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http://www.seattlepi.com/entertainment/television/article/The-D-oh-of-Homer-Professors-employ-TV-s-Simpsons-5962191.php

seattle pi


The D'oh of Homer: Professors employ TV's Simpsons

By FRANK ELTMAN, Associated Press

Updated 12:08 pm, Wednesday, December 17, 2014

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (AP) — Bart and Lisa Simpson have been in elementary school for 25 years. But that hasn't stopped them from showing up on college campuses.

Universities across the country are using satirical references from "The Simpsons" to grab students' attention and convey lessons in literature and all manner of popular culture.

"If the references are important enough to be lampooned by 'The Simpsons,' these works must be important cultural milestones," says Hofstra University adjunct English professor Richard Pioreck, who has been incorporating the denizens of Springfield into his courses for about a decade.

He currently teaches a course about the Broadway theater and how "The Simpsons" have embraced various musicals and plays. Next semester, he shifts to an online literature course titled "The D'oh of Homer" that includes readings from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," and Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" — all referenced in "Simpsons" episodes.

"Teachers need to keep things fresh," says Denise DuVernay, an adjunct English professor at St. Xavier University in Chicago, co-author of the book "The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield."

"They need to reach students however they can. And using 'The Simpsons' to grab their attention, I think, is brilliant," she says. "Fighting against pop culture isn't going to do anyone any good."

In recent years, other universities have had courses focused on the primetime show — which celebrates its 25th anniversary on Wednesday — including Oswego State University in New York and San Jose State University in California.

Longtime "Simpsons" executive producer Al Jean says he's not surprised professors have embraced the program. "Some people may think we are very vulgar, but then they find there is a lot of warmth and emotion and many people are surprised at the intelligence of some of the jokes," he says.

Pioreck says he decided to use the show after a friend of his daughter's passed an exam on "The Devil and Daniel Webster" by watching a "Simpsons" episode that focused on the story.

He found that the sitcom usually aims for more than just the easy punchlines, with writers layering the plotlines with humor that can be appreciated by lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow audiences alike.

For example, in one episode that parodied "A Streetcar Named Desire" ("A Streetcar Named Marge"), the dynamics of Homer and Marge Simpson's marriage are deftly illustrated through a comparison to the relationship of the couple in the play, Stella and Stanley.

"'The Simpsons" do a great deal of parodying, whether it's a complete script or a number here or there," Pioreck says. "Quite often they choose family relationships; what makes a man a success is one of the things that we pursue. And you can see what happens to Homer. Even though it looks like he's not a good father, he steps up and he comes through in the end."

Jean acknowledges a theme in many episodes is the comparison of the C. Montgomery Burns character — the miserly owner of Springfield's nuclear power plant — to the lead character in the movie "Citizen Kane," Charles Foster Kane.

"Mr. Burns ... he doesn't have fulfillment in his life even though he's the richest person in town," Pioreck says. "Here are two people who have it all, they have more money than they know what to do with and yet they're not happy. Homer has no money, but has friends and family."










http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/business/executive-pay-invasion-of-the-supersalaries.html

The New York Times


Executive Pay: Invasion of the Supersalaries

By PETER EAVIS APRIL 12, 2014

Corporate America’s well-oiled compensation machine is running like a dream.

Browse the proxy statements of the nation’s largest corporations and you’ll find the instruction manuals for this apparatus explaining how to finely calibrate the pay of top executives with company performance.

The Coca-Cola board, for example, lays out the formula that set the 2013 cash bonus for Muhtar Kent, its chief executive (base salary x base salary factor x business performance factor). It explains how a failure to achieve certain goals helped limit the bonus to $2 million, but also describes how Mr. Kent got millions more in stock and options. It notes that under his leadership, Coke had “continued to gain value share globally in nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverages,” and tells shareholders why the board might require him to fly on the company jet (“to allow travel time to be used productively for the Company”). What was all that worth? A tidy $18 million.

But putting aside whether those particular metrics for aligning pay with performance make sense (or, rather, turning over that discussion to Gretchen Morgenson in her Fair Game column), the elegant machine itself would seem to have a dark side. Some say, in fact, that it is the main engine of inequality in America today.

The current system of executive compensation, with its emphasis on performance, can theoretically constrain pay, but in practice it has not stopped companies from paying their top executives more and more. The median compensation of a chief executive in 2013 was $13.9 million, up 9 percent from 2012, according the Equilar 100 C.E.O. Pay Study, conducted for The New York Times. The 100 C.E.O.s in the survey took home a combined $1.5 billion last year, a slight rise from 2012. And the pay-for-performance metrics — particularly the idea of paying executives with stock to align their interests with shareholders — may even have amplified that trend. In some ways, the corporate meritocrat has become a new class of aristocrat.

Economists have long known that high executive pay has contributed to the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else. But the role of executive compensation may be far larger than previously realized.

