Nellie Andreeva

If you are one of the biggest shows in the world you are guaranteed a fair share of bizarre stories. But 2 within 24 hours? That’s what happened to Fox’s animated veteran The Simpsons. First the official Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano on Sunday ran an article headlined Homer and Bart are Catholics. What is more weird than the Pope’s home paper devoting a whole article to proving Homer is a Catholic (which he is not)? The paper actually running 2 pieces on The Simpsons in the past 9 months. Osservatore Romano also ran a glowing story about the Fox family comedy last December, calling it “tender and irreverent, scandalous and ironic, boisterous and profound, philosophical and sometimes even theological.” Only hours after the Vatican article came out, Mexican authorities on Monday morning seized 105 tons of marijuana worth $340 million in what is believed to be one of the largest drug busts in recent history. The 10,000 packages were organized in batches with different color-coded wrappers for the different distributors. One wrapper had Homer Simpson on it and a slogan in Spanish that reads: “I’m going to get high, dude!”

And if you think that the story can’t get more bizarre, it can, as the two seemingly random occurrences could both be traced back to an episode of The Simpsons that ran in 2002. In the episode, titled Weekend at Burnsie’s, Homer smoked marijuana and, while high, asked Flanders to read him the whole Holy Bible! Talk about profound… and prophetic.

TV Editor Nellie Andreeva - tip her here.