The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

I just love the way David Rowe draws Bojo the blobfish. He is positively adorable. Like some cute cuddly teddy bear. Especially compared to the toxic pufferfish that is Bananaby Joyce with THAT hat. I get nightmares looking at him whenever he gets washed up in the corner of some cartoon

( Plastic and Goblins )

The more I see of what the police are doing on the streets all over the USA, the more I am convinced that trump has finally unleashed the army of black shirts that he has been training for a long long time

They just randomly walk up to people, knock them over, spray them with pepper spray and seem to have a particular preference for anyone filming them especially journalists.




Meanwhile trump is blame tweeting while the USA burns

The 3 desperate dinosaurs. Blobfish Bojo looks kind of cute and Brazil's Bolsonaro looks like the fugly love child of General Flynn and Adolf Hitler

Meanwhile, Dodgy Don grows ever more desperate with his distractions. Tomorrow is the start of not one but TWO court cases concerning his dodgy deals and dirty laundry from his private business. He thinks all these diversions will take our minds off his Deutsche Bank deals

Here is hoping the Twitterati will have all the court gossip since unlike the impeachment proceedings, it is unlikely to be live streamed.

Meanwhile, I have been rummaging around in the ABC broom cupboard dusting off some old gems that just get juicier with age
Ahmaud Arbery gets the death penalty by some self styled judges for jogging while black while poor misunderstood General Flynn gets a giant pity party parade and "Get out of jail free" card from the filthy freak that fired him in the first place

Flynn the Treason Weasel

Crazy days indeed. Amazed that Dr trumpenstein has cash in that needle instead of Clorox.

Meanwhile back in Oz, I finally found a chemist that is not out of stock of hand sanitizer and masks. $2.50 each for the basic blue models and $12 a pair for the upmarket white models with built in filters. I think the latter are designed for healthcare workers in clinics rather than operating theatres and for people working in very dusty environments.


I tried out the mask when on the bus. Four weeks ago there would rarely be more than 5 people on a bus but now that the kids have gone back to school, other people are out and about much more too.


Tomorrow I will return to my usual schedule of pottering around the garden, planting, reading, drinking endless cups of tea while watching the birds in the garden and generally lounging about and being a lazy serpent

I am still finding it so strange to have no jobs at all to go to. I had a regular schedule for so long and it is still quite disorientating to have my diary completely and totally empty these last six weeks as everything closed down bit by bit

If not for the regular programs on Radio National, I would barely even know what day it is. Not that it really matters unless you have school age kids or one of those jobs in healthcare or the supermarket.

I have been making the most of the opportunity to slowly and steadily sort out the Lair. It is so nice to have a desk and dining room table that are now neat and tidy. It makes the whole room feel that much more inviting. Tackling just one or two little things per day is proving far more effective than any grand plan New Year's Resolutions sort of nonsense.

A nice email from the currently closed State Library promoting their online presence prompted me to apply for membership. I already was a member but lost my library card when my wallet was stolen way back in January. It took less then ten minutes to sign up, get a temporary password and to be diving in the digital stacks of the local paper meaning that I no longer need venture out the door to buy it. Of course, it is much nicer to sit reading the real thing than on a screen but a screen is better than nothing at all. So that is now one less excuse to leave the Lair.

The Chosen One testing his divine powers
He kisses the water and it turns into .....

BLEACH

Don't fear the Reaper because trump is MUCH more terrifying

PS I do hope that the Queen gives Tim Brooke Taylor a posthumous OBE

Move along. Nothing to see here.



Q How many units did we shift today, Jared?

A 666

It looks like the grand plan of going to see the original in Amsterdam will not be happening any time soon.

I just love how David Rowe raids old art works as inspiration for his masterpieces. You don't have to be familiar with the original to enjoy the cartoons but it sure as hell adds so many extra layers of appreciation


If the dotard does insist on reviving the zombie economy on Easter Sunday 12th April, I hope that David Rowe will be on duty with an offering of a giant trumptanic hitting the virusberg.
With no lifeboats. Because we didn't need them last week.

