Please stand by..

Please stand by...

 

Please stand by....

 

Life is just a little hectic this week. Normal service will resume on Monday.

Please stand by.....

Please stand by......

 

Please stand by.......

 

I feel so seen by Family Guy

All the cool kids sneer at me when I say how much I still enjoy watching Family Guy, when like everybody else I've long given up on the Simpsons. Sometimes I get the lecture about how all the non-sequitur jokes have no merit, because all comedy comes from plot, story and character - but that doesn't explain slapstick, and you're not human if you think slapstick can't be funny.

So while the scatological nature of the jokes might comedy nerds crazy, it also makes it timeless and still sometimes genuinely funny. It pushes that divide between funny and offensive - and often fails by any reasonable measure - and nobody ever really learns anything, which is essential.

But sometimes - just sometimes - it nails a mode of behavior that I recognise in myself and am deeply embarrassed about, and tells me more about how I think and interact with the world than a hundred high-end dramas about murder in the Hamptons ever will.

As an aging white male, there is a frequent bombardment of jokes at my expense, and I say bring it on. While it doesn't come close to the start of some kind of repayment for centuries of rank and foul privilege, we could all use that kind of headfuck. But when it says out loud a thought I've always kept to myself, I feel so seen.

There is a blackness behind everything

It's okay, Johnny. I remember the first time I saw the blackness behind everything, while waiting outside the arthouse movie theatre in Dunedin on a sunny day, and saw that the world was painted on a dark canvas, and that you can see that blackness if you look hard enough.

It's okay to freak out about the chasm of clams, because I think it's scary as shit too, man.

The first Mad Max is the scariest

The second Mad Max film is absolute the greatest Australian film ever made - The Castle is a close second - because it's balls to the wall action, full of leather raiders and speed injections and good mad Aussie bastards who break their legs for a stunt and come back for the reshoots in a cast.

But the first film is still the most unsettling, because it's the only one that's not post-apocalyptic, it's straight-up apocalyptic. The world is still recognisable, with places where you can get a beer or a milkshake or a fried breakfast. It's a white line nightmare out of the streets, but there is still an economy, there aren't any nuked-out cities.

In this year of plague on the streets and turkeys in power, that recognisability is disconcerting as fuck. We're not in the age of the Humongous or Immortan Joe not yet, but Toecutter could be out there right now, ready to swoop in like a vulture and feed on the decaying society.

See you on the roads, skags.