century, Eisenhower and Reagan. Some oscillation! Dionne comes closer to the facts with his tale of a ground bass of growls against moderation, swelling at times or diminishing, but continuously present and becoming more embittered. It is appropriate that this feeling has been in alliance with the Confederate South, the loser of a war it still thinks it should have won. The rest of the Republicans may not be as racist as the South, but they cannot prevail at the federal level without it. 

Indeed, indeed. And if one thinks of all the phobias that agitate the Bolter and Rowan Dean, it's easy to see how the right to be a bigot remains dear to their collective psyche ...

All grievances gravitate toward one another. Some conservatives rightly say that Bill Buckley was their best advocate—he elevated their vocabulary and taste, and he shuddered away from vulgarians like Robert Welch and Willis Carto. But he knew there could not be a conservative party if the South were not included in it. In 1957 he published an editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail.” It said: The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. 

And there we have it. A constant moaning and a litany of grievances, and when a stray image turns up,  then the grievances gravitate toward one another in what seems to be a universal, perhaps even cosmic, fundamentalist way.

And where do we end up?

The truth is that conservatives are right to feel that their own moderates are sell-outs. To be (even moderately) a moderate is to leave the Republican Party—to be what Buckley called an immoral Middle-of-the-Roader. 
To accept Enlightenment values—reason, facts, science, open-mindedness, tolerance, secularity, modernity—is to lower one’s guard against evils like evolution, concern about global warming, human equality across racial and sexual and religious lines—things Republicans have opposed for years and will not let their own members sell out to. They rightly intuit that there is only one Enlightenment party in America, and the Republicans are not it. That is why they have to oppose in every underhanded way they can the influence of younger people who are open to gays, to same-sex marriage, to feminism. it is risky for Republicans even to toy with talk of moderation. That is why even “mainstream” Republican candidates steer away from support for evolution, or measures against global warming, or taxes on the rich, or same-sex marriage. None wants to be guilty of compromise or looking soft. The right hated George H.W. Bush’s plea for a “kinder and gentler” party kindling “a thousand points of light.” They had no more kind or gentle feeling about George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and his promise to “leave no child behind...” 

How weird does it get?

Well preceding that rant about freedom of speech, which preceded the rant about the image, came another rant ... about freedom of speech ...

Even Christ would be muzzled ... and so on and so forth (there's a lot more in the rant, but the pond thought that it had swallowed enough of freedom boi for the moment).

And so apparently would the ABC - be muzzled that is - at least if the Bolter had his way ...

Well the pond invited people to remember what might be the situation the next time 18C was mentioned, and it's clear enough.

No AAP images, thank you very much ... anything that offends the Pellists is defamatory, but feel free to invite a footballer to piss on your couch. Treat it as a whimsy, a moment of playful fun, that will allow you to spiritually bond with Sydney-siders. Any other reaction, like demanding money for the dry cleaning bill, will see you labelled a fun-killing wowser ...

As for the Bolter? Well the grieving and the grievances will go on and so will the noise ... and this cartoon remains as true as the day it was penned ...

Oh indeed, and perhaps for once he has been ... the pond did so love this gif here ...

And so visionaries like Netflix will come unto these shores and live the Australian malware dream ...

The pond has gone quiet on the NBN, yet recent links by a correspondent stirred the pond to thinking, or perhaps to brooding.

At least it's not brooding about the Jensenists shamelessly using what should have been an apology as a chance for a grab at more cash in the paw funding, so that angry Sydney Anglicans should be "resourced" for the doing of the making good (here) ...

Oh just sell a cathedral or two ... stop building that temple to fundamentalist theology, Moore College, and splash the cash to assuage your guilt ...

No, better to not go there, and instead look at what the reptiles make of it all, now that their dream of a broken NBN has come to pass ...

Sure enough,  the reptile technology pages make for much laughter. This is a snapshot of yesterdays top stories ...

Uh huh, down at the bottom was that recycling of the NBN's unseemly and unwholesome praise of itself, developed by the usual ploy of getting a mob to come up with a result much desired ...

Well minister, as we all know, it's wise to know the answer to an inquiry before it starts ...

The Australian can reveal ...

... that research into the NBN, commissioned by the NBN and revealed by the NBN ... assures the world that everything's hunky dory ..

Could it get any more pathetic? No doubt some boffin in the NBN thought it was a jolly whiz and a jape.

Drop out some research and then watch the reptiles scramble to report the good news, so Penn and Teller celebrate yet another fine example of the art of distraction...

Meanwhile ...

Oh, after the hunky dory comes the warning?

Ah that'd be the known unknowns, or are they the unknown unknowns?

The ones that Malware paid a shitload of money for, before hoping to dump the unholy mess back into the hands of private vultures, or perhaps Telstra, which these days is much the same thing ...

