In traditional fish-slapping song

[austin_dern]

(Unavoidably delayed: power outage. I forgot how much I don't like power outages.)

BBC America has resumed airing Monty Python's Flying Circus, and I'm glad for that even though I have got several of the DVDs sitting somewhere in my boxes first because, as I've mentioned, there's something wonderful in the feeling of catching something which I like when you didn't make any conscious plan to see it and the reaffirmation of my tastes by the invisible and semi-conscious hand of the network programmer is a heartening one. The commercials leading up to this said they were showing episodes remastered in some way, which would seem to raise the prospect of maybe being able to make them out when they get thick into those impossible and obscure English accents which apparently amuse some English people, although that doesn't seem to be a serious risk.

And there's the fun in discovering sketches that go forgotten entirely because they haven't been turned into .sig files or get quoted extensively in the midst of otherwise pleasant online conversations, such as the band of gangsters planning very elaborately the purchase of a watch for £5/18/3 (``We don't seem to be doing anything illegal.'' ... -- eventually -- ... ``Ken, shave all your hair off, get your passport, and meet me at this address in Rio de Janero.'') or it not being a lifeboat but rather this lady's house (``You're right -- this isn't a lifeboat at all.'' ``No, I wouldn't live here if it was'') or the cheese shop that hasn't got any (``You haven't asked me about limburger, sir.'' ``Is it worth it?'' ``Could be''). Still, it's not changing my opinion that the animated segments can usually be safely skipped, and that bit early on where they would have two or three words in a sentence delivered by a cutaway to a Viking or Mongol Horde or something really wasn't as funny as it probably seemed in the writing room.

It probably does show a healthy bit of my personality that I spent the time during the Confuse-A-Cat sketch watching the middle cat to follow her reactions. While I was naturally amused by the George Melies-esque whimsy of the efforts to confuse the screen cat, the actual cat just looked vaguely in the television's direction and didn't sow any signs of confusion or interest. Perhaps she's not nerdly enough to appreciate their sense of humor.

Trivia: The original printing of Robert's Rules of Order was four thousand copies, by S C Griggs Company (of Chicago), of which one thousand were given away free to legislators, professors, legal authorities, and such. The rest were sold out in four months. Source: Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: Challenge To Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945 - 1974, Asif A Siddiqi.

Comments

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

How about the Bookseller sketch?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yes, or, John Cleese the merchant banker admitting, ``Let me tell you that our management consultants actually queried the necessity for us to employ a pantomime horse at all.''