Lake Neuron

Mental_floss magazine’s web site has a great new quiz:

Troy McClure Film, or Actual Terrible Movie?

Troy McClure was a character who appeared occasionally on “The Simpsons” and was voiced by the late Phil Hartman. The character was retired after Hartman’s death. He was supposed to be a has-been movie actor, and he would turn up in some TV commercial, educational film or what have you, always introducing himself by referring to his past projects:

“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such nature films as ‘Earwigs: Eww!’ and ‘Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory.’” (Example from Wikipedia.)

I did poorly on the quiz, answering only 8 of 15 correctly. In a bizarre coincidence, I had seven consecutive questions wrong followed by eight consecutive right.

I’m watching a “Simpsons” rerun on WUXP (MyTV 30) tonight, and as soon as the episode started it looked strange for some reason. I finally noticed that Chief Wiggum’s police uniform was green. A quick flip to neighboring channels reassured me that the problem was not my TV, and the commercial breaks were in perfect color as well.

Here, apparently, is the problem. Some rocket scientist at the TV station has adjusted the color on the playback of the episode so that the residents of Springfield’s skin is flesh-colored, instead of its usual yellow tone.

Well, I finally got my beta invite to Hulu.com, the video service co-owned by NBC and FOX. It works very well — the clips look great on my system and my 1.5 Mbps DSL connection. I just watched the Simpsons Halloween special. Here is one of my favorite “Saturday Night Live” clips:

That clip is presented whole, but you also have the option of using slider bars to choose just a small portion of an episode or clip before linking to it.

Unfortunately, the hulu.com embed box is just slightly too wide to be friendly with my WordPress theme.

I told you Mr. Burns was in charge!

Originally uploaded by tvbarn.

Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star had this very funny photo from the Writers’ Guild of America picket lines at his blog. “AMPTP” is a federation of producers against whom the writers are striking, which is why the writers would want to imply that it’s run by, or at least endorsed by, the greedy, geriatric nuclear power plant owner Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.”