How the gods cackle when serpents make plans

On Wednesday I finally found my way upstairs to the Big Mac with the grand plan of doing a giant catch up on replying to friends' posts and maybe even doing a Dreamwidth update or two;

That was the map. The territory turned out rather different. First, there were spinning beachballs and then the pages I had lined up to reply to just would not load. Both Chrome and Firefox were in freeze mode. I waited and waited and waited before finally realizing that the best way out of a hole is to stop digging. So I just turned the infernal machine off and started from scratch. But by then of course the creative squiggling mood was long gone. So I made do with zombie mode just lurking around on Twitter to see the latest stupid on steroids

It's strange looking back how I did far more comments and posts in the days when I did not even have a computer or any internet service at the Lair and was reliant totally on university computers and the nasty netcafe down the road which is long long gone.

Now I get 30GB data per month on the little Tweet stone which I also use as a Portkey to Cyberia for other devices but between distractions like Duolingo and Twitter and a general loathing for hunting and pecking on a horrid little touch screen, not much gets written at all these days

I suspect too that all the Dursleyish drama of the last few years has also taken its toll and I now spend much more time in the muggle world than I did in the good old days.


Never did go to Astrofest which was on this evening. Unlike the last week of rain and nasty muggy weather, we had lovely clear skies today but I was simply not up to navigating my way around the plague of pesky rug rats that now infest such events
Oh yesss. Of course it is lovely to get the next generation interested in science, maths, astronomy and all that sort of geeky stuff but even so, they still squawk, squeal, scream and run around like the little chaos monsters that they are.

There's a big fat fugly whiny squealimg 70 something year old chaos monster out there setting a PERFECT example for all of them and this week he has truly excelled himself

On the first day of Impeachmas
The Congress sent to me


this greasy fat puffed up turkey pretending to be a partridge






Finally woken from the serpent zombie slumber induced by nearly 2 weeks of stinking sizzling >38 celsius days

So many bright and shiny things in Cyberia. So so many distractions

I stayed up until 1am this morning watching the start of Celebrity Apprentice President Grand Finale also known as the impeachment proceedings including nut job Nunes and the novelty of Gym Jacket Jordan.

Such nostalgia for the ancient days when I used to be a member of a public speaking club. The craziest job ever was to chair the section of the meeting ever so innocuously named "General Business" where some crazy motion would be put and keeping control of the rabble was like herding rabid cats and it was designed to test skills in meeting procedures.
After several such episodes, it becomes apparent that there is a method to the madness. The rules are designed with the intention of dealing with matters in an orderly fashion, letting as many people as possible have a say and to limit the power of control freaks to hog the speaking spots

So while serpent fluency in this legalistic language of Robert's Rules is long dormant, it was still sufficient to enable me to decipher some of the more obscure activities in the Lower House of Congress

Listening to the 7am news on Radio National made it clear that impeachment had still not happened and that the proceedings were still in progress.
Matt Bevan is going to be like the kid who gets ten Christmases all at once.
So I found the Washington Post live feed and watched on the bus and in the cafe on the way to the day job.
So they said there was still an hour and 15 mins to go which officially would make it 8.30 local time but add on an extra 30 to 60 minute because this sort of thing always runs over allotted time


I turned up ten minutes late and told the boss that I would be on the floor a little later than usual as one Donald J Trump was in the process of getting impeached right now and I did not want to miss a single minute (of course it helps that this is a voluntary job)
She smiled and says "No worries" Some several months previously she had set aside a stash of Trump Cards because she knew that Izzie would want them.
(the job in question is a charity op shop selling all sorts of stuff like clothes, linen, toys, home wares and the serpent specialty - BOOKS.

It has been a great source of trump books such as Think Big, The Midas Touch, The Art of the Deal etc etc which i can buy guilt free knowing that he will not get a single cent in royalties.

The 2 straight hours of watching impeachment proceedings well and truly nuked my little Tweet stone and by 3pm the battery died which meant missing out on a whole pile of Twitter drama. but the main thing was getting a front row seat in real time.

The gutter snipe is all swaggering at his 200 minutes Hate rallies but his face tells another story. It is dripping in hatred and fear and he looks like he has aged ten years in one day.

I am so so hoping that Speaker Nancy Pelosi holds onto those articles of impeachment until she gets an ironclad guarantee that Racket Man himself will appear as a witness along with Bolton, Mulvaney and Giuliani for the win

I am so so looking forward to when David Rowe returns from his Christmas vacation.