To recap, my opinion from before was that although it’s not spectacularly bad or egregiously offensive, there is simply nothing particularly appealing about it. It’s not funny, and it has nothing interesting to say. It goes for cheap jokes rather than insight; it is lazy and predictable. I formed this opinion on the basis of the first two episodes (I’d formed it after the first one, but I invoked the It’s Just the Pilot Rule).

In the next two episodes, things went seriously downhill, for three different reasons.

FIRST, it cranked up the cultural insensitivity. Jokes about Indian names returned in episode 4. They did one in the pilot, but I thought (silly me) that the writers just had to do it once, to get it out of their system. Nope. Then both episodes 3 and 4 went and made all sorts of jokes about arranged marriages. Our White Hero furrows his brow at the absurdity of it all. He points out that Asha’s helping Rajiv with his love marriage contradicts her own preference for an arranged marriage (whereas this is not a contradiction at all). Repeatedly, Our White Hero is presented with some (supposed) facet of Indian culture and asks “are you kidding?”, then rolls his eyes and gets a sympathetic nod from his asshat American friend. His toolishness continues to rise. He’s completely unlikable. Generally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a TV show that has an unlikable main character (British “The Office”, “House”), but the rest of the show needs to adapt itself to match. Outsourced, by contrast, seems to think that Our White Hero is likable.

SECOND, it has decided that some of its characters don’t really need personalities; they just need to show up when a joke needs someone to deliver it. Case in point: the plot in episode 4 about the three employees having a mini-feud against the besuited rival call center employees. Not only is it a perfect showcase for the show’s tendency to make jokes that have already been done to death in other shows but assuming that the characters’ Indianness makes it funny all over again, but it goes against the characters of both Madhuri (who has been established as way too unassuming to get involved in a prank war) and Office Space Guy (who has been established as someone who isn’t a complete lunatic and thus wouldn’t think burning down a rival call center is a good idea). But the writers wanted to write this plot, and they weren’t going to let silly things like established characters and personalities get in the way. Pah! Characters are for pansies. Real comedy writers make jokes about Indian people imitating American accents!

THIRD, its characters are not going anywhere. Culture shock comedy, by nature, requires some character growth in order to work. That’s what makes the whole genre work: the point is not that other cultures are weird, it’s that other cultures cause people to change in interesting ways. Not so on this show. Our White Hero’s just continuing to be more of a dick, and in fact is just going to become more of a dick as he ignores Comfortably White Aussie’s inexplicable interest in him, and continues to be a big stupid-head about Unattainable Indian Lady — even after he gets lonely, decides to take the easy way out, and cashes in for some White Aussie lovin. (That last part hasn’t happened yet, but it’s pretty obvious that it will, because this show is nothing if not predictable.)

Just as a random point, I would like to point out that the five main Indian characters on the show are played by three Americans and two Brits. I know this means essentially nothing in theory, but it does means that they all (except Anisha Nagarajan, as far as I can tell) have flawed Indian accents (their natural accents being American and British). This is starting to bother me more and more.

After all this, I’m done writing about this show. Unless (God forbid) it gets worse, anything I say would be repeating myself, and nobody wants to see that.

I’d gone in with extremely dim expectations. I’d heard that the show was both offensive and poorly executed, and this sounded very plausible. The premise of the show sounds like it would require very skillful handling to execute well, and if executed incorrectly, it would be offensive. This turned out to be not quite true, but I still wasn’t impressed.

The show is definitely not as offensive as I had originally imagined. Maybe it was just the absence of one specific joke, that being an American (or other Western) character mockingly imitating an Indian accent. As a linguist, I have very strong and specific tastes in accent-based humor. The only joke I’m OK with is when a character tries and fails to imitate another accent, but they are actually trying to get it right and not doing it from a position of power (e.g. Stephen Mangan on “Green Wing” trying and failing to say “knob” in a Cockney accent – series 2 episode 4). None of this happened in “Outsourced” (at least not yet).

One interesting thing about the accents: several of the Indian characters have Indian accents that don’t sound quite right. This turns out to be because the actors playing them are American and British, of Indian ancestry. Check this, this and this out.

Anyway, that was a digression. The primary question here is whether I liked Outsourced, and the answer to that is no. It’s not hugely offensive or painfully bad, but there’s just nothing there. It’s a perfect specimen of lazy comedy, which was exemplified last season by “Hank”. Outsourced is not quite as lazy or sloppy, but Outsourced is made slightly worse by being lazy with its handle-with-care subject matter. Culture shock (which is what the first two episodes are mostly about) is a perfectly valid centerpiece for a comedy, but it requires equal measures of sensitivity, daring and cleverness to get humor out of it.

(If you know me at all, you can probably figure out what fantastic example of culture shock comedy I’m about to go to.)

“Lost in Translation” is a perfect example of doing it right. There are a fair number of moments that simply play on how odd various Japanese phenomena seem to Westerners, but there are three important things about this. First, the characters reacting to them are reacting not with overt incredulity, smug self-satisfaction or ridicule, but instead just perceiving them and reacting quietly. They don’t fall back on Dumb American Tourist archetypes. Second, the culture shock moments are mined for laughs in a very quiet, subtle way, almost as background entertainment rather than the primary center of attention. Third, the culture shock moments are, ultimately, a metaphor for the main characters’ situations. They’re isolated within their own lives and not really sure what to do, but they find shelter in each other and learn to deal with their situations together.

Outsourced, on the other hand, does nothing beyond the superficial with its culture shock moments. The most egregious example is That Guy From Office Space’s line (multiple lines, really) about Indian food giving you diarrhea. Again, if you know me at all, you’ll know that I appreciate a good poop joke as much as the next guy (probably more, in fact) but see… this is not even a good poop joke. It’s predictable and uncreative, as is the extended joke about sacred cows.

