Condition
The house is often shown as dilapidated. For example, the walls are painted with lead paint, the roof leaks, and in "All's Fair in Oven War", the kitchen is so badly damaged that it needs to be rebuilt. One running gag shows the interior of the walls and floors filled with dangerous and unusual items when the camera pans between floors or rooms. Some of these unusual items include: asbestos, toxic waste, hidden treasure, recording devices, baby dinosaurs, and dancing mice. Even the family cat, Snowball II, is seen between the walls from time to time. However, the lived-in spaces are usually kept neat by Marge. In the episode "Homer's Enemy", Frank Grimes - who lives in a single room above a bowling alley and below another bowling alley - describes it as a "palace". In another episode, Moe Szyslak observes that it contains no silverfish. Many episodes in which Springfield is hit by extreme heatwaves indicate that the air-conditioning system in the Simpson home is either broken or nonexistent. If the Simpson home does have central air, it is more than likely broken and the Simpsons simply cannot afford to get it fixed. The house is shown to have a gas furnace, as well as gas for the stove, water heater, and dryer. In one episode, Homer reroutes the gas line to turn a totem pole into a fire-breathing "God," filling the whole house with gas in the process. In a flashback episode, Homer steals Ned Flanders' air conditioner and installs it in his own house. The air conditioner stolen from Flanders is a window unit, indicating that neither the Simpson nor Flanders residence has central air. Ned, however, can afford window units.
In The Simpsons Movie, the house and all of the family's possessions are completely destroyed by a sink hole in Maggie's sandbox, which expands after the Simpsons escape through it and the police shoot bullets into it. At the end of the film, the townsfolk and the family themselves rebuild the house in exactly the same manner as it was before, restoring the "status quo". The opening sequence and the couch gag of "He Loves to Fly and He D'ohs" shows the house still under construction, along with the whole town rebuilding after the events of the movie.
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Famous quotes containing the word condition:
“Humility is a grace that shines in a high condition but cannot, equally, in a low one because a person in the latter is already, perhaps, too much humbled.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)