do you like the bleeding obvious

I was randomly looking through old posts and thought of this one, christ those people are now approaching forty (they're probably 37ish). I assume this is about Deakin students but I was trying, I suppose, to deidentify them so I wasn't specific about the subject, even the campus. But in any case that's the reality - they would have been 18 or so, and it's 18 and a half years ago. I don't really know why this is even worth mentioning, that people who were born in (say) 1987 are going to be 37 this year, except I suppose when I distill it I realise I have been blogging a long time. Yeah, that's probably the crux of my engagement with that stupid, irrelevant, idiotic short post. 

I also have precisely no recollection of any of the students from that time. Sorry if you were one of them, but I am guessing you probably weren't. I do know that those kids never said anything about hoping to read my blog in 2024. 

I reckon I only started being interested in teaching around 2005. Certainly, when it was suggested to me that I could get some tutoring work at Deakin, where I was doing my PhD, it had never occurred to me that I could, would or even should do that kind of job (I know people say things like that and you go, 'sure', but honestly, I remember the conversation with my supervisor - we were driving along Glenferrie Road Malvern, I have no idea why - and it was a novel concept to me). 

By the way the above picture is AI's idea of 'the bleeding obvious 2005' without cows, people or blood (it gave me two bloody images so I had to specify no blood). Thanks AI I think you nailed it

the simpsons s16 e10 'there's something about marrying'

Recently I sort of accidentally started watching old episodes of The Simpsons, a show I stopped keeping up with solidly about twenty years ago. Maybe more. The season I randomly landed on was (I now appreciate) season 16, which was screened in I think 2005. I could tell it wasn't super-recent because the style of animation was, while not as primitive as the first episodes obviously, still not as pristine as it appears today, but tbh I could not otherwise really figure out what the year was. I was figuring 21st century. 

Anyway, this episode intrigued me and I had to check it out more because it really, really shows how much times have changed in, well, 18 years, which I have to admit is quite a long time and imagine if times hadn't changed? I'm going to spoil it, by the way. 

Essentially the plot is that gay marriage is legalised in Springfield to assist in tourism (I suppose it's 'tourism', though really the gay people who are coming to Springfield are simply getting married, they're not exactly having any other kind of touristic experience that we see). Reverend Lovejoy refuses to marry gay people (apparently no-one sorted this out with him before the law came in and apparently there is only one church in Springfield) so Homer gets a priest's license off the internet and marries gay people for $200 a pop. Marge's sister Patty asks Homer to marry her to her fiancee, a pro golfer called Veronica. Marge is challenged by the news that one of her sisters is a lesbian and then discovers that Veronica is, actually, a man who (it is revealed) pretended to be a woman to get into some golfing league which we are supposed to understand through its acronym so I don't know whether it's just women's golf or gay women's golf.* Not important. The point is he is not a woman but also only pretended to be a woman to get some privileges or something? 

It's amazing to imagine that this episode was groundbreaking and controversial in its day, but wikipedia assures me it was. I wonder if I would have thought so at the time. The jokes about anyone marrying anything (Homer marries Reverend Lovejoy to the bible without his consent, for instance, but at the very end we see a line of people going into Homer's chapel to marry inanimate objects eg the Sea Captain is going to marry the figurehead off a ship, etc) are extremely Cory Bernardi as far as I'm concerned. There is also a lot of stereotypical male gay shizzle that feels like a real throwback, far older than 2005, but what do I know, I'm not a gay man or woman and I am probably - like so many things in this world - not really qualified to have an opinion except broadly as a consumer of culture, and I guess as an ally. 

Of course I watch The Simpsons with the Finnish subtitles turned on as though I'm ever going to learn anything from this, other than that languages have words for everything and you have to learn them all and it's probably impossible.  

'Could we hurry up?'

'Veronica is a man!' (Finnish has no definite or indefinite articles which makes it somewhat easier at the same time as it makes it harder, lol). 

'Patty, I love you but I pretended to be a woman long before we met.' 

I guess there is a joke in here somewhere that 'Leslie' is a man's name that sounds like the woman's name 'Lesley', and 'Robin' can be a man's or a woman's name, I don't get the last name, 'Swisher', though (yes I know the caption says 'Swisherinä' and names are often presented in this kind of way in Finnish and I don't know why, but the character's real name is actually 'Swisher'. 

'Even if you are a lesbian you are the same'. (Who'd have thought the Finnish word for 'lesbian' would be 'lesbo'?! 

*I looked it up. Ladies' Professional Golf Association or something like that. I assume there's a belief at the heart of this that men are intrinsically better at sport than women? Not sure.