Of course, it's helpful to remember previous bouts of blather, as recorded in Malcolm Turnbull's NBN is rolling according to plan - the new plan, that is ...

The-then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott announced earlier that year that a Coalition government would dump Labor's project, and spend a maximum of $29.5 billion on the construction of a network that was an amalgam of fibre to the home, fibre to neighbourhood junction boxes, fixed wireless, and satellite. 
All premises would have access to download speeds of between 25 and 100 megabits a second by 2016, and 50 to 100 megabits a second by 2019, they said. 
After winning power in September 2013 and seeing inside the black box, Turnbull said the project would cost $41 billion, but that Labor's project would have cost up to $73 billion. The construction timeline was extended, and minimum download speeds were wound back. 
Then in August last year, weeks before he mounted his successful leadership challenge, Turnbull and the NBN Co changed tack again. 
It is the targets set last August for 8 million homes to be connected by 2020 and a total project cost of between $46 billion to $56 billion that the government and NBN Co are on track to achieve. In August, Turnbull and Morrow also claimed that Labor's fibre-to-the-home network would cost up to $84 billion if revived.

It's as comprehensive a set of lies as might be found, with Maiden also parroting in that piece how customers are satisfied with their second and third rate broadband ... according to NBN research ...

And yet ... and yet ... each day the pond is irritated at the way the private sector delivered fast connectivity to inner city Sydney apartments long before the NBN arrived.

And then the late arrival, spurned at least by some who saw no need to change, tried to exert their right to a monopoly, because it was a threat to their business model and because wannabe, inept monopolies must do what wannabe monopolies must do...

Because right from the beginning the roll-out was mis-planned and badly executed, and now the dumping of second rate offerings in a hodge podge fashion around the land is being celebrated as a consummation of Malware's dream ...

It was around this time that the pond took a look at this reptile piece ...

Oh fuck, what drivel. The entrepreneurs lurking in the woodwork.

They don't even lurk in a hard drive?

What entrepreneurs? What new services? Netflix is a new service? Stan and Presto regurgitating American product is a new service?

That's it? Recycling Hollywood product is the beginning and the end of the entrepreneurial dream?

That's the best Morrow's got to offer? It'll help Netflix and a few others with deep enough pockets and a willingness to go along with territorial limitations and geoblocking beloved of Hollywood, and that's it?

So provided the NBN is good enough for streaming the latest Hollywood crap, that's good enough ...

It's such a debilitating sense of what the unknown unknowns might have offered ...

The pond's tip to any young entrepreneur? If you've got a good idea for the intertubes, head off to the United States ... you'll find no life here, though you might find a second rate service.

In the USA, they dream of gibabytes, here they dream of 12 mbps ...

What you're facing here is a half-assed, half-baked system where sirens sing their own songs in celebration of their wondrous achievements ...

Remember this nauseating spectacle?

Not so long ago, and yet even since then the bullshit had to be modified ...

Oh okay, that's just Labor propaganda, and Stephen Conroy fucked it up as much as the next man, but is it any consolation to hear that both sides fucked it up, and now all we're getting is Malware Fraudband?

And feeble-minded, addle-brained clowns like Fletcher leapt into print to explain how fine and dandy it all was?

News flash Mr Fletcher. Vodafone is the shittiest network of them all - the pond should know, it keeps a legacy phone and a plan that irritates the hell out of them, just to spite the bastards ...

And right now we're slowly, hesitantly copping a service that's designed on the principle of panem et circenses ... 

If it's fast enough to stream some Hollywood soma, that'll be good enough ... even if, in the case of HFC, it involves recycling a thirty year old network .... or in the case of copper, an ill-maintained network which will require a motza to fix in the areas the NBN has studiously avoided to date ...

It's around this point that's all that's left to the pond are memes ...

Yes, he actually said that one, as he dropped his cash on copper and HFC, and you can find it and much more nonsense here ...

Turnbull: You can’t future proof anything in truth, so the idea that you would invest in a technology which will last for thirty years is pretty naive. Better to invest in the tech that works now and in the foreseeable future which means you can invest in better and better tech as time goes on. This is better financially, time value of money etc, and also gives the optionality you need in such a disruptive tech environment.

How about this one?

The pond recognises the code. If you want fast broadband, be prepared to pay for the connection yourself, when surely, inevitably, the decision to invest in copper and HFC reveals certain limitations ... you know, like they did when you partied in 1999 ...

Well the pond would, or at least it would welcome private enterprise delivering connectivity as they briefly managed to do for inner city apartment blocks.

Until the monopoly struck, and the results came home to roost ...

And so the dream and the vision as originally outlined by the original visionary continues ... and the memes are as slow to load as ever ...

Confirmed this Sunday ... no sign of wit or life under the Polonius tree, just another shaggy dog joke running wild and free ...

So what's new this Sunday?

Oh okay Devine's imitation of a screeching harridan, fresh from the Jacqui Lambie school of deportment, isn't news, it's so stale even the pigeons would turn up their noses at the crumbs.

