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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Gaylord Q. Tinkledink

When Dansy text messaged me that I should watch The Simpsons tonight, I figured there'd be something Drew-specific in it. It turned out to be better than I could have ever hoped for: tonight's episode, "Little Orphan Millie," takes place, if only for a few moments, in Solvang, the Disneyland-for-Danes quilting store of a town that I resent for more reasons than I care to list. I can't quite believe that Solvang registered on radar of the episode's writer — Mick Kelly, quite possibly writing for the first time — but at the same time, I note that the show took nineteen seasons to get around to mentioning it. That, I'm positing, is precisely how long it should take any show to feature Solvang in any way. For what it was, the episode dealt with Solvang just how I would have wanted it to: jokes about butter cookie and boring Danish architecture. Amazing.

One more quick note: The Simpsons episode concerned Milhouse thinking his parents were dead after they fell over the rail of a cruise ship and were lost at sea. The episode weirdly mirrored last week's 100th episode of Family Guy, in which Lois seemingly died after she fell off a cruise ship. Even more weirdly, last week's Family Guy episode was "to be continued," meaning we had to deal with even more fake-dying-by-falling-of-cruise ships with the part two that aired just one half-hour after tonight's Simpsons.

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