Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Kyle Kesselring.

“You ate my homework?  I didn’t know dogs really did that.” – Bart Simpson

This week’s Reading Digest is shorter than most, but I have two and a half excuses.  The first is that for some reason the “Simpsons” tag on WordPress isn’t working correctly, and I often get several links from there.  The other one and a half excuses are the fact that we are sitting in between two talked about Zombie Simpsons episodes.  Last week they had two guest stars and one of them was playing Michelle Obama, this week Zombie Simpsons is going to Jerusalem.  Much like the whole “Marge in Playboy” thing, this has caused a flood shallow and uninteresting Simpsons commentary on-line.  When the signal to noise ratio gets this out of whack I have a hard time finding good stuff, and I’m much too lazy to plow through it all.  But we still have some usage (excellent and poor), a Zombie Simpsons fan who blunders right into a classic cliche, two links about Simpsons words, and two YouTubes of the same scene (one in German, one in Spanish). 

Enjoy.

DON’T BUY THIS!!!!! ~~"The Simpsons: The Complete Twentieth Season" – A rather wonderful review from Canadian Amazon. 

‘The Simpsons’: Their greatest gift to us? ‘Yoink.’ – In defense of “Yoink” as the best Simpsons contribution to the English language.  The real treat here is the comments section, which breaks out into a rash of quotes.  It goes for nine pages and I didn’t bother with them all, but there are, as you’d expect, very little Zombie Simpsons. 

Cartoons that still run after 10+ years – I never knew the color yellow was so powerful. 

‘The Simpsons’ is Still Awesome – I really should start cataloging these:

For the record, even when everyone else stopped watching "The Simpsons" I stuck with it. Admittedly some of the years out of the past decade have not been its finest, but if you were once a "Simpsons" fan and quit, you should really pick it back up.

This has occurred to me over the course of the current season, and specifically during a moment from the episode "Postcards From the Wedge."

Zombie Simpsons fan (“I stuck with it”) saying that it’s getting better.  How surprising. 

22 Theme Songs In 7 Minutes – This has been making the rounds recently.  It’s all teevee-theme songs.  I almost stopped it right away because it started with “Two and a Half Men”.  I saw seven seconds of that show once, almost killed me.  Anyway, the Simpsons part starts right after that but is only about seven bars long and bleeds almost immediately into “The OC”.  Feh.

Links for Wednesday – The word “Waterloo” has been getting thrown around a lot in political circles here in America this week.  This man had the proper response:

* And Jim DeMint gets Waterlooed. Hasn’t happened to a nicer guy since Mr. Burns. (Sorry, German and Spanish only!)

I cannot resist embedding such excellent YouTube:

I now have Abba stuck in my head.  It was worth it. 

The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down: Why I can’t get enough of those celebrity sex scandals – I consciously avoid celebrity news, but this is excellent usage:

Just because they once pretended in a movie, like Homer Simpson said, to be on “a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode! I think it was called, ‘The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down’”;

Don’t worry – Poor quotation here:

“Don’t worry son. You could wake up dead tomorrow.” – Homer Simpson, “The Simpsons”

The actual quote is:

“Don’t let Krusty’s death get you down, boy.  People die all the time, just like that.  Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow.” – Homer Simpson

The Simpsons like you’ve never seen them before: gambling, doing drugs and soliciting prostitutes – A bar in Shanghai has public service announcements (No Prostitution) with Simpsons characters.  Click this, it’s too fun to miss (via).

D’oh! – Simpsons grunt has global clout – This list is not cromulent – literally.

Cinematical Late Night: Little Brother, Miley Cyrus, Asian Film Awards & The Simpsons – And finally, I get to end with someone who agrees with us.  This is a catchall post most of which has nothing to do with the show; but in the course of mentioning the kiss montage from last week’s episode we get this:

I haven’t been watching The Simpsons with any regularity for some time now because, well, The Simpsons hasn’t been all that good for some time now.

Damn straight.