“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times“
Last Exit to Springfield, S04E17
The idea for this blog came from recently re-watching old Simpsons episodes and laughing uncontrollably at the constant barrage of jokes that they provide. The classic quote above comes from Season 4, Episode 17 ‘Last Exit to Springfield.’
The scene is based on the ‘Infinite Monkey Theorem‘ which proposes that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the works of Shakespeare. Thus Mr. Burns has ‘hired’ one thousand monkeys to work at one thousand typewriters with the aim to create ‘the greatest novel known to man.’ Tearing the latest sheet from one unfortunate monkey typist, Mr. Burns reads out the results: ‘It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.’ While close to recreating the famous first line from Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ the monkey has failed miserably, so crumpling the paper in anger Mr. Burns chucks it at the monkey exclaiming ‘you stupid monkey!’
Although this episode first aired in 1993, before I was even born, I distinctly remember watching it on TV and finding it hilarious (despite having zero clue of the Infinite Monkey Theorem or Dicken’s work) and quickly adding it to my repertoire of Simpsons quotes that I repeat ad infinitum. This is the magic of The Simpsons, scenes like this one work on so many levels it makes re-watching them a joy.
Now I realise that this isn’t an original name for a blog, stealing a popular quote from a much beloved series and turning it into the name for a blog. Indeed, a quick Google suggests that ‘Blurst of Times’ has been used in the form of a song, multiple podcasts and various different already existing blogs. However, I feel I can defend my choice on two fronts:
- ‘Blurst of Times’ matched my aim with this blog; to consistently and constantly produce absolute nonsense in the naïve hope that I will one day write something worthy of note.
- None of these people were smart enough to grab the domain name so….sucks to be them?
My ultimate goal is to beat the real-life performance of monkeys in Devon who produced a total of five pages largely consisting of the letter “S” and subsequently beat the keyboard with a stone and soiled it. I admit that I may be setting my aims a bit too high, could quickly grow jealous of the success of my primate relatives and much like Fry in Futurama (S01E11), I may end up hating them and their fancy hats. However, if I do fail then at least this blog will act as a reminder that we really do live in the best of times and the blurst of times.