So those two jokes I just cited are from the pilot, and I did invoke my It’s Just the Pilot rule and move on. Regardless of the fact that pilots are supposed to be when a show puts its best foot forward and explains what the show is about, some good shows have had pretty bad pilots that ended up being nothing like what the rest of the show turned out to be (Scrubs). So I watched the second episode and it didn’t get any better. The second episode let up on the obvious culture-shock jokes, but is no better for it. It seems like The Office, Special Xenophobic Edition. The humor in episode 2 is based on quirks of the various characters, which is exactly what early The Office was about, but treating it as if the characters’ Indianness makes it fresh and hilarious all over again. So it’s funny when a guy talks too much? Well it’s doubly funny when he talks too much in an Indian accent! Ha ha! Anytime a joke is made at the expense of one of the Indian characters, even if it’s not a stupid culture-shock joke about religious headgear, I get a little uncomfortable. It’s not that making a joke about a character who happens to be Indian is offensive in and of itself — the offensive part is when the joke is supposed to be funny because of the character’s Indianness.

This all goes without mentioning the very obvious setups for Conflicting Love Interests and Ensuing Angst, as our Handsome White Hero immediately has Comfortably White Aussie Lady engaging in witty suggestive banter and Exotic Erotic Indian Lady touching him in the face. What’s going to happen there, I wonder? THERE’S NO WAY TO KNOW!

Despite all this whining, I don’t think Outsourced is beyond salvation. One can hope that it’ll burn through all the cheap humor pretty quickly and then have to dig deeper. This could easily not happen, though; they could just continue to produce The Office: Xenophobia for a while. If it keeps going as-is, then I wish the show a swift death.

Before I get to that, thought, some background. My history with Green Day extends farther back than with any other band. I’ve written about how Metallica was the first band I ever liked, and this is still true. However, Green Day is the first band name I ever remembered. This is because, when I was a wee lad of 7 or 8, I had a babysitter who enjoyed watching MTV while keeping an eye on me. And one time, on MTV, I happened to see a music video with some revolting footage of someone having a tooth pulled. I was traumatized and ended up cowering in horror. This video was stuck firmly in my head for a long time, as well as the words superimposed on the final shot of a bloody tooth lying on a table: “GREEN DAY”. Turns out, the song was “Geek Stink Breath”. Even now I can’t watch the video all the way through. (And interestingly, I associate the childhood experience of the video with a snatch of music that sounds nothing like the actual song.)

My babysitter tried to get me to appreciate some of the crap she listened to, and I can still remember some of the songs to this day (mostly boy bands and rap). I’ve looked up the songs and artists on the basis of lyrics that I remember (thus proving that my brain is amazing at remembering completely useless garbage), but I didn’t remember any of the band names from back then. But by God I was never, ever going to forget the words “GREEN DAY”.

Once the trauma faded a little, I didn’t actually give Green Day much thought until high school. Just after senior year began, American Idiot came out and apparently it was a big hit. I was completely oblivious to contemporary music at the time (I was still catching up on Metallica’s catalogue from the 90s), so I would not have noticed if not for my best friend’s younger brother. He was the singer and guitarist in one of maybe three bands that competed in our school’s Battle of the Bands, and their entry was “American Idiot”. (To avoid hurting anyone’s feelings, this event was not an actual competition; they just let some bands perform for ten minutes each and that was it. Still, the yearbook awarded my friend’s brother the “Best Guitar Solo” recognition on the page devoted to Battle of the Bands.) At the time I was in a phase where I scorned basically any music anyone tried to tell me about, so I was all set to automatically dismiss whatever band originally made this song as stupid, but this high school band’s rendition of “American Idiot” was actually quite good. It was certainly miles better than the other bands’ performances.

Anyway, this concert performed by actual Green Day. For context, the previous night, I had gone to a ZZ Top concert. During this concert, I almost got involved in a dust-up with a drunk fat guy who was under the impression that I was messing with his stuff (I wasn’t). The crowd was composed largely of people like him — older, unpleasant-looking guys, usually accompanied by equally unpleasant-looking ladies, to whose physiques the years have been unkind. I’ve written at length about the crowds at the kind of concert I go to, so i won’t repeat myself here, but suffice it to say the ZZ Top crowd was scary. (ZZ Top was great, BTW.)

So maybe it was just that whole situation from the previous night, but Green Day made me realize several things, chief among which is this: I should probably start listening to bands that are not older than I am.

Not counting Green Day (or openers), I’ve seen nine bands live*. Of these, only two formed after I was born: Tool and Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Most of them peaked before I was born too. And the difference in atmosphere at the concerts is striking. Green Day was not filled with Scary Aging Metalheads; it was filled with people who were of reasonable ages and appearances, many of them younger than me (many of them were little kids, actually). I did not almost get involved in a dust-up. There wasn’t even a whole lot of smoke in the air.

And the band itself was very obviously of a less advanced age. I don’t know if Billie Joe Armstrong is an exceptional frontman and that’s what makes the difference, but he certainly was the most energetic of all the frontmen I’ve seen perform. Some frontmen benefit from an air of aloof detachment (Billy Gibbons) but I’ve never seen anyone engage a crowd like Billie Joe did. He pulls audience members on stage, crowd surfs, hoses people down with water, and lets audience members perform entire songs. It’s also quite convenient that Green Day is a Bay Area band and Billie Joe could name all sorts of random Bay Area towns and diss Los Angeles and scream soulfully about finally being home.

And they went on and on for over three hours, without a break. This is the longest set I’ve seen any band play live. They played all of their classics, didn’t play too much from 21st Century Breakdown, and covered bits of a few classic rock songs. They did everything in a good order, playing some classics up front, then screwing around a lot in the middle (including taking audience requests), and saving “American Idiot”, “Jesus of Suburbia”, and some acoustic things including “Good Riddance” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” for the encore and second encore. And, of course, Shoreline Amphitheatre is still amazing. Essentially, they put together the perfect Green Day concert, and the best concert I’ve ever been to.

