The Simpsons Marathon is Coming to FXX: Set your DVRs for these 25 episodes
Simpsons Universe
FXX starts their Simpsons marathon this Thursday, 8/21 at 10am. 25 seasons, 552 episodes. A metric fuckton of Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, Selma, Patti, Flanders, Kang, Kodos, Dr. Hibert, Sideshow Bob, Krusty, Milhouse, Nelson’s “Ha-Has!” and even Cletus and Brandine. R.I.P. Troy McClure.
Many near the tail end are barely worth watching, but who cares, the first 10 seasons or so were golden. Many will argue the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” episode jumped the shark but it continued to be great for many years, and even today, an occasional episode does good and doesn’t make you pine for the good ol’ days. (Admittedly rare.)
The Simpsons might be the greatest thing ever put on TV. Conservatives hated it (of course, because they hate everything) and it was considered crude trash by the cultured gentry of yesteryear.
Today, it’s a cultural cornerstone to a whole generation (X?) and the episodes have not only aged well but somehow remain eerily relevant. (See The Cartridge Family.)
Let’s say you’re a happenin’ person with a life and will only have time for 25 episodes. Set your DVRs for these 25 — whether seeing them for the first time or revisiting, they embody what The Simpsons did best: snark, humor, commentary, and cultural criticism. (Too lazy to put them in particular order.)
- Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire (S1E1!)
- The Cartridge Family
- Homer the Great (the Stonecutters episode)
- City of New York vs. Homer Simpson
- Homer’s Phobia
- Marge vs. The Monorail
- King Size Homer
- Bart after Dark
- Lisa the Vegetarian
- Mr. Plow
- Two Dozen and One Greyhounds
- Bart gets an Elephant
- Homer Badman
- $pringfield
- Treehouse of Horror I-X
- Dog of Death
- Colonel Homer
- Bart vs. Australia
- A Fish Called Selma
- Itchy & Scratchy Land
- Marge Be Not Proud
- One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish
- Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish
- The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular
- Deep Space Homer
- The Last Temptation of Krusty
- The Springfield Files
Yeah, a couple bonus episodes, and will likely add more.
What to Watch
Frontline: News War, a 4-part series starting tonight.
Readers didn’t need a week of front-page stories about diaper-wearing astronauts and the alleged cultural significance of Anna Nicole Smith to tell them that the Fourth Estate is having an identity crisis.
[…]
The 4 1/2-hour “News War” series traces the pathology crippling the media business — financially and legally — back to the days of the Nixon administration.
TiVo DRM Cracked
Get to it before the lawyers do!
On a Mac:
tar xvf tivodecode-0.1.2 cd tivodecode-0.1.2 make clean make tivodecode
The binary’s in objects.dir. Galleon’s good for pulling, VLC will play it, use ffmpegx or something to convert if you want QT/iPod friendly.
TiVo’s got no one to blame but themselves after having no TiVo2Go for the Mac for like 2 years. I’m surprised it took as long as it did.
TiVo Series 3 p0rn
TiVo Series 3. In the wild. Here.
Cablecard, yay! HD, yay! 3 years too late, boo! But, note to TiVo: be damn thankful all the Cable companies offer crap DVRs right now. The next round will not be so easy and you can not be so lax.
Also, confirmed: the box will cost $800, as expected.
Fox Fucktardery
Fox decided to cut ~2 seconds off The Family Guy tonight where Peter offers Lois a “Cleveland Steamer.”
WTF? Don’t wanna offend the precious Clevelandites? Doesn’t bode well for the new episodes coming in March.
Morally Bankrupt HDTV
Comcast picked up Fox in HDTV today in SF — channel 702.
Sweet Jesus, that dream of inspecting Paula Abdul’s pores in minute detail can finally be satisfied!
Kerry on Stewart
Make sure to watch tonight. Should be funny…
Last night on The Daily Show:
…and tomorrow night of course, Senator John Kerry will be our guest.
[ooooohhhhs from the audience]
You don’t… You don’t believe me? He actually will be our guest. Our audiences’ disbelief not-with-standing.
[audience laughs]
And from what I understand, I could be being punk’d. They said he was gonna be here. And, and the audience that night gets a free bike. John Kerry and a free bike! AND… AND… Massage with release! for the whole audience! That’s tomorrow night, tomorrow night… Tonight the audience will exit through a gauntlet of fire.
The TiVo Dilemma
As TiVo stock continues to tumble, a lot is being said about the future of the company amongst an onslaught of cheap cable- and sat-based offerings. Will it boutique itself ala Apple and become an obscure fascination of elite geekboys, or will it take the software approach with the acquisition of Strangeberry and its’ buffet o’ patents? The latter seems to be the current approach, smart considering the notoriously harsh and painfully thin margins of the hardware business.
But the reality on the ground today is summed up beautifully in BoingBoing:
I can’t begin to say how much I despise the Explorer 8000 digital video recorder made by Scientific-Atlanta. That’s the system Time-Warner gave us when my wife signed us up for cable service a few weeks ago. I was out of town on the day they were scheduled to install it, so I told my wife to make sure the DVR was real TiVo, because I’d played with a TiVo belonging to my friend, and thought it was just about perfect. The service tech came and told her it was real TiVo. When I got back and saw that the ugly box didn’t have a happy bipedal TV set logo on it, I was disappointed, but willing to give it a try. The first thing I noticed was the crappy user interface…
[snip]
This last flaw hit home when the machine suddenly stopped recording shows. I tried everything I could to get it to work, including rebooting the system and calling Time Warner Cable customer service. They told me that they’d have to replace the unit, which would take five days.
Five days later a service technician came with a new box. I asked him if this problem was common, because Google returns a lot of pages from people who think the Explorer 8000 is a piece of junk. He said the system is fine as long as you didn’t store too many shows on it. If you fill up the hard drive, the system freezes up, and there’s no way a user can undo it. But how do you know when the disk is close to being full if there’s no gage to tell you? The service tech’s answer: “don’t keep very many shows on the hard drive.” That pretty much defeats the purpose of a DVR, doesn’t it?
He also warned me not to put anything on top of it, as it was notorious for overheating and seizing up. I told him I was considering TiVo, but he insisted the Explorer 8000 was better than TiVo. How so, I asked? “We will give you a new one if it breaks,” he said.
[snip]
Yesterday I was at Best Buy, and I noticed that 40-hour TiVos were on sale for $50 after rebate. I bought one and set it up. What a difference! If TiVo were a beverage, it’d be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old.
I can’t wait to get the Explorer 8000 out of my house. Why did Time Warner make a deal with this company?
comments