(August 20 – August 26)

There has been an interesting theme of disruption and lack of focus this week. Politically, the week started with a leadership challenge in Parliament in which the least effective Prime Minister in Australian history was challenged by a strong candidate for the least suitable person ever to [almost] be Prime Minister–and given the catastrophically low talent pool currently available in the Liberal party, and the fact that we’ve already had Tony Abbott, that’s really saying something.

Fortunately the leadership bid made by Peter Dutton, possibly the one person in the world less fit to be in charge of people than Donald Trump, failed.A second attempt followed at the end of the week which Dutton still lost (because apparently he’s really, really bad at this), but we still ended up with a new (and just as awful) Prime Minister. We also endured the shameful spectacle of the government shutting down Parliament for a day simply because it was all too hard for them to get on with their jobs.

Meanwhile, over in the USA, Donald Trump inches closer and closer to impeachment and grows more paranoid and deranged as the day approaches. I haven’t checked in on the UK for a while, but I assume the government there is continuing with the catastrophic omnishambles that is their Brexit negotiations, and which shows every sign of wrecking the country in the long run.

Closer to home, I’ve all but given up on being particularly productive during my morning (writing) shifts. I’ve continued to write, but I’ve struggled getting up most mornings and my concentration is shot. I’ve turned out paragraphs here and there, but nothing substantial. I’ve decided to mostly write off (hahahaha) August, by which I mean I’m not going to stress too much about not writing, and I’ll make an effort to return to normal business in September.

Hopefully the world will have calmed down a bit by then and things won’t be quite so distracting.

Lol.

Watching

It’s been another week of not watching anything TV-wise. On Monday the kids and I dropped in on a very excellent Lego group, which particularly rekindled the Elderbeast’s passion for LEGO. As a consequence we sat down and watched the LEGO Brickumentary later in the evening. It was pretty good and offered a very rounded view of the world of LEGO. My only complaint was, like most of these feature length pop culture documentaries, it focused a bit too much on the fans. I can talk to LEGO fans anytime—what I’m really interested in is how LEGO gets made, how the sets get designed, all of that stuff we don’t usually get to see.

Also, all of the Americans who keep saying “Legos” can get in the bin.

For our Friday horror film this week we watched a British offering called Ghost Stories. This was excellent, very scary in parts, pretty oddball in others. It was not unlike the portmanteau chillers of the seventies, which would typically wrap up by delivering a severe moral judgement on its various participants. This one ended up in a different place—which I obviously don’t want to spoil—but it was nice to see that the British industry can still deliver top quality horror.

The Elderbeast chose Spider-Man: Homecoming for our Saturday night film, which was as good as I remember it being first time around.

For Sunday I was a little stuck for something to watch, and eventually chose Night of The Hunter, which I’d recently bought on bluray. I’d only seen it once, many years ago, and there turned out to be a lot I didn’t remember. It’s a remarkable film; at times chilling, lyrical almost to the point of surrealness in others. I’m very glad I now own a copy that will allow me to revisit the film a bit more often than previously.

Reading

Still reading The Haunting Of Hill House. Still listening to Dune. More next week. Maybe.