Plot
The family goes to the YMCA to attend one-time-only free classes, along with many other Springfieldians who admit they will never return to the YMCA and pay for any of the regular classes. Lisa takes gymnastics (and gets yelled at by the Russian coach for being too old), Bart gets tricked into taking an etiquette class by a black man dressed as a gangsta rapper (who happens to be the husband of the prim and proper etiquette teacher), and Homer participates in a basketball class for men over the age of 35, but suffers a torn ACL after a dunk attempt ends with the backboard crashing down on his leg. After Homer gets his surgery, he is told by Dr. Hibbert that he cannot go to work, and he must stay home. Homer finds himself extremely bored, even going so far as attempting to cross-breed Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II. One evening, Ned wants Marge to watch Rod and Todd while he attends a Chris Rock concert (that he misinterprets to be an abbreviation for a Christian Rock concert), but Marge is out identifying a body (which ends up being a very much alive Hans Moleman which everyone thinks is really dead) so Ned asks Homer instead. The kids like having Homer take care of them, which allows Homer to establish his own day care center.
Homer starts a day care center (under Marge's ownership), "Uncle Homer's Day Care Center", to entertain himself, but makes Bart and Lisa feel like outcasts by ignoring them, giving Bart's jacket to Milhouse, forcing them out of their bedrooms for a film crew that is making a documentary about him, and having them work long hours at night to cut out felt hearts in his honor. The daycare center is wildly successful, and Homer earns a nomination for the "Good Guy Awards" ceremony. For the ceremony, Bart and Lisa splice in home movie footage of Homer at his worst (passed out on the floor drunk and almost naked during Christmas, losing Maggie in a poker game, and chasing Bart down the street while wielding a chain mace) to prove to everyone that Homer is a bad father and a worse person. The audience becomes outraged and Homer angrily strangles Bart on stage. Everyone in the audience becomes horrified by Homer's behavior, and decide to prevent their kids from being watched over by him. Homer escapes from the ceremony with all the kids in a van, until he crashes the van into a tree, and tries to escape before Chief Wiggum stops him. After three mistrials, Homer apologizes to Bart and Lisa for neglecting them, and promises to care for his own children (including the perpetually-ignored Maggie) instead of the neighborhood kids. The family then helps themselves to the craft table, which the Teamsters left behind in their house.
Read more about this topic: Children Of A Lesser Clod
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)