D'OH REPORT

Remember those cool-ass Simpsons stamps that I was raving about two years ago? Well it turns out the Postal Service completely misjudged the popularity of The Simpsons Franchise by about, oh, seven hundred million.

According to Bloomberg, all those beautiful, beautiful stamps are now just sitting in a stamp warehouse somewhere waiting to be disposed of, which is a real tragedy:

Bloomberg’s Dominic Chu reports that the money-losing U.S. Postal Service guessed that TV cartoon character Homer Simpson and his family were twice as popular as Elvis Presley when it came to sales of commemorative stamps. The service produced 1 billion of “The Simpsons ” stamps and sold 318 million with the remainder being disposed at a loss.

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COMING ATTRACTIONS

It was only a matter of time before tween heartthrob Justin Bieber did a guest voice for The Simpsons. And now the inevitable has become reality, and the show’s producers are surely confident it’ll give them a huge ratings boost. It didn’t work last time with Lady Gaga – just the opposite, in fact – but, dog gone it, they’re nothing if not persistent.

The Biebster tweeted the news himself earlier this evening. Here’s his Tweet, embedded below…

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SPRINGFIELD SHOPPER

homer simpson is the face of slaveryHey, uh, do you own that pair of slippers that look like Homer’s face? Are you perhaps wearing them right now?? Well, you’ll no doubt be thrilled to learn they were produced with state-sponsored Chinese slave labor.

Al-Jazeera has a 30-minute documentary on their site (use YouTube if it’s not loading) that uncovers how China throws political and religious dissidents into prison camps and forces them to manufacture consumer goods. It specifically highlights these Homer slippers, which were manufactured in Nanjing Prison near Shanghai for the New Jersey company SG Footwear. The company claimed (via Fox for some inexplicable reason) “it has never knowingly utilized involuntary labor.” Ha ha not only do they not deny it but they made their comment through a second company. Anyway, just something to think about next time your browsing the novelty slipper aisle at your local shoe store.

[Al Jazeera via Tumblr]

ROCK BOTTOM

!!!!! It’s not everyday that a big scoop lands right in your lap, but sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time. Someone… or something… threw a brick through the window of our offices (why people can’t just deliver bricks to the door I’ll never know). Tied to the brick was an Iomega Zip disk. Immediately I knew this was big, and not just because the disk has about 100 times more storage capacity than a normal floppy disk. A week later, after having secured an Iomega Zip drive from eBay, I looked at the disk’s files, or should I say file, because there was only one file: a single JPEG, which you can see below…
There it is. Solid, rock-hard confirmation that Simpsons Studio, the studio that makes The Simpsons, is abandoning the second dimension behind and going Full 3-D CGI for the next few seasons. Needless to say, this will definitely prove controversial… we haven’t heard anything about this until now, so therefore logistically the producers must be trying to keep things under wraps, afraid of what the bad people on the internet will say on the computer at them.

Personally I don’t think they have anything to worry about. Sure, some “purists” out there will whine about how it’s different from Old Simpsons, but I for one applaud the show-makers for taking such a bold leap into the future, and at great expense too. I await the upcoming Simpsons Season 24 with baited breath, and not just because I ate a bunch of fried worms.

No response from FOX or the producers as of yet, probably because I’ve made no attempt to contact them… Developing…