It is truly bizarre how sometimes the most disparate things will converge, leaving you with a strange feeling of synchronicity, or the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things.

First of all, the Simpsons recently started up again on Channel 4. Since the Simpsons is one of the most brilliant TV shows in the world, ever, in the history of all TV shows, this is great news (it also takes a tiny bit of the sting out of the fact that the latest season of the Sopranos just ended - and the next one won’t start until 2006…).

Second of all, I desperately need to come up with a topic for my linguistics term paper. Today I started tossing around the idea of writing something on the death and revival of the Cornish language, and when I Googled "revival of Cornish", I got a very weird-seeming hit: "Lisa Simpson Sparks Cornish Revival". Huh?

It turns out that it wasn’t a fluke: on the Christmas episode of the Simpsons this year, Lisa (the character closest to my heart, though Ralph Wiggum is probably closest to my funny bone) will be shouting for Cornish independence - in Cornish. Apparently, news of this has given a huge boost to Cornish language groups, whose websites have seen their visitor numbers double and whose representatives have been getting exposure on television and radio.

So not only is the Simpsons hilariously funny, brilliantly satirical and wonderfully surreal, it may also help revive an ailing Celtic language. Could a TV show be any more perfect? And do you think I could get a term paper out of this?

(By the way, the title of this post means "Simpsons forever" in Cornish.)