UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

Homer and OJ Simpson looking morose in a heavenly sports bar. They are in angelic garb with halos, eating onion rings. Behind them are a lot of TVs showing various football games.

Pro Football Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson, who was quite a character, has been permanently ejected from the game of life by cosmic forces, and also cancer. He was 76.

Born in 1947, Orenthal James Simpson, also known as “The Juice,” is widely regarded as one of the greatest football players of all time. During his time in the NFL, he was the first player to rush more than 2,000 yards in a season, and recorded an average of 143.1 yards rushing per game, a record that still holds today. The former Buffalo Bills running back also had a storied acting career as an ad spokesman for the Hertz rental car company and a recurring role in the Naked Gun franchise, before running into some legal problems in the mid-1990s.

Simpson claimed to be a fan of The Simpsons in a 1991 issue of Simpsons Illustrated, “especially the part at the beginning where Bart has to write on the blackboard.” Despite this, he turned down a role as a celebrity panelist in the classic episode “Last Exit to Springfield,” which then went to Dr. Joyce Brothers. Thanks to a draft of the script uploaded to the Internet Archive by JamesHellBrooks, we now know how the original scene would’ve gone:
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UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

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OJ Simpson’s ending soon. According to The National Enquirer, the athlete-turned-murderer says he “feel[s] the end coming” and has requested an early release from prison so he won’t die “like common jailhouse scum.”

This could be Simpson’s final season:

“OJ’s doctors have told him he could be dead in as little as three months because of his out-of-control blood sugar and blood pressure,” said an unnamed source.

Created in 1947 by Eunice and Jimmy Lee Simpson, the long-running former running back was popular for many years, but in recent decades has become largely reviled by all but the most fervent of fans.

[Yahoo! News]

UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

Alan K. SimpsonYes, you heard right. After years of anticipation and speculation, 81-year old former senator Alan K. Simpson and his youthful ward Erskine Bowles have finally announced and released a long-awaited followup to their 2010 megahit, The Simpson-Bowles Plan.

The new plan, Simpson-Bowles 2: Escape from Necron 7, goes even further than the original plan in reducing the nation’s deficit. While the original had a semblance of balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, the new plan is much more heavily tilted towards extreme austerity (which mostly involves cuts from Medicare and Medicaid), thanks in large part to the deficit hawkish Simpson, who once called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

The plan is also supposed to somehow serve as an “outline for a new grand bargain” between Republicans and Democrats, despite the fact even Bowles thinks the idea of a grand bargain is “at best on life support.”

Critics are calling the sequel “lame,” “vague,” “unbalanced,” and “a waste of everyone’s time.”

[Salon]

UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

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Alan K. Simpson, the Republican co-chairman of President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission, removed his “size 15 feet” from his mouth to apologize to a critic on Wednesday for a stinging letter in which he compared Social Security to “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

[New York Times]

UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

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Is it just us, or is there something a little weird about a knife stabbing deeply into the “Nicole Brown” part of actress Yvette Nicole Brown’s name? We don’t doubt that SAG naming rules have forced Brown to suffer enough when slating her name in auditions (“Yes, ‘Nicole Brown,’ like OJ’s murdered ex-wife”), but now that unfortunate comparison’s been enshrined in the opening credits of her big break.

[Moveline]

UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

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Barrett Prody, the brother of Simpson’s former girlfriend, has created a nonprofit corporation and an Internet Web site, the Society Against Legal Injustice Inc., to raise money for Simpson.

“I hope to help out someone who has gotten to be a good friend,” Prody said by telephone from his home in Fargo, N.D. “I want to leverage his name in an effort to right an injustice out there in Las Vegas.”

[Tampa Bay Online]