Now excuse me, I have to buy a mint condition Funzo

In something that I'm not entirely proud of, I read Parade magazine today. It's not something that I usually do and it certainly does not paint me as one of the intelligentsia but there you are. Sometimes you just need to look at a Howard Huge cartoon. Anyway, what caught my eye was an advertisement for a Simpsons holiday decoration. Essentially a Christmas tree covered with Simpsons characters.

Now this raises two simple questions. The first is "Just how much has Fox whored out the Simpsons franchise?" I mean, it's not like we are talking about high quality merchandise here. These aren't the collectible figures that, uh, take up most of my spare bedroom (oh, like you don't own every variation of Comic Book Guy). This will probably fall apart upon exiting the box it came in. I'm all for profit but this is just on this side of releasing commemorative plates.

The second part is that this is Christmas decoration. Or as they put it "seasonal" though the fact that Homer was driving a sleigh would seem to indicate a particular season. Now my question is is the target market for this people who decide to celebrate Christmas two months later? Or have we now reached the point where the Christmas season begins in January? That would probably be easier on retailers. Just don't bother taking the decorations down, it's holiday sales all year round. Sigh. Oh well, at least Love Day is coming soon.

I did watch the new Simpsons tonight as well, which seems to have created a temporal warp within the Simpsons universe. So Homer was a part of the Be Sharps, which won a Grammy over Dexy's Midnight Runners for the song "Baby On Board" about Lisa. But now we find out that Marge and Homer weren't married until the 90's with Marge going to college. A college that seemed to span the entire decade as Homer invents grunge while singing in a boy band while listening to the Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. This means Bart was born a decade after he was born. I am might confused.

Ok, the entire episode was an excuse for 90s jokes and I'm not sure if I'm fond of my college years being mined for nostalgia. It's interesting that Nirvana jokes are now considered reasonable. Apparently the end of Kurt's life is now a comedy gold mine. Though I'll admit that some of the Nirvana inspired songs were pretty darn good. They weren't obvious parodies and were subversive enough to be cool.

Plus I gained my new motto from this episode. When you're tired of Weird Al, you're tired of life.

(No random CDs this week. Last week got so screwed up I haven't finished listening to those yet. But in the words of the Infinite Improbability Drive "We have reached normality. Any problems that you still can't deal with are your own damn fault.")