Dublin Opinion

The Simpsons prides itself on its stated ambition to offend everyone in the World. The Brazilians gave out about how their country was depicted a couple of years ago and news comes to us that Argentina are a bit fecked off that it suggested in a recent episode that the legacy of ‘disappearing’ people occurred during the Presidency of Peron, whereas it happened several years afterwards when the country was controlled by a military ‘Junta’.

Mainstream media in the US was also rife not so long ago with ill-informed nonsense about how Venezuelan TV had ‘banned’ the Simpsons, replacing it with the much less ‘malign’ Baywatch (although in many stories it was described as an order from Chavez himself).

This morning while talking about a school trip my daughter is going on today she mentioned that the bus they are going on has seat belts.

She brought it up, in fact. Obviously I asked her if her teacher had told them that the bus they were going on had seat belts and she said that she had. I jumped to the conclusion that the teacher mentioned it not to reassure the kids, but to inform the parents that the bus they using complies with new regulations.

However, my daughter was wondering why some buses have seat belts and some don’t.

Hmmm, I thought, I’m not going to explain that the regulations were brought in because of the accidents that lead to the deaths of school children, so I said that its only school buses that have seat belts.

‘But the school bus in the Simpsons doesn’t have any seat belts’, she replied.

Quite so, I said, quite so.