“What’s your favorite subject?” – Dr. Hibbert “Arithmetic.” – Lisa Simpson “Oh, arithmetic. Now, before you know it, you will be back among your polygons, your hypotenuse, and your Euclidean algorithms.” – Dr. Hibbert As an academic subject, math has always stood at the extreme end, as the hardest of the “hard” sciences. Even physics has uncertainty built right into it; math simply has things that have not yet been proven. That’s all well and good for mathematicians when it comes to inter-disciplinary dick measuring contests, but it also makes math more abstract and difficult to explain to the uninitiated.…
Category: Reviews
Unfortunately, Agreeing With Us Isn’t Enough
“Well, what do you think?” – Homer Simpson “This is a joke, right?” – Springfield Shopper Editor Thought Catalog is one of those small, independent new media outlets that’s trying to make its place in this brave new on-line publishing world. Their about page is full of noble sentiments and phrases like “an experimental media group”, “We believe all thinking is relevant”, and “help shape culture by empowering you”. Their shtick is to be “value neutral” editorially, which means that you can publish a piece there about whatever the hell’s on your mind provided that you can string two words…
Reading Digest: Retroactive Conan O’Brien Edition
“You know, Conan, I have a lot to say. I’m not just a one line wonder. Did you know that a section of rain forest the size of Kansas is burned every single-” – Bart Simpson “Just do the line.” – Conan O’Brien We’ve got two links to the tall Irishman today, one from the man himself. O’Brien got Jean, Reiss, Jay Kogen and Jeff Martin to sit down and talk about the show. The link we have is just the preview, but the whole thing will be up on Monday. The other O’Brien link is a look back at…
The Longest Daycare: Maggie in the Spotlight
“We didn’t invite the other babies. Maggie doesn’t seem to get along with the other babies.” – Lisa Simpson Though I still haven’t seen it a second time, after a weekend of mulling it over, “The Longest Daycare” is doing that thing that high quality movies/television shows/books do where it gets better the more I think about it. The story is sweet without being saccharine, exciting without being scary, and plausible without being fanciful. The animation is very similar to the movie and HD Zombie Simpsons, but there’s a not-quite dreamlike quality to it that makes it fit in will…
Longest Daycare Open Thread
“Don’t like to nap, eh? We have a place for babies like you: the box.” – Ms. Sinclair On a single viewing, The Longest Daycare, which premiered this morning in theaters near and far with Ice Age 4, was very good. I say on a single viewing because this has the feel of elder seasons way more than the movie did, and way way more than Zombie Simpsons does (including the animation), so I’m sure once it inevitably finds its way to home video most Simpsons fans will watch it at least a couple of times. I’ve changed my opinion…
Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play: Enjoyed By All
By Hank Pumpkins Let me start out by saying this: I both love to pretend, and am horrible at, being a journalist, a profession where my egocentrism is at odds with my sheer obliviousness. Which explains why I showed up to the Wooly Mammoth Theatre haughty with lofty perceptions of how I would craft my review-de-resistance—and also why I showed up looking like a sweaty bum, wearing a White Sox cap, my trusty Toms loafers, and a t-shirt of Boba Fett if he were a dog (“Boba Fetch”, a bartender explained to me later—like I said, oblivious). Were I a…
Why Teevee Sucks (The Book)
“Mr. Blackheart?” – Lisa Simpson “Yes, my pretty?” – Mr. Blackheart “Are you an ivory dealer?” – Lisa Simpson “Little girl, I’ve had lots of jobs in my day, whale hunter, seal clubber, president of the FOX Network, and like most people, yeah, I’ve dealt a little ivory.” – Mr. Blackheart A few weeks ago, a reader (thanks Steve!) e-mailed me with a PDF copy of an unpublished book written by a longtime television writer named Andrew Nicholls. Nicholls and Darrell Vickers, his writing partner, have been typing away for television since the 80s, including a number of recognizable titles…
Zombie Simpsons Ruins Another List
Zombie Simpsons has cheaply cashed in on the success of its preeminent forerunner in many, many, ways. One of the most prominent is by cramming musical guests into episodes with little to no purpose and few, if any, jokes. This list, which purports to be the top ten musical guests, contains only 60% real Simpsons. The White Stripes, Lionel Ritchie, Metallica and Green Day all make the cut from Zombie Simpsons (or the movie), but none of the following from actual good episodes do: Tito Puente (Who Shot Mr. Burns 1 & 2) Cypress Hill (Homerpalooza) Peter Frampton (Homerpalooza) Tony…