As a bonus, the opener was AFI, which I had never heard of before. It turns out they’re actually really good and I will start listening to them.

* The others, in roughly chronological order: Yngwie Malmsteen, Rush (twice), Dream Theater (once as a headliner, once opening for Iron Maiden), Queensrÿche (twice), Def Leppard, Metallica, Iron Maiden, ZZ Top.

There was a rumor, during the summer hiatus, that the show’s name was going to be changed. The name was a thinly-veiled reference to the premise of the show at its start: Courteney Cox plays a divorced woman in her forties who starts going out with younger dudes. Pretty quickly, the show dropped this theme completely and turned into an ensemble comedy about a group of friends who live in some suburban cul-de-sac. Critics (and Bill Lawrence) universally agreed that this made the show much better.

My confession, which I resent having to label as a confession because I see this as an eminently reasonable point of view but society apparently disagrees, is this: the show was totally better when it was about a divorced woman in her forties who starts going out with younger dudes.

That is a show I would watch all the time. That is an awesome topic. There haven’t been any TV shows based around it. It can give rise to tons of funny stuff. It is also an awesome topic. And I would have expected Bill Lawrence to have the balls to make that show, and to know how to get it right.

But the show as it is now is not a whole lot more interesting than if “Friends” were done in modern sitcom style. A heterogeneous group of people sit around in living rooms, say wacky things, and have heartwarming moments. Yay.

They’re not changing the name, as it turns out. The name will just sit around and taunt me, and remind me that if I want to watch the show that’s actually interesting, I have to stick with the first, like, three episodes.

It strikes me that every decade so far since the invention of rock has produced one or two rock bands who were head and shoulders greater in metaphorical stature than all the others — bands you could point to and say, “[Band name] was the band of the 80s” or whatever decade is appropriate.

Then I realized that I can’t think who the band of the 00s might be. For that matter, I can’t even think what the rock subgenre of the decade might be.

For historical context, let’s look back at previous decades.

Rock, in the way that I’m thinking about it, came into existence in the 1950s. Inasmuch as there was a rock musician of the 50s, it was Elvis Presley.

The 60s was the decade of The Beatles.

The 70s was the decade of Led Zeppelin.

The 80s are actually really difficult to pick a band for. So much happened in the world of rock; there are so many different subgenres (and gray areas that may or may not be termed rock) that there were a multitude of apparently larger-than-life bands having their breakthroughs. But the problem here isn’t the same as the problem I’m having with the 00s — I can’t think of any candidates from the 00s, whereas I can think of too many candidates from the 80s. The popular musician of the 80s was almost undoubtedly Michael Jackson, but I don’t categorize him as rock. If I really had to pick one band for the 80s, it would have to be U2.

The 90s was the decade of Nirvana and Green Day.

So what was the band of the 00s?

Now, I realize that a decade is a completely arbitrary period of time, and chopping up the history of rock into decades and choosing a band to represent each is a mostly-bogus thing to do. But it still seems odd to me that I can’t even pick out a single subgenre of rock that emerged or dominated in the 00s.

The cop-out answer is “indie rock”. I do agree that the indie scene gained prominence in the 00s, but this isn’t so much a subgenre in the musical sense as a subculture. And of course, by the nature of the subculture, indie bands aren’t household names, which is what I’m looking for.

Perhaps I’m just behind the times, and I don’t know about some awesome new feature of the rock scene. Perhaps this kind of analysis is impossible while the relevant cultural phenomena are still ongoing (and they very well might be — it’s not like the turning of the calendar from 2009 to 2010 put a stop to everything going on in the 00s). Or perhaps the 00s will just turn out to be a decade that defies attempts to assign icons to it, who knows. All I know is that the 80s is still definitely the best decade of music.

Let’s just talk about how amazing Valve is at game design, shall we? Let’s talk about that. Specifically: how amazing Valve is at storytelling. “What!” I hear you cry. HL2 has a silent protagonist and no cutscenes or anything! How on earth can you say it has amazing storytelling!

Well, let me tell you how HL2 has amazing storytelling. It is amazing precisely because it tells stories so effectively without the crutches of cutscenes, text walls or speaking protagonists.

So there’s this area in the chapter Water Hazard, the one where you’re buzzing around in an airboat avoiding a hunter-chopper that buzzes around strafing you and pooping mines in your path. There’s an area off to the side during the part where you’re going through some kind of refinery. A lone metrocop shoots at you from behind a pile of tires. If you kill him and go into the area where he was, you will find a story, told by nothing but scenery.

As you go in, a zombie will get up from the ground and, inexplicably, a whole bunch of headcrabs will come flying out of a big inaccessible opening above. Once you dispatch them all (with great dispatch!), take a look around, and listen to the story that the scene tells.

There’s a little lofted area with a lambda painted on the wall. There’s some supply boxes there, but also two bare mattresses and a few empty cans of food. It’s very plain that two rebels camped out here. If you look around, you’ll see a dead body — one of the rebels. As for the other one, well, uh, that zombie. Look up at the opening where the headcrabs came from and wonder what’s going on back there. These rebels chose an unfortunate place to camp.

This is hardly unique in the game — there’s plenty of evidence of rebels living in harsh conditions and meeting sticky ends — but this scene stands out in its use of sound. First of all, there’s the howling wind. This, combined with the spinning windmill above, makes the place feel very desolate — as if you’re out in the middle of a desert, even in the midst of this concrete wasteland full of headcrabs and radioactive sludge. The wind sound is quiet, and a welcome break from the constant noise of the airboat, gunfire, and exploding mines. This is a very peaceful, lonely place to stop and rest.

And then there’s the windchimes.

