The Crow's Eye: "The Simpsons" Grows A Beard

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Oct 11, 2010

"The Simpsons" Grows A Beard

Growing the beard.

(relevant portion: 0 - 1:38 mins)

Obviously, the producers of "The Simpsons" don't employ pandas and unicorns, but if ever there was a case of the lie that told a truth...

7 comments:

JM said...: I heard the animation conditions are good..the product factories on the other hand... Did you ever like the show before?; October 11, 2010 at 7:58 PM
Jack Crow said...: South Korean animators make good money. I know that.

It's not about whether I like the Simpsons, or not. I don't really have strong opinions about entertainment, except to note that even the best shows are produced and broadcast in order to showcase commercials which sell soap, diapers and pharmaceuticals to people who might not be bothered to care about brand, otherwise.; October 11, 2010 at 8:01 PM
Anonymous said...: Did Oxtrot get writing credit fot this? Any coin?; October 12, 2010 at 11:44 PM
Jack Crow said...: Anon @ 11:44 pm:

Credit for what? The Simpsons episode, or for the sentence I wrote as minimalist commentary?; October 12, 2010 at 11:47 PM
Anonymous said...: the character from yale seems borrowed from the staff and/or guests of 'progressive reports now.'; October 13, 2010 at 6:34 PM
Jack Crow said...: Ahah. Stock in trade characterizations have some merit, I think, because they model actual types of persons.

It's not difficult to stumble across common usages, because people sort of filter into common types.; October 13, 2010 at 7:35 PM
Anonymous said...: I got no coin in this, though it does seem Groening has been watching PRN cartoons.

Fucker imitates Amber Milgram for the Yalie wench.; October 14, 2010 at 1:51 PM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.