“Please take the fries off my head, kid. The basket is extremely hot.”
Today is an excruciatingly slow news day, so this story is about “United Plates of America,” an ambitious reality show greenlit by NBC in which the winning contestant is awarded a restaurant chain.
A group of would-be restaurateurs will compete to impress a panel of wealthy investors from the cooking and business world. Challenges will test competitors’ savvy on such subjects as their restaurant’s concept, menu and marketability and their ability to manage staff…
The show’s winner will receive a restaurant chain that opens in four locations in various U.S. cities on the night of the show’s season finale. [THR]
My pitch: “Good food, good fun, and a whole bunch a crazy crap on the walls!” Do I win? What if my deep frier can flash-fry a buffalo in six seconds?
The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History is a new book out this week from Faber and Faber, an expansion of author John Ortved’s 2007 article for Vanity Fair. In a blog post for The Daily Beast, Ortved outlines the difficulties he had writing the story, largely because James L. Brooks and Matt Groening put the clamps down when they heard that Ortved was asking about deposed producer/writer Sam Simon, who left the show after the fourth season. A snippet (emphasis mine):
Groening was not considered a great asset by many in The Simpsons writers room; he was not a sitcom writer and didn’t really didn’t know how to tell those kinds of stories, and Sam Simon let him know it. Once while discussing a script where Marge finally lets her hair down, Matt really wanted to reveal that underneath her beehive, Marge had Rabbit ears—Sam, of course, said no. One witness to the early days was particularly annoyed that Groening took so much credit for the show’s success, when “the fat fuck just sat up in his office all day, figuring out ways to make more money [with merchandising]” while Sam Simon and the writers churned out brilliant script after brilliant script.
Even more delightful is Ortved’s description of the corrupted circle jerk that is the Hollywood publicity machine:
I’ve never seen or touched any kind of illegal drug, but some of the less reputable boys at my church have friends who say that this is Homer Simpson’s head made out of the cannabis plant. I haven’t been able to confirm it myself, as I believe that marihuana is meant to be smoked, yet I don’t see any hand-rolled cigarettes here. With all that elaborate glass tubing, it looks more like a methamphetamines laboratory that I saw once in an episode of “CSI.” So who knows, maybe those boys are wrong about it being weed.
Playboy continues its series of head-scratching attention-getting ploys with this most recent announcement: Marge Simpson will appear nude on the cover of November’s Playboy Magazine, with an accompanying pictorial inside.
Sources confirm that the ambiguously aged, iconic cartoon TV mama will appear—naked!—on the November cover of Playboy magazine…
Hugh Hefner teased a while back on Twitter about a possible Marge-Playboy collaboration. We now can tell you that the Simpson matriarch will be featured in a three-page pictorial complete with an interview and a data sheet to mark The Simpsons‘ 20th anniversary.
I don’t want to sound too dismissive about this, because I’ve masturbated to every sexy cartoon from Cheetara to Bugs Bunny dressed as a woman to anything and everything that Japan has to offer. But the Internet trumped Playboy in a big way here. Go ahead, Google “Marge Simpson naked” or “Simpsons porn.” You will find a vast and disturbing tableau of the denizens of Springfield working over the former Miss Bouvier. It’ll F up the way you see “The Simpsons” forever. Like, really? Whose idea was it to make Bart have sex with Marge? I guess there are tech-savvy “Simpons” geeks even in Appalachia.
UPDATE: More at Topless Robot
This is a screen capture of the footer at philly.com earlier today. I’ve removed most of the color to highlight the fact that for the story about the FTC banning “robocalls,” someone on staff used a “Simpsons” screencap of the infamous AT-5000 Auto-dialer that Homer uses to run a telephone scam in the episode where Lisa dates Nelson (episode 4F01, “Lisa’s Date with Density” — **gets punched by football player**).
This got me thinking about the episode in question, and I realized that it’s underrated in the pantheon of great “Simpsons” episodes. Not only does it feature Nelson’s Nuke the Whales poster, but there are countless quotes here that work perfectly in everyday conversation. “Frankly, I expected better from Jimmy the Scumbag.” “My H has been stolen! Awww, that’s how people know its a Honda!” “Do you find something funny about the word ‘tromboner’?” “He can’t hear you now. We had to pack his ears with gauze.” “When she sees you’ll do anything she says, she’s bound to respect you!”
And so on. Go ahead, re-live the majesty yourself. Your boss’ll just be happy you’re not looking at porn for once.
(thanks to stalwart commenter Danger Guerrero for the tip)
