Tag: Two Bad Neighbors

“Just gonna relax with my U.S. News and World whatnot.  Ah, good, roasting the new guy.” – Bush the Elder Before we get to this week’s links, I’d like to show you something that illustrates just how different the attitude of the Zombie Simpsons writing staff is from that of The Simpsons.  Yesterday, Matt Selman, who is the longtime second-in-command at Zombie Simpsons and who’s been running some of his own episodes the last two seasons, tweeted this: Zombie Simpsons has long acted as unpaid advertising for businesses The Simpsons genuinely mocked, but it’s another level of commercial apathy to have one of the head writers take to Twitter and personally help his “pals” at Axe advertise the shitty and laughably stupid perfume they sell to insecure and sexually naive adolescents.  (Selman, by the way, is in his 40s.)  Twitter didn’t exist twenty years ago, but it’s damn hard to imagine the guys who wrote the beer parody ad where dour feminists turn into giddy bikini babes at a splash of Duff personally endorsing Budweiser or Miller Lite in their spare time, much less repeating the ads they mocked so harshly.  That tweet is some shameful shit. In more pleasant Simpsons news, the big story this week was the release of official pictures of the new Lego Simpsons set.  There were uncountable tweets, blog posts, and articles about this, but there’s only one link below because all of them were just reposting the same pictures and information.  In addition to that, we’ve got two links each this week to people getting themselves Simpsonized and politicians invoking the show to lambaste their enemies.  And in addition to that, we’ve got quite a few excellent fan made drawings, some excellent usage, several people who agree with us, and some real life turnip juice, just like they make in Shelbyville. The Merciless Peppers of Quetzalacatenango – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this scientist’s discussion of those merciless peppers: When Homer just barely puts one of these peppers on his tongue, it burns so much he has to find something to drink; beer is at hand, but he doesn’t drink it only dipping his tongue in it to remove the heat (capsaicin is not water soluble, but is in fat, so milk or drinking straight up butter is the way to go, alcohol actually makes it worse), Say cheese! You’re being Simpsonized – The first of our two Simpsonizing posts this week has the entire process, from sketch to done, of Simpsonizing a picture of two young women.  Looks great. You Can Add Lego’s Simpson Set To Your Must Have List For 2014 – All New Pics AND A Video! – Lots and lots of pics from the Lego set, including a video of nice Scandinavian people explaining how they were designed.  You can buy it next month for $200 (ouch). Turn Your Handsome Face into a Simpsons Cartoon – The “Simpsonize Me” site has been dead for a few years now,…

“Okay, son, give him the glue!” – Homer Simpson If you were reading about American television on the internet this week, you likely encountered the uber-stupid nontroversy over ex-President Bush the Younger and HBO media darling Game of Thrones.  It’s not worth tracking down in full, but the basic story is that someone was watching the DVD commentary for the final episode of Season 1.  On it, the two guys who run the show noted that in a shot where there are a bunch of heads on spikes, one of the anonymous ones in the background was a George W. Bush replica head.  The person watching the commentary made a note of it on Reddit, and since Reddit and politics are far more explosive than pop rocks and Coke, here you are still reading about it several days later even though nobody should’ve cared in the first place.  Topless Robot had one of the calmer write ups I saw: • This was not done as any kind of political statement at all. • Indeed, production just needed severed heads, and the prop department had a Bush head laying about. • As you can tell from the pic — which is a severe close-up of part of the shot where Joffrey makes Sansa look at her dad’s head on a pike and not an actual shot in the show — they put a wig on it and turned it away from the camera to minimize the chance anyone could tell it was Bush. • In fact, no one would have even know it was Bush except that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss mentioned that it’s Bush in episode 10 director’s commentary track. Here is the picture that was making the rounds: First of all, I would pay several dollars to see Bush the Younger grow his hair out like that.  More importantly, here’s what the actual shot looked like: The old woman’s head in the middle is the actual focus of the shot, Bush’s head is incidental and likely would’ve gone noticed by precisely no one if it hadn’t been on the commentary, which was itself released months ago.  This is the very definition of unimportant, so naturally everyone panicked, HBO apologized, the Game of Thrones people apologized, and by this time next week no one’s going to remember it except the occasional Game of Thrones fan who a) cares enough to figure out where it is, b) rewatches the first season, and c) still remembers that this is the shot by the time they get all the way to the end of Season 1.  The only reason I care enough about this to write it up is because I think Game of Thrones should be ashamed of itself.  Not for putting Bush’s head on a spike, but for being so foolishly coy about it.  If you’re going to put a divisive, right-wing President’s head on a spike, just go ahead and fucking do it: As usual, Simpsons did it…