Thursday, June 11

After watching Ryuichi play piano for Covid isolated I was ready to kill myself

If I could have gotten through the entire hour I might have learned it's a Japanese version of a Shaggy Dog Tale but I was so depressed after two minutes I wasn't going to stick around to find out. 


That explains how I ended up watching two three-minute parts of Episode 6, Season 2 of "Fawlty Towers," posted at YouTube. Those are the only parts posted at YouTube; the only free internet version of the complete episode is a horribly bad print and interrupted every 90 seconds or so by a lady spraying her hair with hair spray. But watching just six minutes of the rat hunt was enough to restore my good humor and faith in humanity.

If you never saw the episode, Wikipedia has an entire article describing it in detail. Look, just buy the episode if you're that interested. But if your introduction to the episode is the two parts at YouTube, it helps to know that the raw meat Basil Fawlty poisons with rat poison is veal, and that Basil learns it's accidentally gotten mixed up with the other raw veal in the kitchen refrigerator. 

As fate would have it, every lunch guest at the hotel that day, including the beleaguered health inspector, orders a veal dish. Of course the kitchen could've just thrown away all the veal rather trying to figure out which piece was poisoned, but then Fawlty Towers wouldn't be Fawlty Towers.

One other note: Manuel the waiter named the rat he adopted "Basil" -- clearly in honor of his boss -- so there are two Basils in the episode.  



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