This one sound effect is why this scene makes me gush and spew and profess my undying love for Valve. If you wait a little bit, eventually you will hear a small jingle, and then a clear, lingering tone from a windchime. It is haunting and spooky and beautiful all at once. It continues the story of the two luckless rebels and makes it rather more poignant: the rebels tried to put a little touch on this place to make it feel more like a home. That, in turn, makes you feel like you’re intruding, and makes you slightly uncomfortable about being there, while at the same time slightly mesmerizing you. But here’s the real key: there are no windchimes to be found. This sound, this goosebump-inducing sound, has no apparent source. It meshes perfectly with the scene, yet it makes no sense.

And this is why this constitutes great storytelling: the windchimes are telling you that there is a story here that you will never know.

The whole scene, including the windchimes, tells you a story, but deliberately leaves out part of it. The windchimes are what gives the scene emotional impact — no small feat given that the story is about two already-dead NPCs — but you cannot find them. You will never know where the rebels put them in order to make this little corner feel like a home. You will never see them. That part of the story has been lost forever.

The windchimes aren’t the only mystery of this scene — if you look up, you’ll see a platform with a dead guy, high up and inaccessible. How did he get up there? You’ll never know.

And this is why Valve is great. Not only are they able to tell such a poignant story completely without words, but they bother to craft these stories at all. They could easily have left this whole corner out, and they could easily have left the windchimes out. But they put these things in. They acknowledged that there is even more story there, but it’s gone.

Good TV shows peak within their first two seasons.

I took the union of all the sets I’ve named when people ask me what TV shows I like, and found that they all fell into two categories:

1. The Bright Star: the show burns with the brilliance of four lesser shows combined, powered by a genius concept, focused writing, a perfect cast, and unwavering vision. This has the unfortunate side effect that the shows burns itself out in the first season, having achieved its brilliance by packing everything that can possibly be done with the concept into 22 jaw-dropping episodes that somehow only get better as the season goes on. The rest of the seasons consist of the show staggering along, a shadow of its former self, as the writers try to wring every last drop of money out of the tired old beast. This kind of show is, more often than not, a drama. Of the shows I like, these were the Bright Stars: The OC, Veronica Mars, Gossip Girl, Heroes, Green Wing.
2. The Wobbly Pony: the show stumbles and wavers in its first season, as it struggles to find what works and its cast develops rapport among themselves and with the writers. The second season has solved all these issues, and sometimes even comes with a reworking of the concept (usually not, though). The second season is the product of a well-oiled machine, firing on all cylinders, purring like a cat. The concept is not as powerful as it is for Bright Stars, but Wobbly Ponies make up for it with flawless execution. The rest of the show’s run consists of either passably good execution, making for decent entertainment, or an unwatchable mess as the shows tries too hard to recreate its former glory and ends up faceplanting. This is typical of comedies. The rest of the shows I like were Wobbly Ponies: Scrubs, Chuck, Arrested Development, Bones, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Better Off Ted, My Boys.

There are a couple of other shows I like and watch regularly — Community and Cougar Town, for instance — that have only produced one season so far, so I can’t tell which category they’ll be in.

So what useful conclusion can we draw from this rule that I made up?

If you are making a TV show that is any good, you should quit after two seasons, recognizing that the show will never be better than it already has been. If you are a high-concept show where your entire first season consists of a single extremely tight and self-contained plot (Heroes, Veronica Mars), you should consider quitting after one season.

Yes, this means we’d miss out on a fair bit of potentially good television (Veronica Mars season 2, Scrubs season 3), but it also means we’d miss out on the heinous garbage that comes as a result of good shows severely outstaying their welcome (Scrubs season 6, Heroes season 4), so I think it would be a net positive.

I’d like to see a show try this. Arguably, Freaks and Geeks did (not of its own volition, but still), and look at what happened to it: it’s remembered as a cult classic that reached heights few other TV shows did. If it had kept going, I can’t imagine it would have stayed good, and would have somewhat tarnished its image. But I’d still like to see the creator of a show state, before it even begins, “We are going to make one season of TV, and it will be the best season of TV you’ve ever seen, and then it will be over. No more.”

I understand why this is difficult, though — once you complete the first season, the success has gone to your head, and all you can think about is keeping the momentum going. You may think you still have good ideas left (even though you probably don’t have anything that can top your first season). I would like to see a creator who recognizes this and actively works against it.

• Horror: bad. Terror: bad.
• Horrible: bad. Terrible: bad.
• Horrify: bad. Terrify: bad.
• Horrific: bad. Terrific: good. Wut?

So I investigated, and it turns out that “terrific” underwent the same melioration process that words like “sick” did in the last few years. Originally, “terrific” (from the Latin terrere “to fill with fear” + facere “to make”) had the same sense you would expect from the analogies above. It gradually moved from that sense to a sense of “frightening by virtue of its great magnitude” and then simply “of great magnitude”; for example “a terrific achievement”. The evolution here then parallels the word “great”, originally just meaning “large” and then gaining a sense of “excellent”. Why the same thing didn’t happen to “horrific” or “terrifying” is one of those things we’ll just have to attribute to human languages being full of mess and oddities.

The first thing I’ve been thinking about is set phrases — groups of words that frequently appear together in sequence as an idiom. The one that got me thinking was “figment of one’s imagination”. Everybody knows what that means, but have you ever stopped to think: what the hell is a “figment”? There are a lot of other words that could take its place in that set phrase and make sense: creation, product, part, resident, and so on. One theory I dreamed up was that it’s like “fig-ment” — like a fig… plant… produces figs, the figs are a figment of the fig plant. So a figment of your imagination is like a fruit that your imagination bears. Anyway, it’s a word that you never hear outside of that specific phrase and does not have an obvious specific meaning.

Turns out, “figment” is cognate with “figure”, “fiction”, “feign” and, remarkably, “dough”, and has a historical meaning most similar to “creation”. “Figment”, “fiction”, “feign” and “figure” all come from a Latin root fingere meaning “shape” or “form”. Notice how all four English words took that meaning in a slightly different direction. “Figure” took “shape” in the literal sense, while the other three took it in a more figurative way. (Also, the preceding sentence is one of the best I have ever written.) And how on earth is “dough” related to this? Through the Proto-Indo-European root *dheigh-, meaning “to mold, shape or form”. This is the root of fingere (which, lest you fall into that trap, is not at all related to English “finger”) and of “dough”.

