“Ohhh doctor!  We are seconds away from the 100M Butterfly and with the East German, heh heh, women, shaving their backs 9,000 miles away, the Americans are heavy favorites.” – Not Keith Jackson

In our continuing mission to bring you only the finest in low class, low brow, and low tech internet Simpsons commentary we’re bringing back our “Crazy Noises” series and applying it to Season 21.  Because doing a podcast smacks of effort we’re still using this “chatroom” thing that all the middle schoolers and undercover cops seem to think is so cool.  This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “patriotism ”).

One of the nice things about actually posting these chats is that, unlike Dave and Mad Jon, if there’s something I forget to complain about I can rectify my omission by complaining about it now.  And when we did this chat I forgot to complain about the “opening ceremony” thing.  It goes on for a full minute and has, wait for it, two jokes.  It takes Costas fifteen seconds just to set up the one note Ivan Reitman gag which then drags on for another twenty seconds.  You could’ve kept all the jokes and gotten the whole opening ceremony scene down to ten seconds just by getting rid of the Costas exposition and not milking the “who you gonna call” thing.  But then you’d be fifty seconds further away from a “whole” episode.  They’re so transparently desperate to fill time that they might as well just give up and install a laughtrack.

Charlie Sweatpants: Shall we commence with the curling?

Mad Jon: Ok

Charlie Sweatpants: I’ll start by going out on a limb and saying that I hated this fucking episode.

Mad Jon: That may have been the worst episode I have seen in a long time. I would have to go back and check but I don’t think I say that too often. I think I usually say "That episode sucks" or something.

Dave: It was undoubtedly and unrepentantly stupid, a massive waste of 23 minutes of my life.

Charlie Sweatpants: The thing that really bothered me is that this is the kind of episode that they can sometimes scrape up to almost Season 12 standards. They’ve got a fresh topic to mock, they have the family go somewhere, there’s lots of new things.

Dave: It’s the copout setup, right?

Mad Jon: I think that has been a theme for the last few episodes.

Charlie Sweatpants: And yet, all they came up with was a bunch of montages, several curling scenes that were identical and two subplots so sparse that can’t even be called "B".

Mad Jon: But still, curling is terrible.

Charlie Sweatpants: Curling is like any other niche sport, it’s laughable to everyone who doesn’t love it. The same is true of NASCAR, ballroom dancing, and consensual sodomy.

Dave: It’s hard to mock something that no one cares about, and they didn’t even do a good job of it. It could’ve been any other sport really.

Mad Jon: I think that the only thing I thought was almost funny was when homer said "There’s a winter Olympics?"

Charlie Sweatpants: The montage, or what Homer said?

Dave: Are you guys getting my messages?

Mad Jon: Because that’s how I feel. I have tried to get into the winter Olympics. But each time I do I turn the TV on and see ski jump or curling round robin or sprint biathlon, and I lose any patriotism that may have been there.

Charlie Sweatpants: I got "It’s hard to mock something that no one cares about, and they didn’t even do a good job of it. It could’ve been any other sport really."

But I kind of ignored it. Don’t take it personally.

Mad Jon: And the montage was what I meant, with Santa on the diving board. It was bit of visual humor.

Dave: I won’t. I just got a red nastygram saying the group didn’t receive my chat.

Charlie Sweatpants: I hate it when that happens.

Mad Jon: I have had a couple of those tonight.

Charlie Sweatpants: It’s 2010, you’d think a company as evil and powerful as Google would’ve figured out a chat concept that AOL mastered in about 1994.

Whatever.

Dave: They’ve had a rough week. But I digress.

Charlie Sweatpants: I kinda liked the Santa montage until they showed him trapped under the ice, not that that wasn’t kinda funny, but as soon as he broke though my first thought was "he’s gonna be trapped under the ice" and then when they did it I was massively disappointed.

Mad Jon: Yeah, but I knew it would end poorly and stopped paying attention 4.5 seconds in.

Charlie Sweatpants: I mentioned this in the recap post, but I did laugh at the Swedes, "Joy is but the shadow pain casts."

Mad Jon: Oh yea, I liked the Swedes. The first time at least.

Dave: Out of context that’s funny, yeah.

