"The Simpsons" will live forever; Sam Simon won't

(759 words)

I don’t know why I just spent about 40 minutes scrolling through the channel guide to record about 30 hours of “Simpsons” reruns. I already know each of them all by heart.

I guess I’m doing it for our daughters.

I want to see one of my favorite shows all over again through their eyes. I want to spend the weekend reveling in some of the sharpest and most subversive humor in the history of American entertainment.

Wait. I lied.

I’d rather be watching it with about three or four buddies and a keg of beer.

Watching with drunken buddies would be the ideal way for me to watch “The Simpsons,” the show that FXX channel will be round-the-clock broadcasting for the next 12 days straight. That’s 552 episodes — 25 seasons — and one feature-length movie.

Amazing. Up until about four days ago I didn’t even know I had an FXX channel. Now, FXX will be about all I watch for the next 12 straight days.

One of these days I’m going to have to study the channel guide and see what else is hidden among the 930 or so channels I never bother to watch.

I’m convinced “The Simpsons” colossus will never end. It’s too embedded in the American comedy DNA.

The 26th season begins in September and will include episodes by writers who weren’t born when the show began, writers who’ve probably never seen some of the seminal episodes I’m recording for the girls this week.

Shows with stories like the one about Homer’s bypass, the one where Homer buys Lisa a pony, or where the boys from Moe’s form a barbershop quartet.

I could go on and on. What Simpson’s fan couldn’t?

But I’ll instead divert and tell you about what might be my favorite Simpson’s story.

It’s the story of Sam Simon.

He’s dying, dying very publicly, in fact. He just signed a deal to allow Fusion Network — and I’ve never heard of that one, either — exclusive rights to film his death which could happen any week now.

Simon, 59, was diagnosed in 2012 with terminal colorectal cancer. Doctors said he had 6 months to live.

No telling if one of the experts was Dr. Nick Riviera.

Simon helped create “The Simpsons” in 1989, but in 1993 left over a personal dispute with show-creator Matt Groening. Simon negotiated executive producer credits for the show's entire run and home-video rights, at the time a little known potential revenue stream.

So today he earns about $20 million each and every year for a show with which he’s had nothing to do for 21 years.

He’s played in the World Series of Poker, dabbled in boxing, been married to actress Jennifer Tilly and for three weeks in 2000 was married to Playboy Playmate Jami Farrell. He’s spent the last years of his life lavishing his fortune on worthy philanthropies devoted to improving the lives of defenseless children and animals.

I just read this very morning he bought a California chinchilla breeding ranch for $50,000.

What do you do when you’re an animal lover after you’ve bought a chinchilla ranch?

You free all the chinchillas.

He’s arranging more humane conditions for the animals until all 425 can be adopted by people who’ll have no intentions of making fancy garments out of the critters.

A frequent guest on Howard Stern’s show, my favorite Simon story involves the time he went to a luxury automobile dealer for floor mats. The details are elusive, but the gist is correct.

The first salesman he encountered was rude and condescending and didn’t want to be bothered with something so picayune. 

So Simon sought a second salesman, and from this person he impulsively ordered a new top-of-the-line luxury car — let’s say it’s a Ferrari — loaded with all the options and came back an hour later and paid cash.

It’s the greatest eff-you money story I’ve ever heard and leads me to believe there are hundreds just like it.

Most of “The Simpsons” characters you’ll see on the show are Groening creations. He’s the show’s true creator. But those there at the beginning say the show’s indelible sensibilities and absurdist genius are all because of Simon.

Those are just some of the reasons that led “60 Minutes” to declare in a 2007 Simon profile that he’s “perhaps the perfect Renaissance man of this baffling, uncertain age in which we live.”

Thanks in large part to Simon, “The Simpsons” will live forever.

It’s just a shame Simon won’t.

Related . . .

When all you can eat ain’t

Giving away my book a blue chip idea

A theory on conspiracies

A farms and a cure for baldness

When NSA intel gets really stupid

Re-run: The skinny on bomb implants

News that the CIA disrupted a plot to sneak a concealed bomb aboard a trans-continental flight led to a mini-surge of readers stumbling upon this July 2011 post. It's about the zealots who'd try and smuggle surgically-implanted bombs on planes. I re-run this today in honor of Casey, a canine perfectly suited to foiling those plots. Or should I say perfectly "snooted."

News that terrorists will be soon be smuggling bombs surgically implanted in their bodies has me again realizing I have commitment issues.

Where do they find these zealots? Where do they find these doctors? Is this sort of procedure covered under the new health care law?

The Republicans will go ballistic if they find out really going ballistic is addressed on page 1,293.

My body is my temple and I’m picky about its desecrations. No matter the cause, I’d never smuggle a subcutaneous explosive device to a public event.

I save my zealotry for screwing millionaire mullahs -- or is it moolahs? -- who charge $8 for warm domestic beer at professional sporting events.

It’s impossible to count the number of times I’ve inserted beers and liquor in my body and surreptitiously sneaked them into various Pittsburgh sports arenas.

Of course, I don’t surgically insert them. I pour them in my stomach before entering the buildings (and, as always, thoughtfully recycle the cans). I’d never dream of going to some back alley quacks to have them zipper full cans in my hip for halftime removal. 

Unless they’re talking about a single stick of dynamite, the scheme sounds to me as farfetched as it does impractical. 

The whole thing again convinces me jihad recruiters must be diabolically persuasive.

“We want you to join the movement!”

“Yes!”

