I’ve noticed a disproportionately high number of self-described libertarians among my software engineer coworkers. As in, more than half of the people whose political/economic leanings I know are libertarians. This is pretty clearly out of line with the general populace — why is that?

(Man, this whole post is totally pointless. But I’m gonna keep writing it.)

My theory is that it’s because the pure free market economy is elegant. It’s the most elegant solution to the problem of how to distribute scarce resources. And software engineers are trained to strive for elegance in solutions — hence the attraction to pure free markets.

However, much like software, the free market, as it turns out, has to occasionally deviate from the theoretical ideal in order to work properly. Sometimes you just have to hack in a special case, like penalties for pollution or subsidies for public works projects.

(Whenever I come up with an analogy between software engineering and anything else, I always feel (a) like a tool and (b) like I’m on very thin ice. It’s much more likely that I am making no more sense than an underwater eggnog factory right now, but I will forge ahead.)

This is not to say that you shouldn’t bother striving for elegance, though, either in economics or in engineering. You should try to write elegant code, resorting to hacks only when necessary (and exercising due diligence when determining whether it’s necessary). Similarly, although I wouldn’t call myself a libertarian, I believe that a free market-type structure should be the first attempt to solve any distribution-of-resources problem. But if a free market isn’t going to work, you should not force it, recognizing that free markets cannot solve every problem perfectly.

I can’t say I’m hugely impressed by this show, but it’s good enough that I keep watching it without really being sure why (much like Dollhouse in early season 1).

To me, its strong point is that it does dialogue better than any comedy on TV right now. I’ve never heard a line that sounded wrong or like it was dreamed up by something other than a human. It’s the polar opposite of Dollhouse in that sense. And despite having perfectly true-to-life dialogue, it still manages to be funny. In episode 4 (the most recent), there was one line that, while very simple, cracked me up for several minutes: Britta saying to Jeff, “You broke my trust. You SUCK!” In a normal TV show you’d expect the second sentence to be some cheesy thing like “You betrayed me!” but no, it’s “You SUCK!”

Community’s weak point is its characters. They all seem pretty two-dimensional to me; not so much that they’re unoriginal or archetypal (they’re not really) but more that they don’t evoke much sympathy. I’ve been spoiled in recent times by other shows: nowadays I can only get really attached to comedies that mix drama with the comedy (like Chuck or Scrubs) or that are at least flat-out funnier than Community. Community doesn’t really keep up a rhythm throughout each episode like more adept comedies do. Too much of Community feels like it’s just killing time.

It also doesn’t help that Community’s main character is kind of a tool. Just a little bit of a tool, though. So I don’t sympathize with him enough to hope he succeeds, and I don’t hate him enough to keep watching to see him get owned. It’s an unfortunate middle ground.

The other characters are good, though, especially Abed and Troy (who in at least two of the episodes so far have done what seems to be an improvised scene over the end credits, and these are usually the funniest parts of their respective episodes). Pierce (Chevy Chase) can also be good, but he’s not as funny as the writers seem to think he is. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ken Jeong as Señor Chang is awesome in his unrestricted unhingedness. A dose of wild absurdity in a show is helpful as long as it doesn’t take over, and it seems like Señor Chang is firmly a recurring background character.

Community definitely has promise, and I’ll keep watching, but it isn’t assured of a spot on my permanent weekly show rotation. It really is exactly the same situation as with Dollhouse in season 1. Perhaps, like Dollhouse, Community will pleasantly surprise me in a few episodes’ time.

So I’ve actually been pretty heavily involved in iPhone development since the SDK was released to developers. I’ve taught a class on iPhone development and worked on an iPhone app for Apple. However, my debut into the App Store has waited until today.

The App Store is a potentially great idea gone a bit wrong. There’s definitely some excellent work in there, but it’s often swamped by an ocean of 99-cent garbage. And what’s worse, a developer can make a good bit of money by writing one of these 99-cent garbage apps, like a fart noise app or a flashlight.

So being the cynic and lover of money that I am, I decided to get in on that. I decided that one weekend, I would sit down and crank out some piece of crap in a few hours and sell it for 99 cents.

I wrote Tap The Dot in 3 hours and 14 minutes; I timed myself. It’s a game, for a rather loose definition of the word “game”. The basic gameplay mechanic is this: the app puts a dot on screen. You tap it. Then the app puts another dot on screen. You tap it. Repeat.

It’s now available on the App Store for 99 cents:

Tap The Dot

My initial aim is to recoup the cost of the iPhone Developer Program ($99). If I make more than that, then joy for me. Stay tuned.

