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:
“Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequences of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)
“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)