An Unmitigated Crime Against Storytelling
“What happened to Mindy?” – Bart Simpson “Yes, what did happen to her?” – Marge Simpson “Enh, she hit the bottle pretty hard and lost her job.” – Homer Simpson “Hm, good.” – Marge Simpson I am not a big fan of Season 12’s “Trilogy of Error”. (In case you’ve blocked it out that’s the one where Lisa invents the robot, Homer gets his thumb cut off and three different stories all unfold at once.) But I do recognize that it took a lot of skill to weave three stories together like that. Getting all those little elements to drop…
You Forgot Someone (updated)
“Marge, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell anybody about my busy hands. Not so much for myself, but I am so respected it would damage the town to hear it.” – Artie Ziff Today a website called “The Top 13” (they make – you guessed it – Top 13 lists) ranked the top thirteen guest voices on the Simpsons. The best part about it is that there is nary a trace of Zombie Simpsons. Indeed, this is from the intro: But as the show has changed over time, in our view the quality of the guest appearances has…
Morgan Spurlock Doesn’t Like Zombie Simpsons
“Look Bart, it almost killed me but I handcrafted all seventy-five characters from ‘Oliver Twist’. And now, the coup-de-grace, a bitter snowstorm.” – Lisa Simpson They say it is best to judge a man not by his words but by his actions. By that criteria I would like to thank Morgan Spurlock for publicly disparaging Zombie Simpsons – on FOX itself. To the untrained eye it looked like he was just eating an orange, but to the eye that has brains he was making a guerilla point about Zombie Simpsons. It took a disturbing amount of my (admittedly not very…
Spurlock Update: Ah, Fuck
From a review of Spurlock’s special: If there’s a weakness in the anniversary show, it’s that Spurlock doesn’t delve too far into the issue of how challenging it is for the series to live up to the impossibly high bar it set for itself in the 1990s. Creator Matt Groening chuckles at one point about how fans are so invested in the show, they have no reservations about being intensely critical right to his face. That sets up a tremendous quote by Simpsons writer Matt Warburton, who says dryly, "I think the Internet message boards used to be a lot…
DHS Book Review: The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History
“Marge, I’m bored.” – Homer Simpson “Why don’t you read something?” – Marge Simpson “Because I’m trying to reduce my boredom.” – Homer Simpson In countless discussions with other Simpsons fans over the years the one question that always seems to come up is “Why?”, as in “Why did the show get so bad?” I’ve heard a lot of different theories which always seem to boil down to something overly simple, ‘this guy left’, ‘that guy took over as show runner’, ‘they just ran out of topics/ideas’. The reality, as John Ortved documents exhaustively in his new book “The Simpsons:…
Synergy Works at Conde Nast Too
Yesterday I finished reading our free(!) copy of John Ortved’s new book “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History”. Given that I am a long winded bastard and that there’s a lot to cover (for Simpsons fans and loathers of Zombie Simpsons) we’ll probably have some lengthy posts about it coming up. The short verdict is that it’s mostly awesome and was a very fun read. For today though we’re going to take a look at some of the synergistic on-line publicity the book has started to garner. First up is The New Yorker which fills its word count by blathering…
A Good Sign
I don’t know how many of you follow us on Twitter. Jebus knows I wouldn’t, our Twitter feed is just shy of 100% pointless, even by our standards. But its one useful function was getting us a promotional copy of the new Simpsons book by John Ortved, “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History”. I’ve just started reading it, and I’m sure we’ll be doing more with it in the coming weeks, but this sentence on page 7 is very encouraging: Around Season 9, it hit a point where the characters and situations became so exaggerated, the comedy so dispensable, and…
The Pictures Speak For Themselves
Last night’s seriously unfunny and slapdash episode may as well have been titled “Homer Does Dumb Shit For 20+ Minutes… Again.” No, we’re not killjoys, we just call them like we see them. Here’s the proof, presented chronologically and without comment, in eleven screengrabs. Does the first shot mean that the creators of Zombie Simpsons have been reading our blog and taking our name rather literally? I’d like to think so.