Holy shit, the new season of TV totally snuck up on me and now there’s like a billion things I have to talk about.

In dramas, we have Bones, House, and Dollhouse all starting up again. I seem to be the only person left in the country who doesn’t actually care all that much about House — I watch it if someone else in the vicinity is watching, but I don’t follow it myself. I may also be dropping Bones from my lineup. Dollhouse is still in; I’ll probably post about the premiere soon. I’ve also recently gotten hooked on Heroes, but I’m not going to start watching current episodes until I’m caught up, which may take a while since I’m only just finishing season 1.

Also: Gossip Girl. My dirty little not-so-secret.

In comedies, there are a bunch of new ones I’m watching. We have Parks and Recreation, which I haven’t written about before, but I have seen all the episodes and I like it. There’s Community, which is completely new; it looks pretty funny but I can’t say it really holds my attention, except for Ken Jeong’s (Señor Chang) amazing rant in the second episode. There’s (oh God don’t make me say it) Cougar Town, which I would ordinarily give an emphatic “hell to the no” but it’s created by Bill Lawrence, so I have to give it a chance. I may be writing about it.

The only other show I watch regularly that starts this fall is 30 Rock. The others (Chuck, Better Off Ted, “Scrubs” with emphatic quotation marks) are all slated for midseason, as far as I know.

And I swear I have a whole bunch of crap written about the Scrubs (real Scrubs) finale, which I will post eventually.

It must be difficult to be a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. The entire rest of the world knows you’re not going to repeat your success and it’s only downhill from here, but you have to pretend that’s not the situation. You’re a bunch of guys in your 40s at least, trying to pretend you’re still the wild, hedonistic youths you became famous as. There may be groupies at your concerts, but that doesn’t even do you any good because you’re married and have kids. The worst part is, the groupies suffer from the same problem as you: they’re in their 40s and failing miserably to be 20 years old again.

I have to say, it’s also difficult to be fan of a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. You have to constantly worry that the band’s lead singer is going to fall over and break a hip on stage, or otherwise make some other embarrassing concession to his advanced age. You feel slightly embarrassed for their antics: they’re close to half a century old and they’re still running around on stage wearing ridiculous clothes and hairstyles and asking the audience to pour some sugar on them. One might say their refusal to succumb to the boring, humdrum life of most midlifers makes them brave or even heroic, but to me it looks self-delusional. Worst of all, when you go to their concerts (which you are pretty much obliged to do — when you’re dealing with this kind of band, any tour could be their last, and as a fan, no matter how embarrassingly old the band has become, it’s still a thrill to see them live), you have to deal with the other fans. The aforementioned groupies are among them: women who are in their 40s and who have apparently not been informed that they are no longer 19 and as such they should not attempt to dress like the hot, skinny 19-year-old they may once have been. There are also the male partners of said groupies: generally dudes in their 40s or 50s wearing mullets and ridiculous moustaches, with bad teeth and grating voices. Aging metalheads like this fill me with a mixture of fear and pity for some reason.

That said, the fellow-concert-goer situation wasn’t all bad. I saw a surprising number of people wearing Rush t-shirts; I’d always thought the fanbases of Def Leppard and Rush were disjoint sets except for me. I also saw Metallica, AC/DC, Dream Theater and Queensrÿche shirts. And my seat was on the end of a row, so I was only next to one person, who was not a scary aging metalhead but an unusually attractive girl in her 20s. Her boyfriend, next to her, distinguished himself by acting like a spectacular ass (mainly shouting and waving his arms around in something with only a passing resemblance to rhythm) but the girl did not, acting more like me instead (mainly swaying and foot-tapping most of the time, in rhythm, with occasionally more pronounced rocking-out during higher-energy moments, and only singing along when appropriate*). She also exchanged judgmental quips with me when, between Poison’s and Def Leppard’s sets, an extravagantly drunk Scary Aging Metalhead lady stumbled up to me, grabbed my leg and asked if the seat next to me was taken (which it clearly was). After Scary Aging Metalhead left, Unusually Attractive Girl said to me, “She just wants to sneak into a better seat! I thought you were going to get lucky!” I raised an eyebrow, glanced at Scary Aging Metalhead’s departing figure and said, “Well…” Unusually Attractive Girl looked too, curled her lip and said, “I guess that wouldn’t really have been lucky, huh?” See? Reasonable people can go to Def Leppard concerts too.

