Well hey, that's more like it. I know the "get a school employee reinstated" plot has been done many times before but I liked it, and the initial Roosevelt hook was inspired without dominating the rest of the episode (DABF07's cowboy theme comes to mind). Nice outing for Chalmers, too. Lisa's bit about Franklin was fun, but on the other hand, Abe's subsequent run felt odd as it crossed the line from Grampa- type humor to much more current-events-aware stuff by the time it got to Stewart/Colbert (it wasn't bad, just felt glaringly not him).
DYN: ...Edna's shirts from other schools appear to be from nicer ones we've seen in previous episodes (I caught Waverly Hills - LABF10 - not the others well enough though)? ...Modern Proctor magazine (30 minutes remaining)? (Coincidentally enough, I was just on the phone with my beloved smother today and she mentioned proctoring an SAT yesterday.) ...Teddy Roosevelt is seen boxing Mr. Burns (on the TR website)? ...Kearney doesn't seem to be around when the bullies first tag along with Bart, but appears later (in the treehouse)? ...Jimbo says "bitches" (like as an address/interjection) - which seems odd for the show? ...Theodore Roosevelt is credited just like any typical guest star (does this make the first official presidential guest spot)?
Previous episode stuff HABF12: Oddly, here Chalmers feels typical school settings are more accessible to girls, as opposed to this older episode AABF03 (and others I'm sure): State Comptroller Atkins shows up KABF03: a poster for Ralph for studeny body president reminiscent of this episode 4F09: barricading selves in the school
Meta Lisa plays a third alternate instrument in the opening tonight: the tuba! I list it here because originally that was to be Lisa's thing, based in part or in whole on David Silverman's own choice of instrument (see also 4F12 capsule).
Goofs -The school marquee at the start says "THIS YEARS THEME", with no apostrophe (even though there are enough bits to make quotation marks). Since it wasn't part of a gag about bad grammar or anything, I assume it's just a regular goof. -Also, literally, Booth didn't say "death to tyrants". (He didn't deliver his line in English anyway, but in Latin, "sic semper tyrannis" doesn't mean that.)
The Hurricane The MacFarlane trio's "hurricane night" aired tonight, after originally being dumped from its May slot because of real-life hurricane devastation (and what do you know, Irene this August wound up being even bigger!). (There was also a Red Cross disaster relief ad before it began, though not explicitly mentioning why it was shoved in there.) Anyway, it hit me near the end of the night - mostly when Stan went outside to survey the damage to the neighborhood - that it would have been kind of neat, especially now with the advance warning, to set up an arrangement to show "Hurricane Neddy" (4F07) on Fox, since now there's a bit of precedent (with the post-mortem airings of 7F24 and 9F08). It's a solid, classic episode anyway, but it also would have fit well with the "character study" thread the other 3 shows seemed to have. I may just pop it in myself.
Newsgroups If you saw my rambling rant last week: I seem to have proper group access through this account again now. Turns out that the university's original setup didn't cover all apps or something and so - despite my having no trouble in May - it all got disabled some time after that. I filed a ticket and blah blah blah here we are. So, problem solved, but I still say the arrangement/transition has been a huge pain in the ass overall.
Paging Don If you're curious: the football game Fox was showing in Cleveland (Giants vs. someone maybe?) ran pretty late, not ending till a few minutes before 7:30 (so no Cleveland Show repeat at all). It looks like OFF would have begun otherwise around 7:28. At 7:35, the correct original opening to NABF12 ran, then some commercials, then the episode was joined in progress about a minute into act 2, at the last moments of the scene where Homer was failing to draw flattering images of Selma.