A couple nights ago, for the first time in nine years, I was watching "The Simpsons" season 24 episode 21, "The Saga of Carl" (originally aired May 19, 2013). Although it comes from the infamous quality-in-decline era of the show that has come to be colloquially referred to by some fans as "Zombie Simpsons", it stands among my all-time favourite episodes of the show thanks to the fact that this particular episode is mostly set in Iceland and features some music and even a quick cameo appearance by the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós (their own cover of the show's theme song even plays over the episode's end credits), and anyone who knows me will know that that specifically is the main attraction for me.
I had first watched the episode in September 2014 for that exact reason (I don't think I heard about it until sometime that year so obviously I was a little late), although I hadn't been allowed to watch "The Simpsons" as a younger kid (I was fourteen when I saw this episode), I wasn't familiar with the show or its universe, history and characters at all at that time (all I knew was that it was an animated cartoon sitcom created by Matt Groening and it was about a dysfunctional family, it was a long-runner after first airing in 1989 and still going strong, voice-acting legend Nancy Cartwright was the voice of Bart and many other characters, the vast majority of the characters famously had yellow skin for some reason, and it had a lot of cameo and guest appearances of celebrities appearing as themselves — I later learned that this latter point seems to be a hallmark of the "Zombie Simpsons" era), and I didn't get seriously interested in the show proper until 2017; but 2014 was the second year of my fascination with Iceland and the uniquely and ethereally beautiful world of Sigur Rós (I had discovered them in late September 2012 and began to explore more of their music and universe in 2013), so naturally I was curious to see what the band suddenly had to do with "The Simpsons" (and a few months before I watched "The Saga of Carl" in a rerun on FX, the band had also had a guest appearance on "Game of Thrones" season 4 episode 2, "The Lion and the Rose"; this aired on April 13, 2014 but I still haven't seen it nor have I ever watched the show, although I have heard and enjoyed their cover of the show's song "The Rains of Castamere").
So imagine my surprise when, about three minutes into this "Simpsons" episode, there was a short joke about the 17th century French polymath Blaise Pascal. And then I immediately remembered that Kristina had had a correspondence with the real Blaise Pascal. For many years there's been a popular joke and notion about "The Simpsons" being able to predict the future because of how a lot of big and small things that have happened or been joked about on the show have gone on to either exactly or somewhat similarly happen in real life even as long as one, two or three decades after the airing of whichever episode contained or mentioned whichever event, so I got in on it and joked that the show had, albeit on the most minor and tangential level, predicted my future interest in Kristina via a joke about one of the people who came and went in her/his/their life, and that in an episode that also happened to feature the country and the band that changed the trajectory of my life and my entire perspective forever.
I just thought this was worth pointing out.
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