 Writing lines is frequently satirised in popular culture as "a symbol of futile, old-fashioned, one-size-fits-all schoolhouse discipline", as in the chalkboard gag seen at the beginning of many episodes of "The Simpsons", where Bart Simpson writes lines on a chalkboard as a punishment.Other appearances in fiction reflect the figurative belief that "writing has the power to work back on the writer", as Franz Kafka's 1919 short story "In the Penal Colony" in which a punishment device inscribes lines onto the bodies of criminals with a sharpened writing implement until they bleed to death, or the 2003 book "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" in which Potter is forced to write lines with a magical quill which uses his blood as ink.It has also been used in a satirical way in "Life of Brian".