Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that I’ve seldom seen an entire episode of The Simpsons.
(Once they learn my last name, even people who don’t know me take it on faith that I must be a fan. When I was living in Virginia, pre-The Missus, I had a Saturday-night ritual which in part involved placing a pizza order at the Domino’s in the center of town, and then driving in to pick it up a few minutes later. The first time the kid who took phone orders asked my name, he busted out laughing. “Bart,” he said without explanation, “is that you?” I probably went to that Domino’s at least fifty times thereafter and every time — whether taking my order or when I arrived to pick it up — he greeted me with a hearty “Bart!” When I moved away, I should have stopped by Domino’s one last time to give him a token of some kind — a used copy of Crossed Wires, at least, the pages marked here and there with greasy thumbprints and a bookmark of crust or pepperoni. But, duh, I didn’t.)
Anyway, although I haven’t seen the show that much, I have picked up plenty of the in-jokes and recurring elements which have made their way into the general culture, elements like the very last view of the family, sitting on the couch at the end of the opening credits, in an apparently infinite number of variations of the same pose(s). I’ve seen plenty of Simpsons quotes used in email and forum sigs. I know that the exclamation “D’oh!” doesn’t translate to Duh, as one might expect, but more like something on the order of Oh, CRAP.
(Naturally, I’m expecting to be descended upon by show geeks to point out the nuances — why Homer doesn’t, for instance, simply say Oh, CRAP because in Season 2, Episode 11, he was etc. etc. etc.; and/or why, for another instance, D’oh! doesn’t mean Oh, CRAP! exactly, as I certainly could have figured out on my own if I’d just done some simple research, even Wiki-freaking-pedia got that much right, dude!)
Anyway, again, at least I knew enough about the show to be surprised that no one else, using one of the online time-sink toys at hetemeel.com, had apparently thought of this:
