Simpsons by the Season: 23

"Everything's perfect about the past, except how it led to the present."

I was feeling pretty smug at the start of this season, thinking I had it all figured out - the series dips terribly in the middle but they sort of start to figure it out towards the most recent. At least here and there they start having a few episodes, and there's this distinct possibility of having a solid, cohesive season. By about eight episodes in, right after seeing "The Ten Per Cent Solution" in which Joan Rivers is Krusty's old agent, I felt more correct than ever. There were a few duds early, but a third of the way through I was feeling like the series was finally turning it around. Unfortunately, at episode eight, it was not only the last good episode of the season but the last passable one.

The reason for the early praise on my part is the quality of two in particular; "The Ten Per Cent Solution" is excellent, and "Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts" is also top notch. In fact, they're the best in - perhaps literally - a decade, and it's not hard to see why. "Bart Stops" is a clever idea that fits with the characters; Chalmers appeals to Bart by showing him the manly side of history in Roosevelt, in spite of the man's name being Teddy. They tie in a smartly placed commentary on the school system being soft. Bart isn't a piece of garbage! "Ten Per Cent Solution" follows much the same way, with Krusty being classic Krusty. It doesn't get ridiculous. It's coherent. It's funny. Unfortunately, that couldn't be said for the last two thirds of the season. 

I believe most of the problems stem from the main themes of the episodes being noticeably worse, and because of that it's missing an edge. You can see perhaps more clearly than ever that the episode ideas are not coming as fast and loose as they used to, and the show is falling back on two main plans in order to prop the show up Weekend at Bernie's style. One, they have amped up the craziness, but that's been climbing steadily for years now. Second, and this is at least somewhat new, they're relying more frequently on whole episode-long parodies - picking out movies of (then) recent popularity and basing whole episode arcs on them. This season we have "The Book Job" (parodying the Ocean's series), "The D'ohcial Network" (The Social Network), "How I Wet Your Mother" (an extended scene has the family enter Homer's dreams Inception style, which also covers the ridiculous premise category quite nicely) and the Halloween special had two with Dexter and Avatar. Picking up someone else's plot has proven easier than creating their own. That being said, they're not necessarily bad episodes, but it's indicative of greater problems if they have to reach that far for more ideas. Perhaps it's not their fault, considering it's been over twenty seasons, but I won't feel sympathy for them when it's their choice to continue the series. 

I know it must be hard now with this season hitting its five-hundredth episode, but once more I'll plea to the Simpsons to keep reason and sanity within their program. Their good episodes this season, or at least the decent ones, are all plausible. "The Falcon and the D'ohman" is mostly reasonable (until the very end, as it takes a poor turn) and it's not a bad episode. Same with the two mentioned before, as well as "The Food Wife" (the family, save for Homer, create a food blog which works quite well until, as many other episodes, it loses touch with reality in the end and falls to pieces) and "The Book Job" in which they take a few fairly funny shots at young adult literature - a parody plot but one that holds up fairly well. 

But the poor episodes? Homer helps to choose the candidate for the republican party. The Simpsons get banished from Springfield until the whole town comes to join them (also not ending the episode reasonably). Bart tricks a whole cruise liner into believing the world has collapsed around them (and ends the episode with the Simpsons being banished in Antarctica with a bunch of penguins). A wave of robots turns on humanity and Springfield fights them in hand-to-hand combat. They just can't pull off stupid very well, and if they're to pull off a legitimately good season, they need to stop trying to.

Best Episode:

I won't describe them once more, but I'll give it a draw between "Ten Per Cent Solution" and "Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts". 

Worst Episode:

Speaking of the stupid and ridiculous, we have a contender for the coveted "worst episode ever" title. In "Moe Goes From Rags to Riches", we discover Moe's Bar rag has a storied history going back hundreds of years. It's actually some sort of sentient being. I would honestly prefer the episode to be written by a rag itself, as a blank screen would have been preferable. Once more I have to ask - is this canon? Does Moe's rag really have a story behind it?

"Holidays of Future Passed" also deserves a mention. Yet another unbearable episode based about the family's future, it makes less sense than ever. Once more desperately trying to bring Halloween themed episodes into the actual world. Right when the trees started talking I almost called it quits. 

Best Quotes:

"Roosevelt killed more Spaniards in one day than most people have in their whole lives!"

-Bart, finally interested in history

"When a man who loves America cries, that makes him super straight!"

-Lenny on Homer's American passion

A Tale of SimCity: Part 2 - Coming and Going

The past five days since the last entry in have been an uncomfortably number of hours spent on SimCity. The addiction I've been coming to grips with is if something that, if it had continued for long enough, would have probably left me at the centre of a large circle of friends and family concerned about my well being. It's the most fun I've had playing a video game in a while, and man, I was getting good. My cities flourished. I was rich beyond reason. I had the wealth of Mr. Burns but with the heart of post-lesson-learned-Grinch. Then, in amidst all of the addiction that unheralded joy that the game brought me, something clicked. I closed out of the game and I sincerely doubt I'll return for months, or years, or ever, quite frankly.

Upon realizing that Gopher Heap was a colossal failure of a town, I sought out a new region and began anew, in the fittingly named city of "Redemption." It was stripped of all the things that made Gopher Heap fail - reckless spending, poor city planning, and a deep-seated hatred of my own citizens. I was patient, careful not to overextend, and decided on such brilliant maneuvers as placing the dump a sizeable distance away from both my water supply and my residential segments. For one reason or another, the populace seemed to agree that a one minute trip to the dump was a small price to pay for a town that didn't literally smell like crap.

I was making, as the younger civilians in the town called it, fat stacks. But my people were uneducated, and due to the woefully tiny map sizes, I was forced to move to greener pastures - more-so just to give something new a shot. And that is when the game both got exceptionally exciting and very frustrating.

I made a number of cities of various success, and it really came down to one major factor; if I did horrible things to mother nature and kept my population at an elementary school learning level, I would be making a lot of money. Education is expensive, and digging up the right rocks sells for a heck of a lot. So I would make mining community after mining community, all of which were making millions in incredible speeds, but every time I tried something else they would fall flat on their face. A tourist city I made used the resources stripped from the ground to pay for the tourism buildings, which, while mildly successful, did little more than pay for themselves. A city built on education and high wealth residential could hardly get itself out of the red, proving that in both real life and SimCity, a university degree means you'll make less than the guy on the rigs, but will give you a false sense of superiority. Trying to make a manufacturing city, taking those resources and making them into something, meant that I ran out of space so quickly after using supplemental income from successful mining towns that I had the entire map filled literally before I let people move in. It was in creating the final town that I decided to call it quits - I felt like I had done everything there was to do (which, I'll admit, was a lot) and until they make a larger map size in order to actually trade resources between the towns effectively and let me try something more than just repeatedly drilling into the Earth's face, I simply wasn't interested anymore.

So sorry, Jack Maximum, I won't be able to find the right town for you. Turns out you'll just have to burn all your books and become a rigger. That might not be all that bad, but that was when I discovered Origin (the conglomerate that gave me The Sims 2 for free some time after purchasing SimCity) upgraded The Sims to something I no longer understand, deleting Jack Maximum in the process somehow. So somewhere, buried with universities and tourist attractions that provide no income, lies Jack.

Two Mildly Depressing Non-Fiction Books: Part 2

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
-by David Epstein

We grow up with the notion that if we set our minds to it we can do anything. The nature vs. nurture argument tends to sway towards the latter, because the former would cause us all to just give up and pack it in if we don't have all the right genes in all the right places. But here's the thing; we learn as we get older that we may not be as quick witted as others, or we learn at a slower pace, or that in spite of studying hard we fall short of the pack. Unfortunately for us (unless some Olympian is secretly reading my blog) the same works for physical pursuits, and from birth we were doomed to fall short of the top of the heap. David Epstein, a former Sports Illustrated writer, delves into the science behind the best of the best and just why they're so far above the lowly masses doomed to mid-level soccer in Edmonton (sorry, that got personal).

There are a few obvious examples to show how genetics can play a role in sports, and one needs to look no further than basketball. If you're above a certain height (a height that is rare enough you garner looks on the street) your chances of joining the NBA rise exponentially. This is no news - but what about a sport where no one obvious physical trait would make a great player? Let's hop on the current Blue Jays bandwagon as so many others have, don a crisp, previously unworn Jays hat and pretend we know something about baseball. But let's talk about Barry Bonds, because like most bandwagoners, I can't name a Toronto player either. He may have shown us that size certainly helps, and strength is something that falls more on the nurture side of things - we can all technically become strong, but we can't all become tall. No amount of steroids that I know of are going to push Barry up to stand eye to eye with Yao Ming.  So is baseball a sport that is the great equalizer, requiring no genetic gifts? Unfortunately, no, and I don't believe one exists. Baseball requires from birth bonuses to find success just like anything else.

Baseball players can - quite literally - see better than the rest of us. A great number of them have actually much higher than 20/20 vision, and a disproportionately high number have vision that's pushing the limits on just how well human beings can see. This is critically important because baseball isn't about a batter reacting to the ball coming at him, seeing where it's going to go, and hitting it - if that were the case it would be impossible. The ball is moving at almost a hundred miles an hour and getting there in a fraction of a second. That pushes well past the limits on how quickly a human can react, let alone hit the ball out of the park. The key is to know where the ball's going right as it's leaving the hand of the pitcher. This is where sight comes in; the batters can see things others with lower vision can't, like the pattern on the ball as it's coming towards them (indicating the variety of pitch and the level of spin) and the pitcher's hand placement (much the same). Someone with lower levels of vision just can't do that, but someone with 20/10 certainly can. That being said, practice obviously comes massively into play - they still can't react fast enough, but react intuitively after learning how the ball will likely move. It's not a conscious thing as there's simply no time for that, so a batter will hit the ball through knowing how it will move from countless experiences in the past. So in a nutshell: if your eyesight is bad, good luck, but if your eyesight is flawless, after hours and hours of practice in what has to be the most mind-numbingly boring sport out there, you have a shot at reaching the majors.

Pretty well everything that is physical will find some people excelling and others coming up short. The size of our heart and lungs vary. The amount of red blood cells and the hemoglobin within them is different from person to person. The kinds of muscles we have cause variation in our running ability as well. But what if we simply train harder than the rest? What if we make up for a lack of genetics by pushing harder at every turn and making up for our crappy DNA by blood, sweat and tears (but mostly sweat)? Well... that may not pan out either. As it turns out our physiology doesn't really throw us a bone in that regard.

Let's say we take two runners of presently equal ability. They each train equally, eat with similar diets and have no advantages in bone structure or all that. What can very easily happen is one of those two gets in much better shape simply because of his genetic material going the extra mile for him, as our bodies respond to training at wildly different speeds. To become the very best - and I mean record breaking - you must possess a perfect storm of traits: a willingness to train intensely (don't forget, even those that are genetically gifted need to train), a body with an ability to receive the benefits from that training quickly and effectively, and a body type that lends itself to the sport you're pursuing. You have to win the lottery not once but three times consecutively - but if your parents were both Olympians you're bound to be holding a heck of a lot of tickets.

There's also one more thing that will certainly help you out along the way, and no, it's not just being male (although skeletal structure and levels of natural fatty tissue pretty well ruins you - sorry, women of the world). It's a little more controversial, even though it absolutely shouldn't be. If you want to run well, which helps in gosh darn nearly every sport you can think of...

It would certainly help if you're black.

Kenyans dominate long distance running to an incredible degree. For a relatively small population they have a staggering number of medals. In addition to being in an elevation "sweet spot" where levels of oxygen are perfect for long distance running training, they have a body type that perfectly suits long distance running - thin lower legs. If you're wondering why that makes a difference, think of it like this; if you hold a book in your hand and hold your arm way out wide, you'll tire very quickly. If you tape it to your body up near your shoulder, you'll be able to hold out much longer. The same premise works for legs - a weight on the lowest part of your body will have a much, much greater effect than, say, a heavy belt.

When it comes right down to it, training and effort seems to account for half of the final sum. Maybe this doesn't depress you. Maybe you think, hey, we get to see people that are hardly human in their ability due to a spectacular mix of chance and opportunity mixed with a great degree of effort. But for me, at least, I can't help but feel that little twinge of frustration thinking what could have been if only I had been spectacularly lucky. At least that's what I'll blame it on the next time I get cut from a team.

Two Mildly Depressing Non-Fiction Books: Part 1

Salt Sugar Fat: Michael Moss

It's no secret North America might be packing on an extra couple pounds. Somewhere around one in four Canadians are obese, with Americans even higher. Mind you, that's one of those statistics that's somewhat misleading; the literal definition of obese is much lower than what we'd think, with obese closer to what we'd call "pretty fat". Nevertheless, it's one of the largest risks to our collective chubby hearts and souls. "Salt Sugar Fat" details the rise of the processed food industry, and just why it's so common for us to be struggling with our ever increasing bellies. But that in itself isn't what's so distressing; throughout the book you realize just how stacked against you the odds are, from how they make it so irresistible to the cravings that are there naturally to the convenience of it all.

First: our bodies really, really enjoy the taste of sugar, which should feel like a freebie but it's even more than you would think. We love it from literally the very first moments of our lives, as when we put a tiny amount of sugar on the tongue of an infant they'll light up right away. It's hardwired in our system. How much we enjoy is a bit of a different story, and finding the point where we feel something is too sweet is a science in and of itself. The major food companies have shocking numbers of scientists working on this, to find what they describe as the "bliss point", the peak level of enjoyment of sugar that doesn't cross over to being too sweet. That's why sugary treats taste as incredible as they do - they know exactly what you want, and they'll cater it directly for you. They'll even know how much you want according to your age and race, as well. It's not only a science, but they've worked it down to an exact one, and it's up to you to take those perfect, designed for pleasure pieces of sugar and deny your access to them.

But it's not just sugar.

Fat works in much the same way, and we crave it about as strongly as we do sweets. The "bliss point" for fat is also staggeringly high, allowing food producers to really amp it up to make their wares all the more attractive. Eventually it gets to the point where we won't want to eat it if it becomes too fatty (maybe it's a shame and not a taste thing) but there's a wonderful way that they've fixed that problem. If you pair sugar with the fat, that fatty "bliss point" moves on up, allowing it to become this unholy concoction of artery clogging, blood-pressure surging, beauty-reducing bites of pure joy. Sugar, for whatever reason, has this strange capability of masking how much fat is in foods and making it harder to detect for the consumer. So not only are your fatty foods fatty, but it's more fat than ever because they can add sugar on top of it all. It's like a wolf not in sheep's clothing, but a bear's.

Salt works slightly differently; we don't really have a natural taste for it (the same test with babies with the sugar produces the opposite reaction). We develop that liking, and if we go off salt for long enough we don't really crave it as strongly. However, a small amount of sodium is healthy (actually, necessary) but we're not talking small amounts. Some of pre-packaged dinners have as much as three and a half days worth of salt in one single sodium bomb that tastes pretty awful anyways. For those of you who have had those Michelina's Frozen Entrees, you know exactly what I mean.

So what happens when we remove some of the salt, sugar or fat? It's more than just the taste. The chemical composition of the food changes, and unfortunately, much of the food becomes unpalatable. This can mean colour, consistency, texture, or any number of things that makes food great other than the obvious. At least that happens a lot of the time; sometimes we just don't like it.

Low-fat foods often fail miserably in the stores, and even when they don't it can lead to overeating anyways. The food companies have a history of drawing people in with the low-fat foods, having them find a lack of satisfaction in them, and eventually having them head on back and pick up the same full-fat version of the thing the consumer was avoiding in the first place. They use healthier foods to lead you back to the worst versions. Ultimately, it's the consumer (as in the consumer, not an individual) that's simply too cheap or too lazy to change it. Making your own food is one way of fixing it, but that's inconvenient; better ingredients become too expensive, and people wouldn't buy it. The food being deprived of nutrients isn't even necessarily the producers' fault. Take soup, for example. It's higher in salt than pretty much anything you're going to find, but that can easily be changed without losing the flavour by replacing it with herbs and spices. However, salt is astoundingly cheap, so it's kept in the process. But here's the thing; if consumers collectively purchased the higher cost, higher health foods, the food companies would be the first to accommodate that desire. But that's ultimately not what we want.

