You know how the contestants on Survivor really aren't very interesting anymore? You gotta give this guy points for originality. A California man recently skinned a snake alive and ATE IT at open auditions for Survivor in Bakersfield, CA. He freakin' ATE IT. The guy gave a fake name to the newspaper and told them he's unemployed and he's ready to play a real game of Survivor. [Side note: Do they do background checks for homicidal tendencies?]

The city newspaper, The Bakersfield Californian, actually has a 2 minute video of the entire event complete with commentary from other horrified Survivor hopefuls. I honestly got about 30 seconds into the video and nearly lost my lunch, so consider this your warning.

[Via TV Tattle]

(S18E20)

Bart: You can't send him away. He's a dog, not Grandpa.

Special hint: if you're ever lost in a giant maze (corn or otherwise) you can find your way out simply by keeping your hand on the wall and walking.

You know, if Santa's Little Helper is the main focus of an episode, chances are it's not going to be very good. I didn't laugh very much during this episode, but here's what I did like:

(S11E02)

Dale [in the sewer]: It's kinda spooky down here. Do you think poop has ghosts?

This episode actually reminded me a little bit of Tom Goes to the Mayor with its focus on a city council being taken for suckers by two guys who really don't have the city's best interest in mind. Mostly, I just found it interesting how different shows can tackle the same issues in wildly different ways.

(S06E23)

Homer: Marge, you being a cop makes you the man, which makes me the woman, and I have no interest in that, besides occasionally wearing the underwear, which, as we discussed, is strictly a "comfort" thing.

This episode begins with Marge and Homer attending an outdoor symphony. On the way back home, Homer warns Marge to be careful since the streets are dangerous, especially for "upper lower middle class types." He tells Marge not to trust anyone, but of course he fails to take his own advice and gets swindled by Snake with a game of three-card monty. Marge exposes Snake's cheating, and he takes off running. Since no one will chase him, Marge takes after him and corners him in an alley. When he pulls a knife on her, her instincts kick in and she smacks him with a garbage can lid, knocking him out cold.

(S01E07) Everyone has a list of fears, and being buried alive and waking up during surgery are both very high on my list. People have awoke during surgery before -- it's rare, but it does happen. Stephen King based his short story "Autopsy Room Four" on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which a man is paralyzed in a car accident and pronounced dead, despite being very much alive. To his horror, he's taken to the autopsy room to be hacked into, but he manages to save himself by crying a single tear to show he's still alive.

As King writes in a note after the story, a tear is nice and all, but he wanted his protagonist, Howard Cottrell (Richard Thomas) -- who gets paralyzed by a snake bite while golfing -- to demonstrate a different way of showing he was still alive. So King has him get a huge boner while the older sexier doctor is handling his junk. That's very King-like, and it works on paper, but I knew it was going to be difficult to portray that on television and not have it seem trite or silly. In King's story, Howard is single, but in the televised version he's married and suffering from occasional impotence due to an old war wound. The backstory makes Howard's eventual "rise from death" seem a little less gauche, but it's still kind of goofy.

I sacrificed my gorgeous body for nothing. This must be what it's like to have a baby.  -Mr. Burns

After the first few years of The Simpsons, when it became clear that the show wasn't going to be going anywhere for awhile, it became necessary to focus on side characters for certain episodes. The family itself could carry most episodes, but for a show that's been on this long it makes sense to delve into the lives of the other characters once and a while and expand the Simpson's universe a little more, further stretching the "elastic reality" (to paraphrase Matt Groening) of the series.