WHAA...?!

Kids in TV Land, you’re being duped!

Social media users in Egypt are convinced the situation in Syria is actually a vast U.S. conspiracy to destabilize the region. The smoking gun? The Party Posse episode of The Simpsons.

Business Insider explains:

In the episode, entitled “New Kids on the Blecch,” Bart, Milhouse, Nelson and Ralph, are tapped for a boy band, The Party Posse, whose first single, “Drop Da Bomb,” turns out to be a subliminal recruitment video for the U.S. Navy. In the song’s music video, the boys pilot war planes, parachuting into an unnamed Arab nation to teach the local women to wear bikinis and play tether ball.

And if you look closely, a jeep in the video clearly displays the flag now used by the Syrian opposition.

On what appears to be the Egyptian equivalent of the CNN show that just regurgitates whatever people are saying on Facebook (that is, all of them), an anchor played a clip of the episode, and repeatedly stressed that the episode came out in 2001, way before the Syrian opposition started using their flag. (Sidenote: Does this opposition group have a name? That might be something that would be good to know.)

What does this mean??? There are only three possibilities:

  1. Syrian rebels are big-time Simpsons nuts and borrowed their flag from the episode, as a strange, obscure homage of some sort. Maybe it’s to them what the Bort joke is to us in the west.
  2. It’s a coincidence, because all flags basically look the same. Stars, bars, sometimes a crescent moon or an eagle.
  3. The so-called “war” in Syria is a bunch of smoke and mirrors, with the U.S., Israel and Gulf Arab countries pulling the strings. It’s nothing more than a false flag simulation produced by Lockheed and Oracle and Rockwell Collins, with propaganda about chemical attacks being disseminated by their lackeys in the media.

Clearly, #3 is the most likely explanation. As I recently discovered, the Simpsons writing staff is actually a front for the CIA, who often use the show to spread disinformation and plant grotesque “pre-clues” to 9/11. I guess they just decided to reuse some art assets for their fake rebel group instead of designing a new flag? Damned budget cuts are completely dismantling conspiracies right and left.

[Business Insider]

BORT REPORT

Beloved Simpsons joke “Bort” was referenced in last night’s episode “Yellow Subterfuge,” as roughly half the jokes in modern day Simpsons are just callbacks to old episodes. Apparently, there’s a kid named Bort Sampson attending Springfield Elementary, according to this list of names Principal Skinner wields:

Will Bort and Bart ever cross paths? Will Lisa’s friend Janey ever get a surname that sticks? Will Skinner ever print out an attendance list that isn’t just a random jumble of kids from multiple grades? Keep watching the skis.

[h/t No Homers Club]

BORT REPORT, WRITER WATCH

bortA couple weeks ago, Ben Joseph, a first-time Simpsons writer, went onto the notorious pony-fetish website reddit and took some questions about his experience hanging out with Bart Simpson. Some of the answers are sorta-kinda interesting – how the writing process works, how much money you get before taxes, what Hank Azaria looks like (“a bronzed Adonis”) – but then he let this little nugget of info slither out:

No restrictions. But, as much as I’d have loved to pitch an all-Bort episode, I also worked hard to pitch something that felt like something they would actually do.

Thanks for dashing our dreams, jerkwad. [reddit]

BORT REPORT, TORTURE LAND

And so it has spent the last year outfitting an underground, nerve center to address that most low-tech of problems, the wait. Located under Cinderella Castle, the new center uses video cameras, computer programs, digital park maps and other whiz-bang tools to spot gridlock before it forms and deploy countermeasures in real time.

In one corner, employees watch flat-screen televisions that depict various attractions in green, yellow and red outlines, with the colors representing wait-time gradations.

If Pirates of the Caribbean, the ride that sends people on a spirited voyage through the Spanish Main, suddenly blinks from green to yellow, the center might respond by alerting managers to launch more boats

bort command center

“We need more Bort license plates in the gift shop. I repeat, we are sold out of Bort license plates.”

[New York Times]

BORT REPORT

bort