Lastly, even if we're trying for health, it doesn't quite pan out (and here's where those same producers I just defended turn really scummy). Tang is a notable example, as it was marketed as an orange (the fruit) drink - but really it's just an orange (the colour) drink. They tried adding the same nutrients and vitamins from oranges to Tang, but every time they did so it would alter the colour and the taste, and suddenly it would turn to a horrible mess. Fortunately for them, they discovered if they strip it absolutely bare of anything healthy, and add the one part of oranges that the average consumer knows is healthy (vitamin C) and add just that, then it still tastes fine and they can market it with oranges on the front as if deep down it's not quietly helping to put you in an early grave. The grocery store is littered with stuff like this, and while it used to be worse (lawsuits by consumer advocacy groups really helped here) it's been going on for ages with no signs of stopping.

So maybe at this point you're thinking "well, I'm going to be a better consumer, and stop eating all this garbage." Good! But don't forget that you're fighting companies that are throwing millions and millions of dollars of advertising against exactly that. But it's not only advertising - they go all out on making these treats perfect in every way, right down to the obnoxiously described "mouthfeel", which focuses on exactly what it sounds like. This excerpt from the book pretty well sums up what I mean.

"[Frito Lay employed nearly five hundred chemists, psychologists, and their technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips that snaps with about four pounds of pressure, no more or less."

We're all fighting giants. Every time we hit the store we have to actively choose over convenience,  taste and cost, and opt for the healthier option, all the while resisting the enticing manner in which the companies draw you in with their near limitless marketing power. But that's not easy to do. Not everyone has the money, the time, or even the desire to do so. "Salt Sugar Fat" shows us just how massive and often terrible the processed food industry is, and suddenly it seems like that one in four number for those that are obese is surprisingly low, if anything. But don't worry. They're not lonely. Much like our waistlines, their numbers are growing.

A Tale of SimCity: My First Attempt

Thriving, happy cities like these aren't
really my jam. I have a knack for
crippling depression and fire.

After creating my sim through my two blogs of The Sims 2 in which I killed myself before creating the wildly successful military man Jack Maximum, it seemed fitting that I create a city for the guy. Well, at least that's my excuse for wanting to have a run at SimCity, the fifth installment of the series. The game was met with mostly middling reviews due to forced online play, a massive server issue on release (which shouldn't reflect upon the reviews of the game but it inevitably does), and the one major complaint that I feel personally, the map sizes being far too small. The game has since allowed single-player mode, which in turn negates the effects of faulty servers, but haven't changed the map sizes. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful game that doesn't deserve much of the heat that was placed on it.

So here's my story of creating my beautiful, thriving city - a town worthy of one Jack Maximum.

They give you a number of choices on what region to move into, where there are multiple places to found cities that link together with one another. There are options for seaside views, lush, forested lands and whatever the heck an archipelago is. But this is my first city... would it be right to build in the best lands when I myself am not at my best? I've played the game a few times and my cities quickly become cesspools. I even named one city Cesspool, which, while aptly named, lacked tourism for reasons I couldn't understand. So I passed on regions with names like "Serenity Key", "Whitewater Valley", and even "Granite Lake" (the lattermost sounds too confusing for a city - maybe I'll wait when I'm more of an advanced player). I settled on one that I felt would be a greater reflection of my future cities. I picked the only region that made sense.

I settled in "Desolation". 

