an idiot abroad india — 1 investigation, briefly

in india the show pointed at a microwave-sized appliance and karl asked the obvious question. i remember the question. it was: does this need to spin. the answer, depending on continent, varies. in my kitchen the plate has not spun in 14 months. the food still gets warm. i still get fed.

this is the kind of detail that lodges in my head and refuses to leave. a man on a tv show, in a kitchen that was not his, asking whether a thing was supposed to rotate. the locals, calm. the appliance, calm. only karl, mildly bothered.

so. one investigation, briefly, conducted from the desk while carla sits through an annual planning meeting on the third floor. i have something close to forty minutes before she comes back with a printout and a sigh. plenty of time for a small piece about a small show about a small kitchen on a different continent.

what an idiot abroad india refers to

so the show. an idiot abroad as a whole is the premise where two clever men send a less clever man to places, on purpose, to see what he says. india is one of the stops in the first run. there is a taj mahal. there is a kitchen. there is karl, looking at things with the patience of a man who has been told he will enjoy this and is not enjoying this.

i am not going to pretend i remember every minute of every episode. i remember the kitchen. i remember the plate question. i remember a tie that someone wore in the hotel lobby that looked exactly like a tie i own, which is the kind of detail that ruins a viewing for me forever. once i see my own tie on someone else’s neck on someone else’s continent i can no longer follow the plot.

this is not the show’s fault. this is a me thing.

the spinning plate theory

here is the part that stayed with me. an idiot abroad india had a moment, brief, in a kitchen, where karl noticed that a piece of equipment was not behaving the way the equivalent piece of equipment behaves in his country. and he asked, out loud, the obvious question. and the people in the kitchen, who use the equipment every day, did not have a complicated answer. it just was the way it was.

let me tell you something about appliances. a spinning plate inside a microwave is a piece of theatre. it is a small lazy susan for radiation. you put your soup on it. you press a button. the plate rotates. you watch the soup go around in slow circles like a child on a small carousel. and then a beep tells you the soup is warm.

but if you remove the plate. and you put the soup on the floor of the microwave. the soup, eventually, gets warm.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, about whether the spin meaningfully changes the warming. i don’t have the study. i have a microwave and a soup. i have evidence. evidence is what you have when you live alone and run experiments out of laziness.

why the microwave plate doesn’t need to spin

here is the hot take, signed and dated. the microwave plate doesn’t need to spin. i’ll defend it. i defend it to the seventh microwave. i defend it to the third yoga mat under the couch. i defend it from this desk while carla is upstairs.

the microwave i currently own is the seventh i have killed in this kitchen. i am not proud. i am informed. and the seventh has a plate that has not rotated since february of last year, because i wedged a small plastic clip under it during a cleaning episode and forgot. the food still warms. the soup still beeps. the universe continues. microwave_seventh, to be specific, is doing fine.

SPIN IS THEATRE. HEAT IS HEAT.

karl, watching the kitchen scene, was witnessing this exact realization in real time. a piece of equipment doing its job without the choreography we attached to it. on his face you could see a man recalculating his entire relationship to his own kitchen.

examples of episodes i couldn’t finish

i will admit it. i started the india leg three times. i finished it twice. once i fell asleep at a moment that was not, by any reasonable measure, sleepy — there was a market scene, there were colors, there was a man explaining a structure — and i still went under like a stone in a pond.

this is not a review. i refuse to review the show. i am not qualified. karl is not qualified. that is the whole bit.

here is what stefan, a man at the bar who has opinions on documentaries he has not watched, told me when i mentioned this draft. stefan said the show is “anthropology in a tracksuit” and then ordered another wine. stefan once said wine was “philosophy in a glass” and i wrote it on a napkin and then lost the napkin and now this paragraph is the only place stefan exists this week. anyway. stefan’s review of the india leg, from a man who has not watched the india leg, is that “the plate thing is the entire show, just embedded.” stefan may be right. stefan is sometimes right by accident.

i have, by the count i keep running, three episodes of this series i can watch end to end. india is one. i credit the kitchen scene. the kitchen scene is the load-bearing wall.

verdict, signed from desk

so. the small piece. an idiot abroad india is a brief travel segment in a brief travel show in which a regular man notices a regular thing about a regular appliance and thereby produces, accidentally, a very small philosophy. the philosophy is: appliances do not require choreography to function. food does not require ceremony to warm. neither, probably, do most weeks.

i think a great deal about this. i think about it more than the makers of the show would like. i suspect they made it for laughs. i took it home and made it a hot take. that’s on me.

and yes — i know the slug here says india, but the broader piece of context is the same one i keep returning to in any post about the broader stupid-as-method idea. an idiot, abroad or otherwise, is just a man asking the question the room agreed to stop asking. that is the trick. that is what the show is. that is also, on bad days, what i do at this desk.

further reading, if you have not already done it: the broader an idiot abroad overview, the mexico leg, and the series notes. all conducted from this desk. all timestamped at 9:03am on a thursday i no longer trust.