Out of my way, jerkass!

[vovat]

While last night's Simpsons episode wasn't one of this season's best, I did enjoy it. This season has actually been really good so far. The only real misstep was the Halloween episode. Anyway, when Moe changed his bar into a British pub, I was worried that the episode was going to be a rehash of earlier plots. (Remember Flaming Moe's? Remember Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag? Remember M?) It also brought to mind the Family Guy episode where a British guy bought the Drunken Clam. As it turned out, though, the plot didn't focus on the remodeled bar, and I'm not even totally sure that part was necessary to advance the story. What we ended up getting was a new twist on the old "Homer and Marge's marriage in jeopardy" theme, and I thought it worked pretty well. There were quite a few good jokes, one that stands out for me being Lenny and Carl taking Homer to Itchy & Scratchy Land to tell him bad news. I also enjoyed the reference to "Jerkass Homer." [1] And hearing Barney sing again was pretty cool. One minor nitpick is that I thought the line about the mad dash to the airport was kind of out-of-character for Lisa. It probably would have worked better if it had been delivered by Bart, or perhaps even by Homer himself.

By the way, this was yet another episode with a significant role for Marge. It probably centered a little more around Homer, but still, this season has been turning out to have an unusually high amount of Marge.

In other news, AOL is discontinuing their newsgroup service, which is really annoying. I don't read newsgroups anywhere as much as I used to, but I still occasionally like to check into the alt.music.tmbg and alt.tv.simpsons groups from bethje's house, and she has AOL. The thing is, I think AOL's newsgroup service is one of the few things they did right. The reader is easy to use, and messages tend to be sent and received in a timely fashion. When I saw the notice on AOL, there was no reason given for why they were dropping the service. I'm inclined to believe that they're just going out of their way to make AOL as unbearable as possible.

The University of Blogging Presents to vovat An Honorary Bachelor of Psychotic Ranting Majoring in Bad Poetry Signed Dr. GoQuiz.com ®

Username:

Blogging Degree
From Go-Quiz.com


You are a Folkie. Good for you.


What kind of Sixties Person are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Kind of odd that I would get this when I didn't choose "folk" on the music question. Oh, well. For the record, I do like SOME folk music, but it's not one of my favorite genres or anything.


[1] After "The Joy of Sect," in which Homer used the word "jerkass" several times, "Jerkass Homer" became a frequently used term on the alt.tv.simpsons newsgroup, referring to occasions when Homer's boorishness was too far over the top.

Comments

[revme.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention, I thought the Bart & Lisa ending was hilarious. But yeah, despite having not read Usenet in years, I'm a little surprised that AOL's ending their service. Although, I suppose there's still googlenews. But yeah. Readerwise, I used to dig SLRN, and before that FreeAgent.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

The Google Groups interface seems to be designed more for finding old messages (which is something I do occasionally, so it does serve its purpose) than for actually keeping up with newsgroups. Among other things, it doesn't keep track of what you've read before, and new messages sometimes take a day or more to show up on the server.

[onib.livejournal.com]

Actually, I still use FreeAgent to read newsgroups. I've been very pleased with TeraNews. You pay them a 1-time fee of $4 for processing, and then you can download up to 50M/day. Unless you're doing some significant traffic in alt.binaries.*, that's probably more than enough. They tend to be very fast and quite complete.

It's not as fast, but you could also get a completely free account from BubbaNews. I keep a backup account there for when TeraNews happens to drop a message.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Well, I usually use Outlook Express from home, which has its problems, but is at least decent as a newsgroup reader. I haven't used it recently, though, because I need to set up my account again, and I can't remember how offhand. It's probably on my ISP's site, though.

[onib.livejournal.com]

You could still use Outlook Express and just change its settings to whatever news service you go with. Your ISP should have a description, and pretty much any other news provider you might go with in future should have instructions on how to set Outlook Express up properly. That way, your news service would look the same to you, but would just be contacting another server.