A dry, barren land that has all the beauty of the Grand Canyon without the vastness or feelings of Americana. Or the beauty, really. It's a pretty rough landscape, but that's not a worry for me. I was renaming "Desolation" anyways, after my home province of Alberta, but adding a regional flair of changing it to 'Berta. Real-life 'Berta is a lovely place, with such gems as the cultural history of the great cocaine rush in Fort McMurray fantastic town names such as Carstairs, Picture Butte, and Vulcan (originally named after the Roman god, but now it's mostly Star Trek stuff). But I had one place in mind that I wished to hold the namesake of my town, and that is Torrington - the home of the famous Gopher Museum I attended earlier that year. Thus, Gopher Heap was born. And Gopher Heap flourished. 

Is this what education gets you? Education has only
provided me with unemployment. And not in SimCity - 
that's why I'm playing SimCity. 

Made into a mining and drilling town, the Heap was surviving off tearing the very heart from mother nature herself and exporting it to the global markets. There were a few minor problems, I'll admit; one single road leading to the sprawling industrial complex was a notable mistake, and traffic problems abounded. Terrible city planning put the sewage system and the dump directly upwind of the city, meaning that Gopher Heap not only looked like garbage, but it smelled that way. It wouldn't be easy to clean, either, seeing as the harsh badlands in which they were settled were low on water. Even electricity was hard to come by; a wind power plant (Gopher Heap goes green!) provided little, and quickly took up way too much space. The only thing that seemed to work was the drilling and mining operation which my poorly educated sims seemed to take to quite well. 

SimCity in 1989. The colour scheme is similar to my
present day Gopher Heap.

It was actually the sims that caused the most amount of problems, if anything. Knowing the city was having difficulty with providing electricity, they still refused to live in darkness. Knowing that water was scarce, they still wished to drink. I couldn't please them. Their businesses kept burning down, so they wanted a fire department. They kept getting murdered, so they needed police. And all the gunshot wounds from the high levels of crime meant that they wished for a hospital, apparently disagreeing with my "survival of the fittest" model in which I had a few citizens die on a daily basis due to injuries or illness. Demands of trash pickup arose as they apparently haven't figured out how to throw garbage in the basement, and sewage was an issue as they haven't discovered corners or a shovel. Worse yet, someone informed them of the notion of education, meaning that they demanded a school. That's where I put my foot down. They would receive an elementary, but no more; no fancy high schools, colleges, academies. They would be just well educated enough to write me angry letters, but they certainly won't be able to write them well. Perhaps if I gave them schools they could solve some of these problems on their own. 

The expenses of such wild notions of having both a hospital and a fire department planted me firmly in the poor house. The people were angry and I was angry with them, so I callously demolished a few homes to induce fear in their omniscient leader. It did little. My town was dying, soon to be covered in dust as everything else was in 'Berta. I called it quits. I'll be ready next time. SimCity won't know what hit it.

Simpsons by the Season: 22

"Why can't you support my gibberish?"

Season 21 began to taper off towards the end, and 22 continues in that fashion. It's far from the worst season you're going to see, and the more I watch I believe those seasons are somewhere in the 13-19 range, but it just isn't very good. The reason being is they must feel like they have to push to an extreme to keep the audience entertained, as if that twenty-two minutes of television isn't engaging enough unless there are needless Michael Bay-type explosions and eyes popping out of their sockets (both happened, and neither in the Halloween special). Simplicity just doesn't cut it, and going above and beyond both the abilities of the characters and going to extremes of the characters' personalities themselves happens nearly every episode this season. Nothing is written with a level head, and they try to push the entertainment almost as an adventure, with everyone getting into increasingly impossible situations rather than a character based comedy, but that, ultimately, loses the wit and charm of the show. The Simpsons has to realize that the audience isn't that stupid. We have patience. We don't need everything cranked up to ten. If we wanted Family Guy we'd just go watch it.

Too many episodes began well and held promise but lost it when the show took a ridiculous turn and shot itself in the foot. This is nothing new, but it seemed especially prominent in this season. Take "How Munched is That Birdie in the Window?". Bart nurses a bird back to health, and he gets upset with the dog because Santa's Little Helper swallows it whole. That's not that bad. But it can't stay that way. It's not insane yet, so the viewer must be bored. The result is bringing Santa's Little Helper to an ostrich farm to give him away, but Bart gets attacked and ends up choking out one of the birds. Things were going alright for a while, but just in case anyone fell asleep, have Bart wring the neck of an ostrich.