None of this explains why “figment” got relegated to a single set phrase, while its cognates (especially “figure”) went on to great success, fame and fortune. I’m not sure I want to try to guess.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about resulted from a chat about etymology with a coworker. He mentioned seeing a great word in a scientific article: “explandicum”, meaning “thing requiring explanation”. This seemed odd to me, since it’s so clearly a Latin-derived word (you might even say it’s just a Latin loanword, not even an English word in its own right) but explan- is an English-ism; the Latin word is explicare, which is obvious from the words for “explain” in modern Romance languages (like French “expliquer”) and English words like “inexplicable”. It then turned out that he misremembered, and the word was actually “explicandum”, which makes a lot more sense; you can see the analogy with words like “dividend” (“thing which is divided”).

This got me thinking: where did the word “explain” come from and how did it end up with the same meaning as the slightly different explicare? Well, it turns out that it comes through an interesting kind of synonymy. Explicare is a compound meaning “to unfold or unravel”, having the word plicare at its root — a word which gave us the English word “ply”. You can see how the meaning “explain” could be derived from that. On the other side, we have explanare, which gave us the English “explain” and has the root planus meaning “flat”. So we have two words meaning, respectively, “to unfold” and “to flatten”, both ending up meaning “to explain”. I think it’s fascinating to see this kind of synonymy result from a figurative similarity like this. It’s also interesting to note that “plain” and “plane” are cognates (which you almost intuitively don’t expect from homophones); the only difference is the influence of Old French spelling which gave us “plain”. “Plain” in the sense of “clear” or “simple” is a sort of figurative outcropping of “plane” as in “flat surface”.

Why do I say this? I’ve seen a lot of them. I got my CS degree from one of the best undergrad CS programs in the country and probably the world (Carnegie Mellon), and during that time, I was a TA for several courses. A lot of CS students passed through those courses who really didn’t Get It. They never seemed to get to an intuitive understanding of the concepts, whether those were finite state machines or x86 assembly. Thanks to the miracle of grade inflation, they passed the classes despite a thoroughly mediocre performance, and presumably they’ll graduate and a lot of them will enter the industry.

Or they’ll try to, anyway. I’ve seen this kind of person (not specifically from my college) from another perspective: they interview at my company. Of the interviews I’ve given, most have been total washouts. The candidate and I will chat for a little while about their interests, their previous experience, why they want to work for us. Then I ask them a question that requires them to write some code, and this is often where it goes wrong. I’ve interviewed people with a good deal of experience in industry, with degrees from prestigious universities, who have founded startups or done any number of impressive things, who just melt down when asked to write a simple piece of code. I know that part of this is attributable to the high-pressure environment of an interview, where the two of us are in a cramped room and they’re standing at a whiteboard while I sit there watching and determining if they should be given a job. I can’t understand the disparity between these people’s accomplishments on their résumé and their inability to demonstrate any competence at the most basic, fundamental skill required to create software. I wonder, “What did this person do day-to-day at their previous job as a software engineer? Did they write code? If they’re this bad at writing code, how did anything ever get produced?”

And you know what? These people are the ones who write the software that is actually really important in the world. They are the ones who write the software that transfers money between banks, or that controls electricity distribution, or that flies commercial aircraft autonomously.

Think about it. When was the last time you met a soon-to-be or recent CS grad who really wanted to go and work for a bank? All the top talent wants to go work for Google, or Microsoft, or Apple, or some similarly big-name company whose primary business is writing software. Or they want to found or join a startup whose business is writing software. That’s the big thing. None of the top talent wants to be a programmer for a company that is not a software company. Do you even know what company you’d have to join to work on electricity distribution software?

These positions, writing software that is really important, where malfunctions would cause either major disaster or widespread grinding-to-a-halt of things, are populated by people who didn’t enter the software industry, usually because they are not talented enough at writing software. Food for thought.

First of all, let me say that since the beginning I’ve been watching Dollhouse with what could be described as “detached intrigue”. Ever since there started being a story arc that lasted for more than one episode (around episode 1.06), I’ve kept on watching because I’ve been curious to see what happens next. The show never gripped me the way, say, “Chuck” does. I was never anxiously waiting for the next episode of Dollhouse to air. In fact it took me several weeks to get around to watching the series finale because I just didn’t care all that much. I watched it out of curiosity and boredom.

Consensus among the Whedonite voices on the internet was that the latter half of season 2 was when Dollhouse elevated its game to a higher plane. Part of this comes almost for free with the fact that there’s an awful lot of plot to cover in a short span of screen-time, which makes every episode hugely significant within the show’s universe. I didn’t really see anything exceptional in those episodes other than the breakneck advancement of the plot. I do have to point out “Stop-Loss”, the Attic-centered episode where Echo and Laurence Dominic wander around in people’s minds, as one that I enjoyed far above all the others. You see, I’m a huge sucker for the whole “trapped within a mind” trope that science fiction loves so much. They did this on Heroes (episode 3.09) and it worked on me then too. I think it legitimately does lead to good television because the surreality allows for huge amounts of creative freedom. Directors and actors get to show what they can do when they’re allowed to bend the rules; when what they put on screen doesn’t have to make sense.

Given that, I’m kind of disappointed that Dollhouse didn’t do more of this. With a premise like it has, you’d think within-mind sequences would be rife. But no, it chose to explore the consequences of the Dollhouse’s technology by having Eliza Dushku deliver trite monologues. The more I think about it, the more disappointed I get.