Regardless, it is still difficult to be a fan of an ’80s band. Which makes my life rather a series of difficulties, since essentially all of the bands I like saw their greatest success before I was born (in the ’80s). Hell, the next concert I’m going to is by a band in exactly the same stage of downfall as Def Leppard: Metallica.

And you may be thinking, based on the preceding griping, that I did not enjoy the Def Leppard show. On the contrary, it was great. I was just musing on how much better of a person I am than everyone else there.

As I mentioned in my post about the Rush concert I went to, Shoreline Amphitheatre is a very pleasant concert venue; in fact, it’s probably the best concert venue I’ve been to. It’s arrestingly attractive in the evenings, and there’s something about its grand scale and park-like atmosphere that makes rock music seem that much better. I think Def Leppard are more of an arena band, though. The amphitheatre setting suits Rush to a tee, and probably other progressive, wanky bands like Queensrÿche and Dream Theater, but a band more focused on the rocking than the artistry is really more suited to the arena.

Poison and Cheap Trick were OK. I wasn’t there to see them, though. (I’ve already written about the trials of being an opener for a much more popular act, so I won’t do it again.) They were largely unremarkable, except that I have to say that Poison’s guitarist C.C. DeVille has a lot of talent that is being put to waste. He did an improvised solo that sounded an awful lot like Yngwie Malmsteen. The general sense that I got was that he pretty much carries Poison.

Now finally, let’s talk about Def Leppard. Not only do they have to deal with the difficulty of being an ’80s band in 2009, but they are also a band who produced three astronomically popular songs and a huge quantity of other material that almost nobody cares about. So most of the audience is just going to be bored until they play “Photograph”, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” or “Rock of Ages”. They did play all of those, in a row, and in that order. “Rock of Ages” was the last song before the encore. If you ask me, they should have played “Sugar” as the encore. This is classic psychological manipulation. Everyone knows that at some point in the concert, they must play that song. So by leaving it till the very end, they’d have been building anticipation for it all along, and they could walk off the stage with the audience shrieking in joy. Rush did this: they played “YYZ” as the encore.

To be honest, there were parts of the concert where I got bored. Def Leppard’s hard-rocking songs are hit-or-miss. They tend to be either fantastic (“Rock of Ages”, “Gods of War”) or completely forgettable filler. They played some of the filler-y ones towards the beginning. They have two other general types of songs: medium-speed power ballads (“Hysteria”) or full-on slow acoustic songs (“Two Steps Behind”). Both of the latter types can be OK, and they generally played good ones. Part of Def Leppard’s distinctiveness comes from their unusually strong ability to do those types of songs, so it makes sense that they devoted about a third of the show to those.

And when it comes to pure hard-rocking fun, few bands do it better than Def Leppard, however old they may be. They can make a crowd sound as if they earnestly want Def Leppard to pour some sugar on them.

It occurs to me that Def Leppard is the first British band I’ve seen live. All the rest are American or Rush. And Def Leppard is almost amusingly British. Rick Savage had a bass with the Union Jack on the body. Phil Collen had a guitar with the English flag on it. The giant video screen behind them occasionally flashed images of Britishness. I don’t know if all British bands do this, but it definitely stood out. “By Jove, we are British and we think that is capital, old chap” was the impression I got. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see one of them bust out a pot of tea onstage.

A couple last musical things to call out. You do have to give Rick Allen a lot of credit for not reducing the complexity of Def Leppard’s drum parts after losing his arm. Plus in live shows he has to play pre-amputation drum parts anyway, so it’s moot. Def Leppard’s drum parts are definitely of nontrivial complexity, and he plays them adroitly. (If you’re an etymology aficionado like me, you’ll see the pun there.)

Until now I’d always wondered why neither of Def Leppard’s guitarists seemed to be more famous than the other, or at least famous in a different way. Turns out it’s because they alternate lead and rhythm roles. They do have slightly different soloing styles (Collen’s solos are more shreddy) but neither of them takes any kind of primacy over the other. It’s interesting. Most of the other bands I like have either (a) one guitarist or (b) one clear lead guitarist and one clear rhythm. Then there’s Iron “the more the merrier” Maiden, whose three guitarists are knocking on redundancy’s door.

I’m glad I saw Def Leppard. I wouldn’t have lost any sleep if I hadn’t seen them (if, for example, I’d gone to the AC/DC show happening in San Jose at the same time) but I’m glad I did before they, and their groupies, get any older. It was a good show, but it’ll probably only be downhill from here (in their shows, and their albums). But they’ll always have Hysteria, one of the best albums of the ’80s as far as I’m concerned, and they’ll always be British. Good enough for me.