In “Capital in the 21st Century,” (Belknap Press), a new best seller that is the talk of economics circles, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics makes a staggering observation. His numbers show that two-thirds of the increase in American income inequality over the last four decades can be attributed to a steep rise in wages among the highest earners in society. This, of course, means people like the C.E.O.s in the Equilar survey, but also includes a broader class of highly paid executives. Mr. Piketty calls them “supermanagers” earning “supersalaries.”

“The system is pretty much out of control in many ways,” he said in an interview.

This is not to say that boards always bow to C.E.O.s; some boards will swat executives who fail to meet their metrics. Among C.E.O.s of the 100 largest companies (by revenue) that had filed proxies by April 4, some 26 had been given a pay cut, according to Equilar, an executive compensation data firm. One was Mr. Kent of Coca-Cola, who took a 16 percent cut and may not ultimately get all of his 2013 award if targets aren’t met. But even if they made less money, chief executives were making extraordinary sums. Some received substantial raises: David N. Farr, the C.E.O. of Emerson Electric, the industrial giant, took home $25.3 million, up 264 percent from 2012. (Mr. Farr got most of his pay, $21.6 million, in stock.) Mark Polzin, an Emerson spokesman, said that if the company is doing well, the structure of the package might cause a spike in Mr. Farr’s pay every few years.

The stocks of many companies posted robust performance in 2013, which could also help drive C.E.O. pay higher.

The pay of John T. Chambers, the long-serving chief executive of Cisco Systems, jumped 80 percent, to $21 million, most of it in stock. The strong returns on Cisco’s shares — up 63 percent during the company’s 2013 fiscal year — played a substantial role in determining his raise.

Rupert Murdoch of 21st Century Fox made $26.1 million for the 2013 fiscal year, during which his company’s stock rose 46 percent. Disney’s shares didn’t fare quite as well, gaining 23 percent, and its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, was given a 7 percent pay cut. Still, he made $34.3 million, the second-highest total in the survey. Zenia Mucha, a Disney spokeswoman, said in an email that 93 percent of Mr. Iger’s compensation was based on performance.

(Many large companies had not filed proxies by the April 4 survey deadline, including CBS, which filed last week. The CBS chief executive, Leslie Moonves, made more than $65 million in 2013, according to the filings. In June, results of an additional survey, including companies that file through the end of May, will appear in Sunday Business.)

Wall Street executives are still royally rewarded, but the C.E.O.s of financial firms did not often figure in the upper echelons of the pay survey. Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, who made nearly $20 million, was the highest-paid chief executive at a regulated Wall Street firm. But Mr. Blankfein’s compensation was a mere fraction of some of his peers’ in the so-called shadow-banking sector, where regulation is much lighter. Publicly traded private equity firms like Blackstone and Apollo Global Management were not included on the list because their revenue was too low, but their chief executives made a fortune last year. Leon D. Black of Apollo earned more than a half-billion dollars in 2013, according to data in company filings, though that included income that would not have been counted in Equilar’s survey.

Of the 100 executives on the Equilar list, only nine were women. The highest-paid, Phebe N. Novakovic of General Dynamics, earned $18.8 million, an amount that placed her behind 20 men in the ranking.


No Perfect Incentives

Executive pay has undergone many changes in recent years to make it more shareholder-friendly. As well as including a plethora of performance metrics, proxies have become more transparent and easier to understand. And shareholders have been given ways to express dissatisfaction over compensation in “say on pay” votes.

“We have pay for performance as we’ve designed it,” said James E. Kim, a managing director at Frederic W. Cooke, a compensation consulting firm. “And it is much better than it was when I started in the business 15 years ago.”

But to some skeptics, the new metrics have become an elaborate means to rationalize excessive pay. “The problem with the pay-for-performance approach is that it is simply impossible to create perfect incentives,” Lynn Stout, a law professor at Cornell and a critic of the current compensation system. “And if you try, you may in fact create bad incentives.”

Ms. Stout places much blame on a crucial tax-code change made in the early 1990s. The rule eliminated tax deductions on compensation above $1 million that wasn’t linked to performance. The change, she said, helped prompt widespread use of pay-for-performance metrics. But as that trend grew, pay kept climbing even when shareholder returns suffered.

“I think it’s fair to say that the experiment has failed,” Ms. Stout said.










http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-simpsons&episode=s06e16

Springfield! Springfield!


The Simpsons

Bart vs. Australia


Please to repeat again, and I will translating for the el presidente.










From 1/17/1991 ( the date of record of my United States Navy Medal of Honor as Kerry Wayne Burgess chief warrant officer United States Marine Corps circa 1991 also known as Matthew Kline for official duty and also known as Wayne Newman for official duty ) To 4/28/1994 is 1197 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 2/11/1969 ( Jennifer Aniston ) is 1197 days



http://www.tv.com/shows/the-simpsons/sweet-seymour-skinners-baadasssss-song-1385/

tv.com


The Simpsons Season 5 Episode 19

Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song

Aired Sunday 8:00 PM Apr 28, 1994 on FOX

AIRED: 4/28/94










http://www.snpp.com/episodes/1F18.html

Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song


At Fort Springfield, a giant red "K" lands upright in the ground behind Bart and Seymour.



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 12:52 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Thursday 18 December 2014