I was tired, and I was having trouble with some of the thicker Irish accents on last night’s episode of The Simpsons, so I turned on the closed captioning.

I saw something rare: visible evidence of last-minute rewrites!

I noticed three of them:

1. When Bart was pulling his prank at Blarney Castle (the one that went awry), the on-screen payoff was a long-distance shot with a flock of birds flying away as if startled. The caption said “Bart Screams,” but on the soundtrack, Bart did not scream.

2. In the scene immediately following, Homer and Grandpa Simpson each break a barrel of ale. Here’s the dialogue you heard:

   Homer: You okay, Dad?

   Grampa: I just had a nightmare that I was back with your mother!

   [Homer, Grampa, and Tom O’Flanagan all laugh]

   Homer: Oh, how I miss her!

   But if you had the captioning on, you saw this:

   Homer: You okay, Dad?

   Grampa: I just had a nightmare that I was in England!

   [Homer, Grampa, and Tom O’Flanagan all laugh]

   Homer: Oh, how I hate them!

   If you watch Grampa Simpson’s mouth, he’s clearly only supposed to be saying the three syllables of “in England,” not the five syllables of “back with your mother.” Since the episodes have to be captioned in advance of airtime, it appears that Al Jean and the other executive producers decided that hating on the English was not cool. (I don’t think the replacment line is funnier, so I’m guessing it was more about removing the English reference than making a better joke.)

3. Finally, near the end, Chief Wiggum pokes himself in the eye and says, on-screen:

   Wiggum: Oh, geez, that smarts. Better put a little ouchie spray on it. [Reaches to holster for spray bottle labeled “MACE”]

   But in the captioning?

   Wiggum: Oh, geez, that smarts. Better put a little Bactine on that. [Reaches to holster for spray bottle labeled “MACE”]

   That was probably a legal or sponsorship issue. (Since the shot is of Wiggum’s holster, not his mouth, there’s no visual evidence aside from the captioning of the soundtrack change.)

A few neat things:

1. In the new HD opening, I’m one of many to notice that the billboard outside Springfield Elementary School changes every week, just like the couch gag and Bart’s blackboard message. This week, it was an octuplets joke with Dr. Nick. Nice.

2. I did not notice, until this episode, that next to Bart’s blackboard is a framed picture of Homer the astronaut in his space suit.

3. The voice of Tom O’Flanagan, the tavernkeeper, was Colm Meaney, better known to me as Miles Edward O’Brien, Chief Petty Officer on the USS Enterprise 1701-D (for five and a half seasons) and later chief of operations on Deep Space Nine (for seven seasons—a run of 12 years as the same character). And I still didn’t recognize his voice until I saw his name in the credits.

It seems my time to be observant about TV. I noticed that MSNBC had stopped airing a daily live newscast before TV Newser and actually tipped them off to it. The difference is that I just wondered what the hell was going on, and they were able to confirm that MSNBC had taken the program off the air.

Lesson to other Web sites: having a really easy way on your home page to ask questions actually encourages people to submit questions and tips. If you’re going to do the legwork of actually reporting on the tips (rather than just passing them along as unsubstantiated rumors), such a box may be a really good idea.