(S02E15)

Orel: Gee, Doughy, your parents really do love you after all. They give you money and they don't ever want anything in return, not even you.

This episode was written by former Mr. Show writer/performer Scott Aukerman, along with Neil Campbell and Paul Rust. It wasn't until about one third through the episode I realized this was the first episode that wasn't tethered to some kind of religious ideal. The only "religious" aspect occurred when Orel decided he had to ask his mother if it was morally acceptable for a woman to accept gifts from a man if she doesn't actually like him.

A six-episode commitment is in place for The Baby Borrowers, a new reality series for NBC in which teenage couples are taken through the gauntlet of parenthood in just one month, during which they must care for a baby, then a toddler, then a pre-teen, and finally, grandparents. The new series is based on the popular British series of the same name, and the five couples featured on the show will be supervised at all times. Otherwise, the show would be called something like, Abandoned Babies, which doesn't exactly sell commercial time.

(S02E09) It seems the shows I review have been somewhat light in the plot department this week. Sunday's episode of The Simpsons felt like it could have been stronger, and this most recent episode of Everybody Hates Chris centered around Chris and a pair of ugly (but lucky) socks.

A British study of 69 children ages 7 to 12 found that the kids, when having blood samples drawn, experienced less pain if they were watching cartoons than when their own mothers tried to soothe them. My first inclination, which was also echoed by Dr. Brenda McClain of Yale University, is that when a parent is obviously trying to console a child, the child becomes more anxious because they believe something must really be wrong. Kids tend to be smarter than people give them credit for, and they pick up on things like that. Nevertheless, other researchers insist that this means television is having more of an impact on kids than their own parents. I don't see it as anything so dramatic, but what do you guys, especially those of you with kids, think? I just wonder when the kids get to have their revenge and jab the researchers with sharp objects. It seems only fair.

[via Lost Remote]

(S06E10)

Homer (talking about his father): He said I was an accident. He didn't want to have me.

Marge: You didn't want to have Bart.

Homer: I know, but you're never supposed to tell the child.

Marge: You tell Bart all the time. You told him this morning.

Homer: But when I do it it's cute.

I don't think I would want to see Abe "Grandpa" Simpson made the center of every episode, but I like it when they occasionally give his character a little more dimension than just being a simple satire of elderly people. "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish" is a great example of such an episode, but this one isn't too bad, either, and it gives ol' Grandpa a chance to venture outside the rest home and actually do something.

(S10E14)  When you're young, there's usually only one way to deal with a bully, and that's to give them a taste of their own medicine. It gets a bit more complicated, however, when you're a grown adult and your bully is a ten year old kid. In last night's episode, new neighbors move into the neighborhood whose unruly child, Caleb, begins harassing Hank by calling him "dusty old bones, full of green dust," trashing his work space, and, the most unforgivable crime of all, riding his bike on Hank's lawn.

If beating your own kids is frowned upon, beating other's children is probably more so. Hank thinks he has a solution when he takes Caleb's bike until Caleb learns to behave better. Unfortunately, Caleb's parents don't see their son as a troublemaker, but rather a feisty young sprite with a "precocious sense of adventure." When Hank swipes Caleb's bike to teach him a lesson, they don't make Caleb apologize, they call the cops. Hank finally realizes that the trouble lies with the parents, so he sicks Bobby on them to taunt and harass them as Caleb did. It's not until the parents actually start being parents that Caleb starts to behave. Anyone who has ever had to deal with the children of inattentive parents knows how frustrating it can be. I used to babysit for extended family whose children were so unruly the only thing I could do was try and keep as many sharp objects away from them as possible while they ran amok.

(S01E20) In this age where depictions of sexual fantasies which cover the entire spectrum from mildly titillating to mind-bogglingly depraved are available to anyone with an internet connection, a television episode about a kid swiping his dad's Playboy almost seems like something Norman Rockwell would have painted.

Those of us who grew up before the advent of the internet each have our own story about the time we first discovered our dad's hidden treasure of skin mags. I grew up on a farm and discovered my father's collection of Playboys from the '70s and '80s in an old wooden shed, resting inside a stack of dresser drawers. Like any boy who was too young to really be interested in sex yet, I found the magazines to be equal parts fascinating and repulsive. As much as our parents would try to protect us from such things, discovering those magazines was a kind of rite of passage for many young boys. You didn't know what you had found exactly, but it opened a window into the grown-up world you never knew existed. These days, that window no longer exists. In fact, the whole damn wall has been removed and replaced by an endless digital conduit of smut pouring out of the computer monitor of anyone with the ability to type the word "boobs" into Google's search field. An old copy of Playboy with nothing more than a nude female lounging next to a fireplace seems downright quaint.