The funny thing is, the pond doesn't have the slightest interest in Australia Day, Australian of the Year, David Morrison or all the rest arising from the gathering of gazebos, yet it's possible to have a faint twinge of sympathy for the lad, because once the Devine gets the smell of blood in the nose, it's like watching a rabid hyena go to work ...

Naturally the pond sought refuge in nostalgia ...

Ah, a Ming the Merciless cartoon.

That can mean only one thing ... the pond is catching up with the deep thinking of prattling Polonius, and what's the odds he'll be wandering back in time to a golden era, where men were men and banyan trees were banyan trees ...

As usual, the google splash misses the point ...

Because, the point, as usual, will turn out to be a shaggy dog story, wherein the shaggy dog offers advice with absolutely no expectation it will be followed or that it might succeed.

Here's the reptile splash, which offers the dream ...

There, google, that's the way your logarithms should be working ...

Yep, Polonius's algorithmic piece is all about Malcolm Turnbull setting up a thousand year Reich, or at least a Reich running long enough to resemble the long reign of Ming "the banyan tree" Menzies.

Would such a prospect tempt Malware? Can we listen in as the snake charmer dangles the unguent near the ear, as the pond understands once happened in Hamlet, in which our very own prattling Polonius played such a significant role lurking behind the arras?

Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard, 
My custom always of the afternoon, 
The NBN being slow that hour of day,
And slow at other times, come what may,
Upon my secure hour thy Oz blatherer stole, 
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, 
And many fancy words of Ming the vile,
And in the porches of my ears did pour 
The leperous distilment; whose effect 
Holds such an enmity with blood of man 
That swift as quicksilver it courses through 
The natural gates and alleys of the body, 
And with a sudden vigour doth posset 
And curd, like eager droppings into milk, 
The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine; 
And a most instant tetter bark'd about, 
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, 
Mine curdled ear did whey to hear,
A double dissolution call at once thou must ...

Uh huh, uh huh, but how did it end? The pond's got to know. Was it as long and tedious as the latest Tarantino movie?

Thus was I, sleeping, by a reptile's hand 
Of life, of crown, of Canberra, at once dispatch'd: 
Cut off even in the blossoms of my broadband sin, 
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd, 
No reckoning made, but sent to my account 
With all my imperfections on my head: 
O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible! 
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; 
Let not the royal bed of Malware become
A couch for copper and damned King Tony II.

Phew, with that kind of introduction, who could resist? Bring it on, prattling Polonius, explain how Malware might come into his kingdom ...

Oh indeed, worthy Polonius, what a tremendous setting forth of the bleeding obvious.

Does Malware have a view on this ponderous pontificating?

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! 

I took thee for thy better. Take thy fortune. 
Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger. 
Leave wringing of your hands. 
Peace! sit you down 
And let me wring your heart; for so I shall 
If it be made of penetrable stuff; 
If damned custom have not braz'd it so 
That it is proof and bulwark against sense.

Ouch, a tad severe, yet there is more wise counsel to be had, and an invocation of the god Ming ...

Pray, set to, Polonius, and explain how all might be made well, before ducking behind the arras ...

Now it is true that it is true that it there is no need for bluster blather, there being a need for manly men to strut their hour upon the stage, and it is true that the ploy worked in 1951, and it is true that 2016 is almost exactly, eerily the same as 1951, and the parallels are astonishing in their exactness, and it is true that a wise man would not draw attention to the result of the 1983 double dissolution, it being astonishing how unlike 1983 is to 2016, and it is true that it is most unlikely that Turnbull would dare to do a Ming ... preferring to keep his trousers rolled and perhaps scuttle on the seabed like a crab measuring his life in coffee spoons...

And it is also true that in consequence, reading this piece in its entirety has been a singular and utterly debilitating waste of time, and yet it is true that the ploy of abusing and misusing reader attention spans is always worth the serious consideration of a prattling Polonius, especially if it might lead in circular fashion to a completely pedantic play on the notion of assuaging disillusionment ... especially as the double disillusion joke has been around for yonks, as in A double disillusion election, when King Tony I was peddling the unguent, and others used exactly the same joke as a lead-in, as in No double disillusion in our democratic neighbour Indonesia ...

And long absent lord, Mungo MacCallum used it as a joke in the title for his book about the 2010 election ...

No, there's nothing wrong with running a joke as old and as stale and as wearying as Ming himself, but what of the stuff of the man into the ear of whom prattling Polonius has poured his distilled essence of his infinite, yet most unlikely, wisdom?

Why indeed, it's so EXCLUSIVE, you can read it in another currish Snail in another state altogether ...

Now there's the man to lead the charge across the Rubicon ...

Oh okay, the entire exercise was simply to shed some nostalgic tears over Ming the Merciless cartoons ...