* ROCKET! YEAH!

I’m almost at the end of the first season of Better Off Ted, and it seems to be getting uniformly better.

I mentioned in my initial review that when it started, each character was essentially a single personality trait that was magnified to absurd proportions. That’s still true to some extent (especially of Phil and Lem) but they’ve also started to flesh out the characters a bit. They’re letting Veronica display a bit of a human side, and they’re letting Ted and Linda act a little insane.

I’m writing about this episode specifically because it was a significant step above the rest in terms of awesomeness (with the exception of episode 4, the one about racial sensitivity). Also, there was some actual honest-to-God Japanese spoken at the end. Those were real Japanese people, speaking real Japanese, and they said what the subtitles said. Nothing more to say about that.

This episode featured some great Phil-and-Lem moments, as well as two fantastic lines from Veronica: “I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel!” and “I wish I had the power to make everyone go away. Oh wait! I do! *leave*” I think I’m going to start using the latter one.

Random note: you know what’s weird? The resemblance between Portia de Rossi (Veronica) and Yvonne Strahovski (of “Chuck” fame). There’ve been a few moments where the physical resemblance has been almost creepy. Plus they’re both Australian imports on American TV shows who do American accents with just the tiniest flaws.

This is a bloody difficult show to write about. It’s not particularly deep (yet) and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, so all I can do is watch, laugh and enjoy. There’s little room for criticism or analysis. It’s probably good for me to have a TV show that I can just watch without thinking about it too much.

I just have the season finale of Better Off Ted left to watch, but I’m saving that till tomorrow. Also tomorrow I will be giving The OC a chance to redeem itself after the heinous Chrismukkah episode of the fourth season. The whole time I was thinking “oh man we are airborne over the shark right now” and I’d hate for The OC to have punked out in its last season after a good run.

There’s an unexpected side effect of patronizing a library, which is that it affords you occasional, strangely intimate glances into the lives of other people, without you ever knowing who these other people are.

The way this happens is through stuff that previous book borrowers leave in books. Like a lot of people, apparently, I take the approach of using library checkout receipts as bookmarks. And, like a lot of people, I don’t always remember to take them out before returning books. So sometimes, I open a book and someone else’s reading habits fall out. More than once I’ve discovered other interesting books from these. It works sort of like Pandora for books.

More fascinating, however, is when people leave in pieces of paper other than checkout receipts. Recently I found a sheet of paper from a hotel notepad. The hotel was in Texas. Did someone take this book with them to Texas? Did they go to Texas, take the hotel’s notepad and bring it back here? I don’t know. I’ve also found a shopping list.

Most recently, I found a note from one person to another. It was in a book about Pittsburgh: part history, part guidebook. Apparently two people were going to take a trip to Pittsburgh together. The note was from one to the other, listing things from the guidebook that they could do, and expressing great excitement.

This was very weird for me. It was like eavesdropping on a private conversation with pillow-talky undertones. It’s not even clear that the message’s intended recipient saw it. Maybe the note’s author put the note in the book and the recipient just returned the book without opening it, which makes this whole thing even weirder. What if I’m the only person other than the author who read this note? Then I’d be sharing an oddly close connection with this person, whom I’ve never met, I’ve never seen, whose name I don’t know. But from the type of thing this person was excited about seeing in Pittsburgh (mainly off-the-beaten-path residential neighborhoods), I have some idea of what kind of person they are.

I’m probably thinking about this too much.

Now, though, I’m trying to devise a plan to use this communication channel proactively. Basically I have the power to send messages to people, targeted by taste in books. There’s a lot to think about here. How could I make this communication channel two-way? (Out-of-band communication, like writing a book-message containing an email address, would be cheating and would take all the fun out of it.) And what would I say? I’ll have to ruminate on it.

I know I’m roughly 3 years late to this party, but all I have to say about this episode is thank goodness for actual French people. After the infamous (in my mind) Dollhouse French incident, I’m now eternally grateful for any properly-rendered foreign language on an American TV show.

The dude who played the lawyer is definitely French and spoke honest-to-God fast-speech registre soutenu French, like an actual French lawyer would speak. Autumn Reeser is definitely not French, but she tried so darn hard and got pretty close (while speaking pretty fast and, commendably, continuing to act) so that didn’t upset me unduly. Her intonation of Comment le savez-vous? “How do you know?” is totally wrong* but that’s the worst criticism I have, and it’s mild and understandable.

