Newsgroups: alt.tv.simpsons
From: flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal)
Subject: 8f23 Brother, can you spare two di?es?
Organization: Dynamic Graphics Project, University of Toronto
Distribution: alt
Date: 28 Aug 92 02:55:10 GMT


So was this the long-awaited Maggie's first words?  If so, the joke's on us!

I liked this one quite a bit, personally.  Lots of good jokes, and several
four-letter words (if one includes "ass").  Lots of little things to notice!

Favourite moments / DYNs (in chronological order):

Near the beginning the opening credits, there were two skips.  Was this true on
Fox too?  Like, two frames that didn't quite line up.  Like what would happen
if you removed a quarter second of film or something, although the sound track
was ok.  The television station here, "Global", adds this stupid "On Global" to
the title screens of all of its regular shows, so I wondered if they were just
splicing in old animation footage to which they had already added the "On
Global".  However, the skips were at the wrong places for this.  The first was
about the time the "On Global" goes off the screen (just before "The Simpsons"
fades out, so to speak), but the other was just after we cut to the street on
the way to Springfield Elementary.

There was some kind of Moog-like noise during Lisa's solo.

I noticed some kind of store behind Marge's car when she's turning to run the
stop sign.  Was this always there?  I'll have to check out its name at work
tomorrow.

Anyway.  Now on to the show.  I thought it was odd that a physical examination
would include a semen sample!  It's certainly odd that Smithers would be doing
the analysis rather than some lab tech.

Did you notice that the last one of Homer's sperm we see is three-eyed?

It was interesting the degree to which Burns got excited about Smithers's sperm.

But the best part of all was when Homer was telling Marge about his day.  His
words and actions matched in a very humourous way!

	[pauses in front of the fridge] "stand in front of this"
	[opens door] "open this"
	[takes a 6-pack down from the shelf] "pull down this"
	"bend over"
	[separates a beer from the plastic thing] "spread apart that"
	[turns toward Marge] "turn that way"
	"cough" [drinks beer]

I thought Burns's "rambling" at the lawyers was stupid.

Did you notice, in Burns's office, a stuffed polar bear, and a portrait of
Burns on the wall?

Around the fire, one of the hobos was eating a boot.

Herb called his car "Tempura", ha ha

I liked that bit about "new Coke": Hobo #n: "*I* designed new Coke!"

When the sofa broke, two springs flew out of it way up in the air.  One from
the right travelling leftwards, then one from the left travelling rightwards.
Then Homer dropped his beer can on the floor.

I liked Bart's looking up after his bullshit about the sofa, looking to see
whether or not Homer was buying it.

I liked the self-referential bit about prime time and "TV's greatest stars".

Homer to sofa: You're going back to where you came from -- the curb in front of
Flanders's house.

Anyone catch what that thing is on the bench beside Herb while he's saying that
he needs an idea?

Homer (arrogantly): I'm not signing anything until I read it or somebody gives
me the gist of it.

At the opening of the excellence awards, did you think that the presence of
Black people in the dancing lines going up the stairs had a tokenism-oriented
look to it?  If so, you're right.  Notice that in both cases, the *second* one
of the five people (first in the men's line, then in the women's line) is the
one who is Black.  Perhaps I'm just reading into this, but I think that this
was on purpose to make a joke about token inclusion of racial groups.

Lisa: This award is the biggest farce I ever saw.
Bart: What about the Emmys?
Lisa: I stand corrected.
[her all-time star line]

Smokin' Joe Frazier: Webster's dictionary defines "excellence" as "the quality
or condition of being excellent."
This was AMAZING, especially because here at the University of Toronto they
throw around this word "excellence" a lot, in a really pretentious and really
stupid way.  We in the unions on campus, etc always go around making fun of
their use of this word.  Such a definition in the dictionary appears to be of
little substance; it's a reasonable dictionary definition, but to quote it as
containing a significant amount of information just shows how shallow those
awards, and the beliefs espoused by the current University of Toronto
administration, really are.

