This wooden Simpsons couch can be yours for only $5000 or so!

It's one of 1500 displays that were sent to movie theaters when The Simpsons Movie came out. Now it's being sold on eBay. You can either bid on it or buy it now for the above price. Might be kind of fun to have the show's couch in your living room next to your own couch.

[via MTV]

As any Simpsons fan can tell you, the opening sequence for each episode includes three distinct moments that change every episode: Bart's sentence on the chalkboard, Lisa's saxophone solo and the "couch gag" at the very end. Sometimes these moments are reused from past episodes, of course.

Well, someone with a lot of time on their hands has spliced together 115 couch gags from The Simpsons. The quality of the video (below) isn't that great, and I'm not sure what possessed them to put their YouTube username right in the middle of the screen, but those two minor annoyances aside, it's a nice little tribute to an element of the series fans love and the writers probably loathe by now. That's my assumption anyway, I'm guessing it's tough to keep coming up with new couch gags (which explains why we don't see brand new ones much anymore).

I've placed the video after the jump. It's just under ten minutes long.

Thanks to my pal Wild Bill for telling me about this.

My husband thinks he's so funny. Tonight, I was in the kitchen when The Simpsons started so I didn't get to see the opening sequence where the family piles onto the couch and something funny happens. My husband rewinded rewound it on the TiVo so I could see and when the 'Delete'/'Don't Delete' thing popped up, he says, "Anna, what are you doing?" I threw my hands up in the air and started to stand up, wondering whether I was sitting on the remote. Nope. Just part of the open.

Did anybody else feel a moment of panic, or am I the only dope in the room?

Simpsons merchandise has been around since the show began, so when new toys based on the show and its characters come out, anyone who isn't a collector probably doesn't get too excited. Nevertheless, I think the latest Simpsons figures from McFarlane Toys are really cool. The new "Family Couch Gag" set contains all the family members (including Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II) and their famous red couch. Each character has magnets inside them so you can recreate your own "couch gag" like the ones that kick off the beginning of each episode. The new toy will be released in May.

[via PidgeonBlog]

(Part 2 of 5)

For me, 2005 will always be the year when we all learned that Tom Cruise is crazy. It was nearly halfway through the year when it all started, but I remember it as if it were yesterday...

It all began when he leaped onto Oprah's couch in May. He was on her show to promote War of the Worlds, but all he did was talk jibberish about some B-list celebrity girl we all know for her starring role in a teen-angst drama on WB. He jumped around for 40 minutes of the program and at one point, he appeared to actually murder Oprah Winfrey. How did he and Katie Holmes meet? He couldn't really answer it. What is it about Katie Holmes that makes him love her so? He couldn't really answer that either, except to say she's "remarkable" and "amazing". Later, he also told Billy Bush that "Kate" was a wonderful talent, and that he had seen her on "Dawson Creek". Dude, it's possessive. Dawson's Creek. Obviously he knows her very well. They had been dating since, like, April.