Mr. Burns is all about fun these days, a word he has only seen written until Mark Cuban comes into his life.  Burns can't understand how money can actually buy happiness, until he wins a basketball team in a game of poker.

Flying in his jet to the Billionaires retreat, Burns' favorite week of the year, he is filled with excitement to talk business with his fellow rich men.  By discussing business, I mean they are skinny dipping in the lake with the founder of Facebook.  Showing all the ways thier lives are better then ours, the billionaires act like money means nothing, especially because to them, it doesn't.

Christmas time is over in Springfield, and all Lisa wanted under her tree was a brand new mypod.  Obviously on Homer's salary this was not going to happen.  The family takes off to the Springfield Mall, under the restriction they can return one unwanted gift.  Everyone decides to return Bart's gift, a Kitten Kalendar.  That's when Lisa sees it. The new Mapple store has finally arrived at the Springfield Mall.

Bart and Lisa are running a lemonade stand and aren't getting a lot of business - that is until Bart puts a dollar in the jar. All of a sudden, the stand is mobbed by thirsty kids. Homer shows up and asks if he can put his on his "tab" and when Bart refuses, Homer tells he and Lisa that "lemonade is for babies" and heads off to Moe's. No surprise, the car won't start, so her is forced to ask Lisa he can borrow her bike to ride to Moe's. As he rode the tiny bike, he didn't seem to be getting very far and decided to walk. But, sadly, the bike seat gets jammed in his heinie. When Homer got into the bar, all eyes were on Edna trying to break up with Principal Skinner. Edna's having a hard time trying to get through to him and bribes the boys at the bar to do the deed for her with a cold, frosty beer. Homer immediately sits at Seymour's side and delicately tells him that Edna doesn't want to be with him anymore. He tells him "You're a free man (unlike me), you have all your hair (unlike me) no kids tying you down or a crippling mortgage that you refinanced because a dancing internet cowboy told you to." Homer's words made Skinner feel better, like he was having "one big half-day." Lenny asked Homer if he could handle the duties of breaking up with his girlfriend Doreen. Homer "works his magic" on Doreen, telling her that Lenny's dead. Not really, he's alive, so the next news he has for her won't seem so bad.

It's the Fourth of July weekend (I know, right? It's "The Simpsons," so just suspend any concept of time for a little while. Besides, this will be awesome when they rerun it over the summer!) The family is stuck in vacation traffic, but Homer is taken with the radio's "Shock Jock Talk Block" featuring a countdown of the top 500 wackiest radio sound effects of all time (#499 is the "boooing" soiund effect, in case you were wondering.) Bart says he can't listen to the show anymore and stuffs his ABC gum in his ears. Homer says "nobody shuts out my blather" and grabs for the gum, pulling out Bart's inner ear parts in the process. Ewww.

It's once again time for the annual Simpsons' scare fest - and at least it's somewhat close to Halloween this year. We open on Election Day 2008 and Homer shows up at the polling place to vote for "anything to take money away from parks and schools." He can't seem to manage to wedge himself into the voting booth, so he has to use "the doublewide." He tries to vote (on the electronic machine) for Obama and the machine registers his vote as one for McCain (I didn't peg him as an Obama supporter.) Homer repeatedly attempts to vote for Barry and the votes keep going to his opponent. Homer finally suspects that the machine is rigged, and the machine then transforms into a huge vacuum, sucking him in and beating the crap out of him before spitting him back out. McCain winning is a lot of people's biggest nightmare, so Matt and the gang came up with a subtly scary opening.

Bart is (not surprisingly) causing mischief at the Kwik-E-Mart, where Homer is picking up some groceries ("Stupid shopping list, turning food into work.") Bart is jumping on the tops of the shelves and Homer threatens to beat him (in the blind spot of the surveillance camera) with one of those womens' magazines with all of the ads in them. Apu suggests Homer take his mind off of Bart and buy the last scratch-off lottery ticket on the roll, because as Apu says, they're alleged to be lucky. Homer is about to buy the ticket when Bart decides to try to jump off the top of the shelving unit into a shopping cart filled with marshmallows. As he jumps, Chief Wiggums knocks the cart away and Homer is forced to rescue his son from a nasty spill. In the meantime, Lenny buys the last ticket, and wins $50,000. Lenny tells Homer the ticket could have been his if Bart wasn't messing around (Apu said it was just another "Ironic Tale of the Kwik-E-Mart.") Homer was incredibly angry that because of Bart, he lost $200,000 (because he was going to bet the $50,000 at the dog track.)