Btw, I *knew* Homer was going to fall out of that balcony -- in fact I thought
he was going to jump.  Did he fall into the orchestra pit?  It's not reasonable
in terms of the layout of the hall, but there was a musical-instrument-smashing
noise when he hit ground.

Moe: Whazza matter Homer?  Cummerbund too tight?
Moe adapts his classic formula to a formal occasion.

Barney: Care to step outside?
hee hee

I liked the second picture in the newspaper Herb was reading, the one of him
falling out of the balcony!

Was it just a coincidence tha thte "spine-melter 2000" cost $2000?

Homer: Give me full power.
Salesdweeb: But sir!
Homer: Damnit, I said full power!
This seems like it must be right out of a Star Trek episode or something.  It's
a typical bone-headed Kirk kind of thing to say.  But next, the way that light
comes out in the middle and Bart's and Lisa's faces melt is out of Star Wars.
We then switch to a 2001 reference, which is fairly detailed, from the colours
of the strange shapes, to that vertical vortex-like line, the reflections on
Homer's face, and the kinds of sounds we here.

When Marge looked at the tag on the chair, I thought it was kind of unlikely
that something like that would have a tag on it.  Then, as if the artists heard
me, there was a tag on a chair behind Homer's chair in the next shot!  When we
see Marge again, there's a tag behind her!  Or did I get the sequence wrong.
That's the order in which I found them.  I think the third happened second.
Also, there's some food on the shelves.  First we see a green pie of some kind,
then an apple, the first behind Marge, the second behind Homer when we see the
second tag I mention above.

I loved Herb at the Flanders's.  The best parts were the competitiveness over
who got to "annoint the sores on his feet" and the singing as Herb departed.

Herb: Every word you say just makes me want to punch you in the face.
Homer: Well, while you're a guest in my home, could you just kick me in the
butt?

Homer: This is one of our many lightswitches.  It functions in both the "on"
and "off" modes.

Their play with the games was interesting.  In Monopoly, Herb was on square 2
of some side (with the corner counting as 0) (we can't tell which side, the
colours are all mixed up).  Then he counted "one, two, three", but ended on
square 8 of that side (instead of 5)!  He claimed to have landed on Ventnor
Avenue.  But Ventnor Avenue is not on a square number 8, it is on a square
number 7.  The yellow colour-group, of which Ventnor is a member, covers
squares 6, 7, and 9 of a side, the 8 being Water Works.  The square he lands on
is shown to be 8 of a colour-group covering 6, 8, and 9, as two in fact do (the
light-blue group, highest rent Connecticut Avenue, and the orange group,
highest rent New York Avenue).  Lisa's quoted rent for a hotel on Ventnor is
$1150, which is correct, but there were no houses or hotels anywhere on the
board when we saw it.  Finally, let me say that I wouldn't believe it if you
suggested that Herb faked a landing on Ventnor to let Lisa win, in the way one
often sort of "anti-cheats" at games with children, because he turned out to be
quite a sore loser.

I liked the brief reference to "Sorry!", which they decline to play.  Funny,
when I was a kid, that's what usually happened to that game in my experience
too.

We saw their piano in the living room!  (We've known they have one, at least
since the Christmas special in the first season.)

The washer and dryer moving around was a good one.  However, they probably
didn't need replacing if that was their only flaw.  First of all, let me say, I
have never seen a dryer move around in that way.  I don't think they can; they
move the clothes parallel to the ground, not perpendicular to it like a washer
does, and the clothes shift around a lot more.  But secondly, when a washer
moves around like that, well either your load is really unbalanced which is
easily solved by shifting around the clothes and I'm sure Marge knows that, or
if it does it always, your washer is not balanced right.  These days, they
build them with a release so that you can balance the rear feet simply by
releasing them so that they touch the ground and level.  The front two feet
have to be balanced against each other first by hand, but the front is
accessible.  I think that I've got it right; I must admit that it really would
be beneficial for me to balance our washing machine at this point but I keep
putting it off.