As for how I feel about the finale itself, “disappointed” is a good word here too. The biggest problem was that the ending was just too neat. Topher’s magical make-everything-right device — come on. The whole entire damn point of this show was that the imprinting technology left NO TRACE behind — in fact, the overarching plot of the show revolved around the fact that Echo was special because she was the only one for whom that was not true! And now, all of a sudden, because it’s the finale, people can be remotely restored to their former selves? Deus ex machina is my biggest pet peeve in fiction, and this here was the epitome.

I admit I’m a sucker for non-happy endings, but I just feel it would have done more justice to the show’s plot to end it with the world at large still ruined, but salvation and/or redemption for the main characters. They did this for Priya and Tony (a peaceful tech-free life), for Paul (a hero’s death), for Adelle (her continued shepherding of the helpless). They could have found some other way for Topher to die (death was the appropriate ending for him), with or without redemption. And as for Echo — you know, I find I don’t really give a shit about her. I never really cared about her because (a) as I’ve noted many times before, Eliza Dushku was never able to make Echo a believable character and (b) even as Echo was becoming a person in her own right, I could never figure out her motivation. I never understood what would constitute a happy ending for her. Apparently a life with Paul, but that was just so goddamn cliché it made me squirm.

Why do I want the world at large still ruined? Aside from the fact that fixing the world required one of the most egregious dii ex machina I’ve ever seen? Well, there’s a different reason, which is that the situation our intrepid main characters got the world into seems like something they should have to live with. The transformation of the world’s population into mindless crazy people as a result of an evil megacorporation’s efforts to play God is not something that should be easily reversible. It makes the character’s dramatic pronouncements of the dire consequences of letting the tech get out (in the episodes leading up to the finale) pretty hollow if it turns out the whole thing can just be magically reversed.

Another unsatisfying aspect of the finale was that it left a lot of unanswered questions. A lot obviously went on in between the second-last episode of this season and the time period shown in Epitaph One and Epitaph Two. What was that? I’d have liked to see more of it. Perhaps we’re supposed to deduce it, but I didn’t. Perhaps my brain just isn’t big enough (watching Whedon shows makes me think that a lot). For example, what’s the deal with Alpha? Why is he suddenly OK in Epitaph Two? What’s he been up to for ten years?

Unanswered questions in a series finale are fine, when those unanswered questions are about the future. When they’re about the past, it’s just irritating. I didn’t have sufficient context to really appreciate what was going on in Epitaph Two. (And I saw Epitaph One; I can’t even imagine how confused people who didn’t were.)

Despite all the show’s stumblings and suckings, there were some genuinely good parts. In particular, once I got over how he perpetuates most negative nerd stereotypes, Topher turned out to be a very good character. The fact that he finally twigs to the moral consequences of his work after it’s already too late, and subsequently goes insane, is one of the show’s most poignant tragedies. There’s also Sierra/Victor, which nobody within the show seemed to realize represented two souls just as resistant to the tech as Echo’s. They two are as special as Echo in their own low-key way.

I was trying to get at this point back in my post on Epitaph One, when I said, “Perhaps there will be heroism in the downfall.” I meant, correctly as it turns out, that the most significant moments of the latter half of the show’s life would be significant moments in the main characters’ fight against Rossum, the tech, and the disaster it wrought. That was the point, really: they were fighting a losing battle, but they knew that and they fought anyway. And the goodness and humanity they showed amid that is where the good parts showed through.

I’m of the opinion that Dollhouse the TV show didn’t do justice to Dollhouse the concept. Although the show was sort of a flop, I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting story that could still be told around this premise. It just has so many possible angles, and so many weighty questions to ponder. I’m not sure network TV will ever do it successfully, but I really hope Dollhouse the TV show will inspire someone to do it successfully, in some medium, someday.

It’s on Starz, which means two things: (1) lots of people don’t know about it because seriously who the hell pays for Starz, I mean come on it’s basically like baby HBO (2) there’s a lot of swearing. Network TV has shown there’s much you can do despite an upper bound on the severity of swearing, but Party Down is like a breath of fresh air in that it’s a TV show that actually depicts the way people talk sans bowdlerization or restraint.

There seem to have been an inordinate number of people involved in the conception and production of this show, but all I care about is that one of them is Rob Thomas, the creator of “Veronica Mars”, a show which I have recently become infatuated with. The two shows aren’t similar at all (except that they’re both GREAT) but their shared heritage shows through in the fact that five VM alumni have made guest appearances on Party Down, and Ryan Hansen is a main character. In the first episode, for example, Enrico Colantoni (Keith Mars) appears — completely butt-naked. (This is a downside of pay cable.) The good part is that the VM alumni mostly play completely different characters from their VM characters, with the surprising exception of Kristen Bell herself, who pretty much plays a Veronica Mars whose skills are more oriented towards organizing party-type events than private investigation.

It certainly does its job as a comedy. It made me laugh out loud more than any other show in recent memory. The scene from the pilot where Keith Mars is paddling around drunkenly in the pool yelling, “Maybe I’ll win an award for Best Cock”, and Lizzy Caplan’s episode-4 explanation of how she’s not the Pancake Lady, are things I will not soon forget.

Anyway, I blew through most of the first season (10 episodes of 30 minutes each) in a single day, because it’s that good. It’s been renewed for a second season which is starting in April. Highly recommended.

With Zach Braff gone, SMS is finally hitting its stride. It’s a sad situation, really — the guy who drove a show for eight years became such a dead weight in its spinoff that it’s a relief when he’s finally gone.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but in this episode it seems like the writers really found a good identity for SMS’s main character, Lucy. Whether they’ll actually stick with it for more than a week, or ditch it in favor of whatever’s convenient to the theme every week, remains to be seen. Viz. my favorite Scrubs inconsistency: “You never cared what anybody thought” vs. “You always cared way too much about what everybody thought”.

Do I sound cynical? I think I sound cynical.