Mad Jon: I thought I was going to have to turn in my resignation after the Mrs. Skinner montage.

That was almost it.

Charlie Sweatpants: That whole pole vault thing? That was awful.

Dave: Angry, spiteful Agnes is funny. Regretful, bitter Agnes is not.

Mad Jon: Real terrible.

Charlie Sweatpants: You’ve got it there Dave, when Agnes is sad we have to pity her and pity for old women is not something I enjoy. When she’s angry she’s funny.

Also, their goofy reconciliation at the end was nauseating.

Dave: Would you have it any other way?

Mad Jon: I now have another reason to wish for a meteorite to hit Bob Costas.

So I got that going for me too.

Charlie Sweatpants: He’s pretty small, the usually astronomical odds against that are even worse for him.

While we’re on Costas, I have a bone to pick.

Mad Jon: Go for it.

Charlie Sweatpants: When he talks about how Olympic coverage feeds on tragedy, that could’ve been great. But it wasn’t because it was exactly the kind of fake self deprecation that sports announcers actually do.

If they’d had him darkly muttering about how awesome it was that Marge was hurt it might’ve worked, but instead they just had him reciting the kind of pat, harmless crap that he does in real life.

I wasn’t surprised, they did the exact same thing when they had Mitch Albom on, but still. Targets this show once bit into it now gums for awhile and then lets go.

Mad Jon: Now why don’t you criticize the quartet on the deck of the Titanic.

Charlie Sweatpants: The violin player was half a beat behind the whole night!

Mad Jon: But in seriousness, I agree with what you just said.

Charlie Sweatpants: About the violin player?

Dave: About everything, I think.

Charlie Sweatpants: Sorry, I was going for Moe in Flanders’ bomb shelter there but I forgot you can’t hear me.

Mad Jon: I can’t think of a sports commenter other than Keith Jackson who I don’t want to not be alive any more.

And Dave was right.

Dave: People tell me that quite often.

Mad Jon: Well then you are a better man than I.

Charlie Sweatpants: While we’re on the topic of weak subplots, on a scale of one to incessant, broken smoke alarm how annoying was Lisa’s subplot?

Dave: Incessant with a touch of odiousness for good measure.

Charlie Sweatpants: Are we then agreed that Lisa’s subplot was so boring and pointless that we have nothing to say about it?

Dave: I think you were building to something, but otherwise agreed

Mad Jon: Yeah, that was pretty bad.

Pin addiction? Really? Couldn’t it have been some British Colombian delicacy or something?

Dave: Oh god, I just remembered the upside down dancing muzzle.

What did I do to deserve that?

Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, if ever there was cry in pain for needing fifteen extra seconds, that was it.

Dave: To whom was that supposed to appeal?

Charlie Sweatpants: Though Homer’s little speech about curling was awfully bad as well.

I think it was supposed to be from Henry V, but the only thing that tipped me off was the background music. What a blatant time eater.

Mad Jon: I was definitely a little more ashamed than normal while watching that bit.

Charlie Sweatpants: Though blatant time eater was more of a theme to this episode than curling.

Mad Jon: Touche salesman.

Dave: What’s the opposite of shame?

Mad Jon: Pride?

Dave: No, not that far from shame.

Mad Jon: Less shame?

Dave: Yeah.

Charlie Sweatpants: The hallucination, the bobsled thing, the repetitive curling scenes, even the Three Stooges thing, everything was stretched, even by the standards of Zombie Simpsons. Those were pretty far from shame and pride. Indifference, I think, was quite close.

Mad Jon: I wish I could do my job drunk, you know, like a Zombie Simpson writer.

Charlie Sweatpants: That may be giving them too much credit. Maybe the rotisserie chicken place changed their spices.

Dave: Arsenic.

Mad Jon: "Ok guys, think of an Olympic sport to lampoon this winter. You know, like… Curling. Only more dynamic and interesting!"

"…Curling ok with you guys?"

Charlie Sweatpants: Uh-huh.

Okay, do we have anything else to say about this?

Mad Jon: I’m cashed.

Dave: Me too.

Charlie Sweatpants: Well then, I hereby declare us all gold medal winners.