I thought it was great the way Homer loved that bird and the glass SO MUCH.
What a geek!

Herb speaks of measuring the "pitch, frequency, and urgency" of the baby's
sound.  This is inaccurate on several accounts, which I'll discuss in the next
few paragraphs.

First of all, psychoacousticians would say that pitch and frequency are
low-level characteristics compared to "urgency".  There is no simple way to
measure "urgency" with an oscilloscope.  Personally, I'd say that any way to
detect "urgency" via machine would probably be part of a way to understand
speech altogether.

But furthermore, "pitch" is just as elusive.  When psychoacousticians talk
about "pitch", they are referring to a fairly mentally processed perception.
As most of you will know, sounds which occur in real life are generally made up
of several pure tones (sine waves) mixed together.  Generally the lowest one of
these is perceived to be the same pitch as if we just present that tone by
itself, so we call its frequency (the number of cycles per second, a very
low-level acoustic measure) the pitch of the complex sound (the overall
(composite) sound).  However, experiments have shown that if you take a
reasonably natural-like complex wave but missing the lowest frequency
component, the one which people perceive as the pitch, people will STILL hear
that frequency as being the pitch.  So it's actually a complex psychological
phenomenon, and not something you could measure simply.  In any case, a measure
of pitch subsumes a measure of frequency, more or less, for natural sounds, so
you probably wouldn't list them both as things you measure like that.

By the way, some other kinds of acousticians will occasionally use the term
"pitch" loosely, meaning what a psychoacoustician would claim is really the
frequency.

Of course, you all noticed that the machine had too many words built in to it,
and Herb never would have dictated all those words for it.  Like, when would
Maggie have said leash?  Also, it's clear that infant vocalizations don't have
THAT degree of meaning.  But I'll admit the problems I mention in this
paragraph under poetic license.

So.  Where were we.  Ah yes, I liked Herb's mentioning of a potential baby
saying of "turn off that damn Raffi record".  Raffi is one of the children's
recording artists which I HATE.  (There is children's music I like quite a
bit.)

As many of you will know, Homer's hair in profile forms an M, like this: /\/\
When you see him from the correct side, his ear looks like a G, giving us MG,
Matt Groening's initials.  However, when he was offering the $2000 to Herb, he
was in profile, but his hair looked like this:  /\/\/\   I think this probably
counts as an animation goof.  Somebody didn't know how to do it, or something.

I liked Maggie puking in Herb's face.  Only problem was the sound.  She made a
retching sound.  Baby puke is, generally speaking, not a retch.  It is coughing
food up from somewhere well above the stomach.  I guess perhaps babies could
retch if they were extremely sick, but the fact that this was the normal kind
of baby puke is confirmed by the colour.  It was white, like baby puke is.
Were it from the stomach, it would be yellow.  (Babies are healthier than the
rest of us and their bodily fluids are generally the right colours.  Except for
their first feces, but you don't want to know about that.)

Herb: Marge, you don't have to humour me!
Marge: Well, it's pretty ingrained.

Herb, when Homer keeps talking about the chair could be kneading his buttocks:
Homer, could you stop thinking about your ass?

"dog in a ball"

Child: This leash demeans us both.

I liked all the stuff about the NRA.

So like, at the end, Homer's sperm is vibrating.  Whoopee shit.  I guess it's
more active now too, and there's no three-eyed ones, but it just doesn't seem
like a desirable thing, vibrating sperm.  But did you notice, the credits
superimposed on the sperm were jiggling too?

Finally, at the end it said "20th Television"!!!  It used to say "20th Century
Fox", and then have the "Television" zoom on to and over the "Century".  But
what's this "20th Television" crap?  Surely it's still "20th Century Fox
Television", isn't it?

good night all,