Or "The Scorpion Tale". Have the family accidentally happen upon a drug that makes old people nicer? OK, so the means to get there is pretty stupid but the end result isn't. Old people being pleasant isn't necessarily a bad plot. However, their eyes start popping out of their sockets as a side effect. When in doubt, resort to easy shock value when wit is in short supply.

How about "Homer the Father"? Homer tries to be a better father to Bart, using the values of a (really funny) typical '90s sitcom. Great! But instead of having the humour coming from how Bart reacts to this, or how Homer stumbles through his attempts, they have Bart steal nuclear secrets and sell them to China. As I said - it's not about the characters, it's about adventures and incredible situations. I won't even have time to discuss in detail the Simpsons winning both an Oscar and a Golden Globe, or Fat Tony dying and being replaced by a relative, or how profoundly stupid it is to have Ned and Edna fall for each other which is just baffling in and of itself, because there are just too many examples to exhibit.

Even if the situation isn't extreme, they'll make the characters that way, typically exaggerating their capacity for cruelty or some other degree of the evil in their nature. We've already seen Bart's ability to torture and blackmail in the reprehensible "Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em" in which he threatens Skinner with a peanut after he discovers he's allergic. They inexplicably decide to return to that well, but this time around he's abusing Homer, as he can no longer stand up to Bart after taking a parenting course. You end up hating Homer for being a terrible, thoughtless parent but hate Bart more for treating him so terribly afterwards. This isn't the only example, either; the entire premise of "The Fool Monty" is the entire town abusing a helpless, lost-his-marbles Mr. Burns.

Trim it down, Simpsons. Find a middle ground and focus on who your characters are. The situations aren't funny; it's how the characters react to them, and they have to react in character. That's what's funny. Look at "You Only Move Twice" with Hank Scorpio; the government breaking into his compound isn't the funniest part of the show, nor is it the funniest part of the scene. It's when Homer, walking away dejected after having to leave his job, casually kicks a grenade away like a loose stone as he's leaving. Or in "Marge vs. the Monorail"; it's not that there are possums in the wiring of the monorail that's so funny. What makes that scene memorable is that he casually states he "calls the big one bitey" as if it's hardly a problem at all. It's Homer's stumble-through-life nature that's classic Simpsons, as in when he saved the nuclear plant by guessing and hoping for which button to push to save it from a meltdown, not having him blowing one up in China as they had in this season.

Moderation, Simpsons. All things in moderation.

Best Quotes:
"Boys don't have feelings, they have muscles!"
-Homer's advice to Bart

"Lay off Detroit. Those people are living in Mad Max times."
-Moe on Detroit

"His bat's hungering for a homer, just like Chronos for his children."
-The announcer at Bart's little league game

Best Episode:
I would say the best episode this season is "Flaming Moe" in which Moe makes his bar friendly to unattractive gay men. Moe changing up his bar is nothing new, but the show has traditionally made comedy about gay people pretty darn funny. It could have gone to "MoneyBART" where Lisa uses statistics to bring Bart's baseball team to consistent victories, but one scene in which a man offers to teach Bart over the summer to build model boats by hand. Bart responds with "How would you like to kiss my ass?". It was so indicative of the decline of the show and the characters that it spoiled an otherwise good episode.

Worst Episode:
Everyone abusing Mr. Burns in "The Fool Monty" was the lowpoint of the season. Once again, characters going insane is not funny. It's just lazy writing, and the same goes for when the characters are over the top cruel, which this episode has in spades.

Simpsons by the Season: 21

"Lis, what's going on? You're not normally this interesting."

