Farty Towels -- Writer's Poke #132

For Writers:

Sometimes it's just as much fun to watch my wife watching TV as it is to watch the TV itself.

Linda isn't squeamish. She can watch the most violent horror movie without any problem. It's the slapstick comedy that gets her every time.

Are you familiar with Fawlty Towers? If you've somehow missed this British sitcom, please quit reading this poke right now. You need to purchase the Complete Series DVD post haste.

What makes this series difficult for my wife to watch? It's the masterful use of farce -- taking the comedy of errors to the point that laughter itself becomes painful.

Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, isn't a bad man, but he always brings disaster upon himself, and while viewers understand that Fawlty gets what he deserves, on another level they also recognize that he is powerless to act in any way other than he does.

Fawlty simply tries to play the role he has been culturally designed to play, and when things inevitably go wrong, we feel badly for him. He is a man trapped in own faulty misinterpretations of culture and what it means to lead a successful life.

What faulty assumptions have you had, and how did you finally recognize that they were faulty?

"Let us carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us; and endeavor to excel them, by avoiding what is faulty, and imitating what is excellent in them." -- Plutarch

Comments

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it. Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years. Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him. Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog. https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...

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