Anyway, Lucy is finally getting an identity, and though I still believe the identity is pretty much just Elliot minus twelve years (viz. the perfect rapport they had as student and mentor in this episode, much more believable than JD and Lucy), I don’t see that as a bad thing. Elliot’s “New Elliot” personality was brought in abruptly at the beginning of the third season of Scrubs, and I think there was more potential for humor from her “Old Elliot” personality than they wanted to bother with. So we have Lucy to fill in what we missed out on. They’ve given her a completely dysfunctional crazy-filter, and a lot of crazy. Equals fun.

As a bonus, in this episode, Cole the tool got some character development that mostly avoided the Two Tired TV Tool Tropes: Tool Continues to Be Tool and Skates By, and Tool Turns Out to Have Hidden Depths. This episode almost had him turning out to have hidden depths, but the important part is that they weren’t hidden depths that make him any better of a person. Slightly more sympathetic, maybe, but not so sympathetic that it ruins the fun of seeing him get pinned under a fat guy, or his reaction to being told to manually unclog someone’s butt.

Everyone else had strong showings in this episode. I’ve sort of been worried about Turk all along, since he’s best in combination with one of the other Scrubs main characters (mainly JD or Carla). This episode didn’t completely put that worry to rest because most of his great lines came in scenes with Elliot or Kelso. (“First rule of Pillow Fight Club is you don’t talk about…”) But his delivery during Lucy’s botched presentation was spot-on, and I do believe he has a bright future with Denise. Their rapport will obviously not be the same as JD and Turk, since Denise is quite a bit more of a man than JD, but I think it’ll work. Kelso was great. Elliot was as all right as late-seasons Elliot can be. Drew and Cox seem to make a good team. It’s all clicking. It’s like a New Year’s miracle. A good start to the decade.

My relationship with Metallica is a long one. Metallica was the first band I ever liked. Theirs was the first popular music I listened to consciously. I learned the concepts of “album”, “single” and “record label” in the context of listening to Metallica.

This was about ten years ago. I know I’m way late to this party, but cut me some slack; Metallica was formed before I was even born. They released the Black Album while I was learning to talk.

I still remember exactly how I got started. Back then I was in seventh grade. One of my fellow seventh graders’ popular break-time pastimes was using the school’s computers to watch dumb things on the Internet. (I imagine this tradition is being kept up at my old school.) One time, someone directed my attention to campchaos.com, the purveyors of a series of animated cartoons parodying the ongoing legal kerfuffle between Metallica and Napster. So I duly watched this series, and out of curiosity (and not fully aware of the irony), I acquired a Metallica song, one that the cartoons had mentioned, using Napster. This song was “Sanitarium”.

My thoughts when I listened to “Sanitarium” were not sophisticated. All I could think was, “Wow, this sounds really really cool.” And that was it; I was hooked. I bought “Master of Puppets”. I listened to it a whole bunch. I started talking to people about it. Metallica improved my standing with some people (back in seventh grade, it came as a surprise to everyone at school that I might possibly be cool in any way), harmed it with others. There was a long period of time in high school when, for some reason, declaring that one liked Metallica was equivalent to declaring that one liked ballet. Now, a lot of people to whom I declare a liking for Metallica respond by saying, “Me too! Metallica is great!” I believe that what’s happened is that in high school, Metallica was long passé, and now, in the same way that old fashions become trendy again, they have made the transition into “classic” metal, and are once again cool.

So Metallica was my entrance into the world of popular music, and even now, though I have other bands I like more, Metallica is still a reliable standby. Sometimes I just need some loud shit I can headbang to, and on that front, Metallica delivers like few others can.

Against this background, you can maybe understand why my expectations going into the concert were pretty high, and why I was let down just a little bit. That’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable to see Metallica live; on the contrary, it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. The whole evening was a series of surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant.

First was a pleasant surprise: I had expected the crowd to be composed largely of the same kind of Scary Aging Metalheads that I complained about at the Def Leppard concert, except scarier because this was no tight-pants-and-power-ballads metal band, by golly; no, this was METALLICA, BITCHEZ. But it was not like this. Almost all of the people I saw were pretty much normal, and a surprising number of them were younger than I am. Even now, twenty years past their prime, Metallica is still gaining new fans. Almost everyone was wearing a Metallica t-shirt, which I have always felt is lame — don’t wear a band’s t-shirt to their concert. I saw one Iron Maiden t-shirt, and I gave the wearer a nod of approval; I also saw a Fender Guitars shirt, which would have been an inspired choice if Metallica actually used Fender guitars; as it is (they use Gibson), it just looked clueless. There were a few Scary Aging Metalheads, but they were a small minority. I actually have what I think is a fairly sound theory about why this is: it’s because of the whole “selling-out” business in the ’90s. Metallica had legions of fans in the ’80s, when they were at their peak, but then in the ’90s they started to diversify from pure thrash metal into more mainstream-friendly strains of music. This alienated a lot of their hardest-core fans, and I think those guys still remain alienated. So now, Metallica’s fanbase is largely composed of the more forgiving fans from the ’80s (who tend much less towards the Scary Aging Metalhead model of aging than the kind of people who would call what Metallica did “selling out” and actually stop going to their concerts because of it) and also of people like me: too young to give a shit about all that and just there for the good music, old and new, thrash metal and heavy alt rock.

Next came an unpleasant surprise: there were openers. I got there at 7; Metallica didn’t take the stage till after 9. I arrived almost at the end of the first opener’s set. They’re called Volbeat. The frontman had a funny accent that I couldn’t place and their music was not interesting. The second opener was Machine Head, whom I had heard of before — ironically, from a high school friend who was among the people who questioned my masculinity for liking Metallica. Machine Head is of the “RURR-RURR-RURR” screamy-growling double-bass-drumming type of metal; it sounds to me like death metal but Wikipedia disagrees and who am I to disagree with Wikipedia. During their set, several mosh pits started to develop on the floor. I was not down there, but I had a pretty good view of the proceedings and it was pretty funny. It really is just a clot of people who shove each other around a bunch. I had never really believed that such things existed, but there they were, right in front of my very eyes. I witnessed several people get manhandled away by security guys, and I was amused. Machine Head’s frontman seemed to enjoy this. He got very happy when he noticed the mosh pits. In between songs he blathered about stuff and said “fuck” a lot and just generally stayed on the stage for far too long.

