Prisoners of Illogic

What a weekend that was.  I say weekend, but, of course, it also encompassed Friday, as I now work reduced hours.  So it was a quite an extended weekend. Not that I went anywhere or did anything, really, but I did get through a lot of films.  They ranged from pure schlock to a genuine block buster.  The two which, hopefully, will eventually feature here were late period Hammer kung fu action flick Shatter and the utterly bizarre disco/vampire crossover Nocturna.  This latter film then set me off on another tangent.  Its eclectic casts included one 'Brother Theodore', whose name stirred some vague memories of him as some kind of comedic performer who was in vogue in the US back in the eighties.  I don't think he ever had any profile on this side of the Atlantic, but I was interested enough to do some research, finding that he was well known on the New York club scene in the forties and fifties for his surreal monologues, then faded from view, before re-emerging on the comedy club scene in the late seventies, (which was when he made his appearance in Nocturna).  In the eighties he became something of a regular on David Letterman's Late Show and I found myself watching a compilation of these appearances.  I'm still not entirely sure what to make of him - some of his schtick certainly wouldn't go down well today, particularly the stuff about liking teenaged girls (he was well into his seventies by the 1980s).  But that's part of the risks of his sort of apparently improvised stream-of-conciousness approach to performing.  Actually, I have admire Letterman for having the nerve to have such an unpredictable guest on a mainstream TV chat show so many times.

In between all the movie (and improvisational German comic performer) watching, there was a lot of sleeping.  I seem to do a lot of that these days. In part, it's down to the fantastical dreams I have these days - they are something to do with the various medication I take for my blood pressure.  They make me look forward to sleeping.  They are certainly a great deal more satisfying than much of my waking life.  Which brings us to the other main reason for sleeping so much: it is an escape from my mundane real life, in particular, work. Don't worry, I'm not going to go off on another diatribe about hoe appalling work is these days.  Indeed, that was the other thing I did this weekend: make a start of revising my CV with a view to submitting it to some agencies in order to test the waters with regard to employment opportunities. I've decided that I've to be positive - besides, even I've become tired of hearing myself moan, so I've decided to actually do something instead.  But all the good work I'd done and good mood I'd built up over the weekend was spoiled when I was foolish enough to look at the comments underneath an online article about the Supreme Court's deliberations on the Prime Minister's prorogation of parliament.  I know that I shouldn't have, experience should have told me that I would only be depressed by the sheer ignorance on display.  As ever, all the nutters were there, going on about courts usurping democracy and how it is all a plot to stop Brexit.  Jesus Christ!  For one thing, prorogation is a constitutional matter and part of the Supreme Court's role is to arbitrate on such matters, (moreover, the High Court didn't actually rule the prorogation legal, it decided that, as a constitutional matter, it was not within its juridstiction and referred it to the Supreme Court instead).  Also, it has nothing to do with Bresit per se, it is a question of whether the advice given to the Queen over dissolving parliament was correct and truthful.  But hey, like Brother Theodore was fond of saying, these people 'are not prisoners of logic'.