BART ART

Artist JK Keller created an intense video manipulation of The Simpsons entitled Realigning My Thoughts on Jasper Johns that will break your browser and possibly your mind if you try to watch the whole piece on his website. Here’s the introduction, which gives you a good idea of what the rest is like…

UPDATE: Keller’s video and website have been lost to the sands of time…

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BROOKS BLOTTER

james l. brooksSimpsons executive producer James L. Brooks took to Twitter on Thursday to express his growing concerns about the iPhone search application Siri. Announcing that he was “on the brink of an insight through a troubling plot against us,” Brooks spent the next 45 minutes tweeting observations about the app. Mainly, he suspects Siri reflects our emotions, nothing “I believe that when I was hyper the other day she talked faster.” How, exactly, this proves Siri is plot against mankind is unclear. Nevertheless, Brooks is optimistic “we have a chance against her diabolical programmers” if he heed his warnings.

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NOISELAND ARCADE

funtendoThe name of Modern Simpsons‘s devastating Nintendo “parody,” Funtendo, has apparently been hijacked for a quasi-legal breakout box (I have no idea what that is) that “lets you hook the NES, N64, and Wii Classic controllers up to your PC” via USB so you gamers can play your little quasi-legal Nintendo ROMs with an actual joystick instead of a stupid keyboard as a controller. Feeling nostalgic for Mario Kart 64? Well you’d better get your soldering iron ready, because you’ll have to assemble it yourself with these amazingly simple instructions!

And yet, spending a weekend putting that all together sounds infinitely more entertaining than watching The Simpsons‘s inexplicable Wii parody from a couple years ago that doesn’t actually parody anything, and would definitely be considered product placement had they not cleverly misspelled it.

[The Verge]

THOSE CLOWNS IN CONGRESS

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain likes to quote movies. And not just any movies, but movies based on cartoon franchises. As reported by our sister blog, AnimeJihad, Cain quoted a song from Pokémon: The Movie 2000 during a debate last August. As any political analyst could tell you, it was a brazen dog whistle for the highly-coveted otaku crowd (a move popularized by Lee Atwater’s so-called “Shounen Strategy”). Which apparently worked, because he soon shot up to frontrunner status.

Well now the Cainster is at it again. During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Cain wheeled out his new talking point, telling his supporters “We need a leader, not a reader.”

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AZTEC THEATRE

Famous comedy duo “Eric & Tim” appeared in the sure-to-be-classic “Marge Becomes A Food Blogger” episode of The Simpsons last night and sang a rap song about being a foodie, which you can watch below courtesy of YouTube user “MelZtube80.”

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WHAA...?!

mutation caught at ol fishin holeToday in life imitating The Simpsons news: some fishermen caught a fish with three eyes near a nuclear power plant in Argentina. Literally, like, for reals, they found a radioactive mutant freak fish with three goddamn eyes, and it happened In Real Life. This should probably be cause for alarm, but since the same scenario happened in a beloved cartoon from over two decades ago, it can be safely relegated to the “lighter news” section of the news, chuckled at, and then instantly forgotten. 2011: not a good year for nuclear power.

[Infobae via Geekologie via Gizmodo]

OAKLEY CORRAL

zuckerbergMark Zuckerberg and his Facebook goons have apparently deleted Bill Oakley’s Facebook account, effectively rendering the former Simpsons showrunner and current Portlandia producer a non-person in this hyper-connected age. The crack team at Facebook determined that Oakley was illegally impersonating former Simpsons showrunner and current Portlandia producer Bill Oakley, who is the same person, and swiftly deleted his account. Despite being informed his account will not be reactivated “for any reason,” Oakley has taken to the Twitter to bring the issue to as many Facebook employees as possible, as well as popular tech blogs Mashable and the New York Times’ Bits blog. In the eyes of this reporter, it is great to see Facebook allocating its resources on protecting little-known TV producers from impersonation instead of focusing on less important issues, like instituting better privacy safeguards.

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