Principal Skinner and his mother are on the freeway when his car runs out of gas. He can't believe it as he had put one dollar's worth of gas in the tank that morning and he had only driven "ninety cents' worth." His mother says he's out of gas because he insisted in driving with the windows down (sarcastically calling him "Rockefeller.") She then sends her son out to get gas while she reads her bingo strategy guide, called "It's All Luck." Seymour grabs the gas can out of the truck and plays "human Frogger" to get across the busy lanes of traffic on the freeway. He makes it across only to discover that he left the gas can on the hood of the car. He weaves his way back through the traffic. Homer sees him and takes the opportunity to yell out, "This counts as a parent-teacher conference!"

The family heads off to Spingfield's annual St. Patrick's Day parade. Bart thought it was cool that the river was colored green for the event and Mr. Burns said that his nuclear plant was responsible for the water's color. Mayor Quimby welcomes everyone to the celebration, which for the first year in history was booze-free. The Springfield-ites were less-than-happy about this announcement. He went on to say that Ireland was known for so much more than booze - they brought us the paddy wagon, the Shamrock Shake and folk dancing where you don't move your arms. The parade commences with such floats as "the Irish boy who most resembles a potato" and "straight Catholic priests" (with a mere two riders.) Lisa notes that the Northern Irish are also having a parade the same day, and things just might get ugly. She tries to avoid a sqabble by singing "Tura Lura Lura" which turns into a big sing-a-long/hugfest. Then the fighting commences.

All of Springfiled's brightest stars are out for the Springfield Showbiz Awards. The winner of the "Entertainer of the Year" award is Lisa. We're obviously going to have to go back in time to see how this happened, and we do, thanks to a tribute to one of my all-time favorite movies "All About Eve," narrated by Sideshow Mel. We flashback to the Krustylu Studios, where the 4,000th episode of Krusty's show is being taped. The episode is hosted by Drew Carey. Krusty shows a clip from the show's infancy, with him accompanied by the "Krusketeers." Some of the original Krusteteers show up for a renuoion, including balding Jesse, pregnant CJ and Cubby, who "did time" for Krutsy. They all came back, "except for the successful ones." Krutsy announces that he's looking for a Krusketeer. Bart really wants the gig. The auditions begin - the twins twirl batons, Raplh stuffs an ungodly amount of Twizzlers in his mouth, Milhouse does some contortionist tricks. Nelson beats geeks tied to a table, to make crude music. Bart is a real crowd-pleaser with his prop act, a la Carrot Top. Krusty says they were all great so he hired Nelson, because he bedded the kid's mother. Bart was devastated that he lost to Nelson and Lisa went to talk to Krusty about hiring Bart as an intern, opening up a "whole new world of free labor" to him. Krusty thought Lisa was a real "go-getter" and ended up hiring her to be his new intern.

Ok, how many times are they going to use the "evolution of Homer" open? We open with a visit to the Springfield Mall, where Moe takes great delight in pretending to leave his parking spot and telling the people who drive by, asking if he's leaving that he's not, because he "loves to create disappointment." Inside, Marge, Homer and the kids stop by Itchy and Scratchy's ("Sweaters, not the fun cartoon") for some uncomfortable sweaters. The kids felt they were tricked and were expecting a fun trip to the mall. Marge says that since the kids were so well-behaved that they could do one fun thing. Lisa wants to go to the food court and chastise any businesses still using styrofoam, Bart points out a pile of lead-based toys, and Homer, looking more and more like my Dad each day, says "Sit on the bench, sit on the bench!"