“We want you to be prepared to sacrifice!”

“Yes!”

“We want you to see Dr. Zawahari tomorrow at 10 a.m. He’s going to remove a kidney and fill the vacancy with TNT. If that doesn’t kill you, we want you to board the red eye to London and detonate your new explosive kidney over the Atlantic. Cool?”

“Uh, couldn’t I start by just firing up the internet chat rooms and work my way up?”

And you thought airport pat downs were already too invasive.

A radio report said specially trained dogs will be deployed to the airports to combat the threat. I heard this and immediately thought of my old dog, Casey. A sweet, aggressively affectionate golden retriever, he’d be perfect.

Then I learned I’d misheard. They were talking about bomb-sniffing dogs.

Casey was a bum-sniffing dog.

Still, a dog like him would be perfect in tedious security lines.

Think about it: any doctor who’d agree to perform this procedure couldn’t possibly have the refined skills of the pros who work at places like the Mayo Clinic.

After all, what they’re doing is a clear violation of what Homer Simpson calls their hippopotamus oath.

So if you’re going to get a dangerous explosive implanted in your torso, timing is key. You’re likely going to go on a beeline in still-tender condition from the operating room straight to the airport.

That’s when you’d say hello to Casey. 

I always enjoyed introducing Casey to refined and dignified women (I had that rarified opportunity, I think, twice).

“Oh, what a beautiful doggie!” they’d gush while bending way over to pet his luscious blonde fur.

Then, quick as burglar, Casey was behind them goosing his snoot in places where only the boldest proctologists go.

The effect was similar to what would happen if a surgically implanted explosive device went off in their rear ends. Their arms would flail, their hair would instantly Einstein and they’d scream in equal parts terror and delight.

They’d emerge from the intimacy looking disheveled, but oddly invigorated.

So a dog like Casey would be an extraordinary boon to airport security.

He’d be sure to startle any would-be terrorists into post-surgical heart attacks.

And he’d appease ACLU busybodies by never racially profiling.

Christian, Muslim, Hindu, it wouldn’t matter. All God's children would get a vigorous butt snuffling from a dog I’ll always remember with fond affection.

As security dogs go, he’d be what could best be described as a true asset.

I miss that dog.

With him it was just the opposite.

That dog never missed.

A theory on conspiracies

Insanity zooms along with such nimble virtuosity these days it’s become impossible to outcrazy the crazies.

Just the other day I wrote the following line on Facebook: “Mock Al Gore if you must, but something weird is happening with the weather. Pretty soon everyone on the sizzled planet is either going to be a storm chaser or a storm fleer.”

It caused what we can go ahead and call a storm of comment about global warming. People who swear it’s a hoax began swearing at people who swear it’s fact.

It’s an argument I like to avoid because it won’t be settled one way or another for decades.

I prefer to argue about baseball because it’ll all be settled by fall.

But no one watching the news could dispute the gist of my instigating comment. Half the people being interviewed in the deadly outbreak of the midwest tornadoes were either storm chasers and half were storm fleers.

Really, I should think about becoming a storm chaser. I love to watch extreme weather, enjoy long, aimless country drives and saying “storm chaser” would be a more dynamic answer than “blogger” when people ask how I spend my days.

One of the global warming deniers -- and it’s odd because these are the guys that get the most coincidentally heated -- said there were simple meteorological reasons for the rash of killer winds hitting more populated areas.

It’s cold here. It’s warm there. The two collide and -- voila! -- Al Roker’s boarding a plane bound for mayhem.

He said these storms usually just rip up many acres of corn in Nebraska but an enduring Rocky Mountain snow pack meant the storms would erupt farther east than usual.

That’s when I sensed an opportunity to create a conspiracy theory.

I suggested maybe the storms were simply becoming more intelligent and meaner and are targeting populations out of deliberate malice.

I thought it had a chance to become a dandy conspiracy theory. It turned weather into a motivated bully.

Of course, I learned I was way too late.

Conspiracy theorists have been assuring anyone who’d listen the Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes were not random acts of nature, but the result of military-backed research programs that shoot radio waves into the upper atmosphere.

My question is how a government that operates like Homer Simpson when it comes to things like fixing the roads suddenly becomes Montgomery Burns whenever someone with a gripe needs a convenient boogieman.

Popular conspiracy theories today insist the government has the power to trigger earthquakes, tsunamis, and is using jet contrails to spray weather-controlling chemicals.

I say if Dick Cheney and Haliburton couldn’t do it then it can’t be done.

Yet, conspiracy theory is a growth industry. The Alex Jones show is a media sensation. He hosts radio and documentary films that do nothing but promote wild theories of all sorts.

Who believes this stuff?

Well, his most high profile follower is -- and you can check his website -- is that bastion of scholarly reason, Charlie Sheen.

I’d like to hear Jones’s theory on what’s behind Sheen’s career collapse.

I don’t understand why some people are so prone to this sort of insanity, and they’re often very smug about it.

It must make them feel intellectually superior to the rest of them to know that moon landing was a hoax, that a race of beings called the Agarthians dwell in Hollow Earth, and that Paul is dead.

They know for a fact the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives planted by government agents and that shape-shifting lizards are behind the New World Order.

I just have trouble believing so many men and women are at once that evil and that competent.

Same goes for the shape-shifting lizards. Can they all be that bad?

So I’m not a skeptic when it comes to Global Warming. I’m skeptical when it comes to all the prevailing conspiracy theories.

Paul’s not dead.

Rational thinking is.