Monday, May 03, 2010

Another Simpsons Fail

In last night's episode, Springfield, blankets the town with security cameras after Homer leaves a bag of plutonium unattended, causing a bomb scare. The cameras become a tool for Ned Flanders to scold people for littering.

Meanwhile, in the real world, security cameras may help us catch the NYC car bomber.

I almost feel sorry for the Simpsons crew. You know they queue these episodes up weeks if not months in advance. Yet reality has a way of biting their plot lines in the ass with almost exquisite timing.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chuck Norris had an anti-terrorist flick (where the terrorists were actually Islamic) that was due to premier on TV right around the time of 9/11. They pulled it. When it finally aired, I was actually kind of offended. Not because of the Islamic terrorists, but because the "terrorists" were obviously white people in make-up.

OT: The followup to the KK "Dirty Pool" story has been posted.

Anonymous said...

You are going way out on a limb here.

1. The resolution for those security camaeras is no where near goos enough to assist in catching the bad guy.

2. If the bad guy gets caught, it will likely be due to good old fashioned police work: I.E. sitting in your car eating doughnuts and waiting for some average joe to call you with the tip, because he saw his neighbor loading all that stuff in his "new blue SUV".

3. The cameras will almost never assist in preventing a crime and at best will only document the crime taking place. Again, without sufficient resolution to assist catching the bad guy.

Dr. Φ said...

Prof Hale: surely the resolution of "those security cameras" are situation specific.

Trumwill: I was never a Chuck Norris fan. Do you recall the name of the movie?

It would be exceedingly unlikely for a movie like True Lies to be released today.

Elusive Wapiti said...

"It would be exceedingly unlikely for a movie like True Lies to be released today."

Nah, they'd pull a Sum of All Fears and make the baddies white supremacists. It's like Hollywood is stuck in 1870s Indiana or something.

Seriously folks, update the object of your Two Minutes Hate every once in a while.

Anonymous said...

They might go "Sum of All Fears" or alternately they might go "24", where the Muslims are terrorists but the real bad guys are white men in suits who are provoking, framing, or manipulating them into action.

I can't remember the name of the movie, but scanning over IMDB it *looks* like it was The President's Man, released in 2002 (after sufficient delay) and renamed from... Ground-Zero.

I'm not a Norris fan myself. I think it happened to be on when I was on the computer in the back where we don't have cable.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps, but don't call me Shirley.

Anonymous said...

It's rare to see images from a surveillance camera that are of remotely decent quality. From what I understand, upgrading to high-quality images is quite expensive.

Peter