In a bit of news that’s making my eyes well up and my mouth water, Larry, the lobster who avoided being boiled and dipped in clarified butter by retiring to a Maine aquarium, has died at the ripe old age of a hundred and something—and he didn’t even make it all the way up north.
Reports US News:
Officials say the decades-old, 15-pound lobster succumbed during its journey from a Sunrise, Florida, restaurant to the Maine State Aquarium. The staff at the aquarium in West Boothbay Harbor unpacked the lobster and found it dead on Wednesday.
This sad story, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, is the exact combination—I’m talking a 33.333/33.333/33.333 split—of these three moments from popular culture: a Golden Girls episode entitled “Bringing Up Baby,” the ending of Seven, and a Red Lobster commercial. Allow me to explain:
- In “Bringing Up Baby,” the gals inherit a 29-year-old pig named Baby and are asked to care for it in its twilight years. Having a pig in the house is a big ask, sure, but they’re promised a huge sum of money when it dies—something like $100,000—so they agree to it. By the end of the episode, however, poor Baby is diagnosed with homesickness by a vet (god, I love that show), and the girls decide to forego their inheritance and let it live on a farm. It dies soon after arriving, and they lose out on the money.
- In Seven, Brad Pitt opens a box to a particularly depressing sight: the disembodied head of his wife, played by Gwyneth Paltrow.
- In Red Lobster commercials, the succulent flesh of dead lobsters is photographed being dipped in clarified butter.