I haven't been friendly to The Simpsons over the past several blog posts. Well... really, it's gotten angrier and angrier since season nine, but I'm going to go ahead and try to stay optimistic here. This is a notable improvement, and I dare say (I'm going out on a limb here) it wasn't a total waste of time to watch it. There. I said it. Above all else, in a lot of these episodes I was actually laughing. There were jokes that didn't involve Homer or Bart being cruel or thieves; they didn't exclusively rely on Homer's stupidity, while artlessly pushing it to a maximum; Lisa's whininess and ultra-liberalism are kept in moderation; their episodes were at least somewhat original; reality was at least somewhat present, save for a few examples (Marge and Homer becoming Olympic curlers is not the worst offence).

The greatest fault of this season is their inability to keep a consistently strong episode throughout the twenty-one minute span, in spite of the fact that many of them actually start with promise. "Homer the Whopper" has a decent story with Comic Book Guy writing his very own comic, but falls to another 'Homer finds a crazy new job' plot in which he once more becomes super jacked, but this time for the film adaptation of the comic. "The Great Wife Hope" doesn't have a bad beginning either, with seeing how the rise of the UFC effects Springfield. However, when Marge decides to get in the octagon as well, it's best left to be forgotten. Even "The Squirt and the Whale" starts with a fairly stupid but decent plot about Homer starting to use wind power (nothing special, but certainly OK) before it leads to a terrible ending with Homer being saved by a whale from a bunch of sharks. The lesson here to Simpsons writers: if you're playing heroic music, the characters are probably doing something stupid that doesn't fit their persona, and if the heroic music is being played for a whale, you should consider a new profession. 

The episodes follow a similar pattern to the season itself, with a fair batch of decent starter episodes but failing to continue that streak. "Bart Gets a Z", in which he gets Krabappel drunk during class and subsequently gets fired holds up O.K.. The Halloween special has some genuinely funny bits. "Pranks and Greens", in spite of having Jonah Hill (I really can't stand him for reasons I have difficulties explaining) is fairly strong as well. In fact, the first 5/6 are well above the average for the past ten seasons. It's the second half that goes horribly awry, as if they burned themselves out halfway through. 

Right around the beginning of the back end has "Boy Meets Curl" with Homer and Marge becoming Olympians. Their curling team consists of Marge (by the end having an arm in a sling), Homer (who is a terrible curler whom the team carries), Agnes (an ancient woman) and Seymour (a noted dud). It's not even the best team Springfield could put together, and it distracts from the jokes when you're constantly questioning if this is really happening or not. This season is a prime example of how the show stays fresh when in reality and completely falters when they lose sight of it. 

Mind you, the second worst episode, while not entirely unrealistic, is just plain awful. The family goes to Jerusalem with Ned, and Homer is a disrespectful, sacrilegious oaf. If that doesn't sound terrible enough, he eventually believes himself to be the messiah. Oh, if only that were the worst part of the episode - what takes the cake is the cliched-to-death Jewish tour guide.

In spite of all that...

Season 21 will make you laugh at times, in particular the first half. The series is having the life squeezed out of it, but it's still got a little juice left. Yes, it should have been cancelled. Yes, it should have ended over a decade ago (even at this point in time). But it hasn't. It's still here, they're still making episodes, and on the rare occasion there are some good ones.

Best Episode:

...Like this year's Treehouse of Horror. It's nothing too original or groundbreaking, but delivers on a number of jokes. I typically don't want to give the Halloween episodes the best episode honour, mostly because they don't seem to fall within the regular season quite as snuggly, but I'll make an exception.

Worst Episode:

In "The Bob Next Door", Sideshow Bob steals a man's face, escapes from jail, and once more tries to kill Bart. It's needlessly gruesome, ridiculous beyond even the most asinine episodes, and not only does this take the crown for the worst of the season and the Sideshow Bob episode by leaps and bounds, but perhaps comes in at one of the top ten of the worst of the series. 

Best Quotes:
"Available wherever dubious quasi-scientific books are sold."
-Where to buy "The Answer", the show's absolutely hilarious parody of "The Secret".

"I can't just get rid of a teacher if he's doing a good job - or an adequate job - or just shows up and doesn't touch anyone." 
-Skinner on getting rid of Krabappel's replacement

"His name is Fatov: he represents the Russian spirit of sloth and alcoholism."
-Bart's Olympic pin he made to help Lisa