Next a pleasant surprise: the tech. I feared I’d been spoiled by Trans-Siberian Orchestra a few weeks previous and no matter how many lights and flame jets Metallica brought out, they’d be overshadowed by TSO’s technical performance. But no: Metallica had a full set of lasers, ginormous flame jets, tons of lights, smoke machines, floor lights casting enormous shadows of the guys on the walls, movable lighting rigs, and actual dudes sitting on the lighting rigs above the stage, controlling follow spots. I very much wanted to be one of those dudes. I figure if this software thing doesn’t work out for me, I’m definitely going to become a roadie.

All throughout the concert, a somewhat unpleasant surprise: the setlist. It went as follows: Ecstasy of Gold (the traditional pre-concert warmup); That Was Just Your Life; The End of the Line; Ride the Lightning; Harvester of Sorrow; Fade to Black; Broken, Beat and Scarred; Cyanide; Sad But True; One; My Apocalypse; The Day that Never Comes; Master of Puppets; Fight Fire with Fire; Nothing Else Matters; Enter Sandman; Helpless (a cover); Motorbreath; and Seek and Destroy. Notice anything about that? Yes, six songs from Death Magnetic, three from the Black Album, two from And Justice For All, one (!) from Master of Puppets, three from Ride the Lightning, and two from Kill ‘Em All (plus one from Garage Days Re-revisited, which doesn’t really count). To put it another way: as many songs from Death Magnetic as from their three best albums put together (and this is true for pretty much all reasonable sets of “three best albums”; I’m calculating it based on Lightning, Puppets and Justice). Zero from Load and ReLoad, and it’s not like both of those albums were total washouts. Thankfully they seem to have realized that St. Anger should just be quietly forgotten (although I have been curious to see what “Frantic” would be like if performed live — the answer is not too bad if you ignore Kirk attempting to sing), but I think Load and ReLoad deserved at least one song between the two of them.

But really, come on — I know this is a Death Magnetic tour, but how in the name of all that is metal can you justify only including one song from Master of Puppets, one of the greatest heavy metal albums in the history of the genre? That’s just shameful. Seriously, every other song on the album is great. It’s the only Metallica album where every single song would have made me happy had it shown up in the setlist. And to just include one song, in favor of six from Death Magnetic and one from the EP of covers they made when they were bored — well, it blows my fucking mind.

This isn’t to say that Death Magnetic sucks; far from it. They chose mostly good songs from Death Magnetic, and they do sound good live. It’s just that Death Magnetic does not hold a candle to Master of Puppets. Nobody would have shed any tears if Death Magnetic had never been made. Master of Puppets is the pinnacle of an entire genre of music. It is a masterpiece. It blows my fucking mind.

In fact, take a look at the setlist from that 2006 tour that I linked to above. Here it is: Creeping Death, Fuel, Harvester of Sorrow, Frantic, The Unforgiven, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orion, Master of Puppets, Fade to Black, Battery, Sad But True, Nothing Else Matters, One, Enter Sandman, a preview of a song that would eventually be on Death Magnetic, and Seek & Destroy. That is what I call a setlist. One from Kill ‘Em All, three from Lightning, three from Puppets, two from Justice, four from the Black Album, one from ReLoad and one from St. Anger. We can forgive the one from St. Anger because it’s halfway decent and St. Anger was their newest album at the time (given that, I think including only one showed impressive restraint). And the rest? By gum, they got almost all of the classics and didn’t get any filler. That is how you make a damn setlist, people.

On a Death Magnetic tour, I think three from Death Magnetic would have been a good number. Instead of the additional three, I would have taken two from Puppets (Sanitarium and Battery sound like excellent choices) and one from Load or ReLoad (Fuel, probably). And there you go, you get to promote your new album as well as satisfy demanding wankers like myself who waited for ten goddamn years to see you on a stage a hundred feet away from their face, playing the songs that got them started liking music in the first place.

OK, that’s more than enough grumbling about the setlist. On to more pleasant surprises: Metallica have not slowed down in their old age. They play their songs significantly faster live, and they all have the chops to do it. Well, except James can’t really sing like he used to, but honestly, that’s been true for many years. That ship has sailed. And let’s cut him some slack; he’s playing some pretty fast guitar at the same time, and he plays it well. Metallica’s stage antics generally seemed nowhere near as ridiculous as those of Def Leppard, at which concert I could not shake the perception of a bunch of deluded midlifers acting like morons. Metallica can still act like a thrash metal band and be taken seriously as a thrash metal band, at least in a concert. The sound was excellent, especially on the drums. And my air drumming worked out particularly well, since Lars uses the same drumkit layout that I use in my imagination when I air drum.

And after all that yelling, let’s not forget — I finally saw Metallica in concert. This has been a long time coming. And even if the concert had completely sucked, I wouldn’t regret going. Come on — you gotta do this kind of thing while you can. Those guys aren’t getting any younger.

(It is really delightfully ironic, though, isn’t it, that I became a such a devoted Metallica fan because of Napster? The very thing Metallica worked so hard to stamp out of existence? I always thought the “people use filesharing to discover music, and then they spend money” argument was total bunk but I just realized I’m a supporting example. What do you know?)

Season 1, episode 8:

Ted: Sir, I’ve been the hospital’s legal counsel for…well, let’s just say, when I started, I had hair.

Season 4, episode 19:

Ted: I lost my hair in eighth grade.

So either Ted was massively precocious (doubtful) or the writers FELL DOWN ON THE JOB. AGAIN.

I should note that I only abuse Scrubs like this because I love it so much.