The translations that appeared in subtitle were good. The only complaint I have is minor, which is that the translation of the lawyer’s line Je vous préviens, je me suis entraîné de ne pas réagir aux larmes misses the funny turn of phrase. It’s translated as “I warn you, I am impervious to tears”. Yes that’s what it means, but what it actually says is “I warn you, I have trained myself not to react to tears”. I don’t see why they couldn’t have subtitled it with that. The English line as it is gets a laugh; why not just keep the funnier literal meaning of the French?

Anyway, this is just another in way in which Josh Schwartz continues to improve the world. Vive la langue française.

And in a frigging awesome coincidence, this is my 404th post.

* Her intonation is flat and low for the first two words, then falling through the last two words, whereas it should be rising through the first word, then flat and high for the rest. This is a pretty difficult thing to translate, actually. And as I will demonstrate, the French phrasing conveys what the English stress pattern should be, and thus some additional meaning. Looking at the English, there are two stress patterns that make sense: “you” stressed or “know” stressed. Which word is stressed determines where the uncertainty is. But in French, you’d determine where the uncertainty is by different phrasing, and not all intonation patterns are correct for a given phrasing. If the “you” were stressed in English, I’d say Comment est-ce que vous le sache? (intonation the same as for the English sentence “how is it that you know?”) and if the “know” were stressed in English, I’d say what was actually said in the show, with the intonation I gave at the beginning of this ridiculously long and pedantic footnote.

I hate to admit I was wrong about this, but my conscience compels me.

In my review of Bones season 4 episode 23, I got all in a huff over what I thought was an erroneous treatment of Japanese personal pronouns and ended up writing:

And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns.

This is, I now realize, blatantly false. It is in fact very easy to infer gender from certain third-person pronouns, those being kare “he” and kanojo “she”. (Random side note: these words can also mean “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” respectively.) So I was completely bloody wrong about that.

In my (feeble) defense, I have this to offer: the use of personal pronouns in Japanese to refer to people is not common; certainly it’s much rarer than it is in English. Most often, people are referred to either by their proper name, by a demonstrative such as kochira “this person here” or simply not referred to explicitly at all (Japanese permits omission of subject and object from a clause when they can be inferred from context). In formal contexts, the demonstratives are usually preferred over the personal pronouns. The most common scenario I can imagine in which a third-person personal pronoun would be used is in reported speech, such as recounting a conversation. Using personal pronouns there would still be relatively uncommon.

Excusatory heuristics aside, I can’t explain away the obvious factual error, which is somewhat embarrassing. I promise to more rigorously fact-check any linguistics-related content in future.

I’ve started watching a new show: “Better Off Ted”. It’s just completed airing its first season of 13 episodes, and it’ll supposedly be back in January for an 18-episode second season. Also, it’s fantastic.

The show revolves around main character Ted, who is a mid-level manager at a generic megacorporation called Veridian Dynamics. The other primary characters are Ted’s emotionless, unscrupulous boss Veronica; a duo of perpetually squabbling scientists, Phil and Lem; and Linda, an underling of Ted’s. You might already be thinking that this premise offers few paths that have not already been taken. But “Better Off Ted” manages to find one.

Unlike “The Office” (both British and American), “Better Off Ted” does not aim for realism in its portrayal of generic megacorporation office life, but instead engages in wildly over-the-top parody. It takes all of the setting’s little absurdities, magnifies them to epic proportions, and shows Ted (who is a relatively normal guy) dealing with them. For example, the scientists Phil and Lem are constantly getting into the kind of little kerfuffles that long-married couples stereotypically have, culminating in shamelessly bizarre situations like the two of them squeezing themselves into one hazmat suit.

On the other end, there is Veronica, whose main function is to relay the whims of the nebulous upper ranks of the corporation to Ted, who, as head of R&D, must get his underlings to fulfill such duties as creating beef without the use of a cow, and weaponizing a pumpkin. Though she is emotionless and unscrupulous, she avoids all the tired “evil boss” archetypes. Again, it’s the show’s total abandonment of realism that accomplishes this. The things she says and does are so absurd that her coldheartedness doesn’t come across as an unusually strong bad trait like it does in, say, Bill Lumbergh, but just as a normal trait that is exaggerated like everything else in the show. It doesn’t make her evil; it’s just how she is.

Stylistically, the show bears a striking resemblance to “Malcolm in the Middle”. It’s extremely fast-paced, full of random and abrupt segues, and has a main character who habitually breaks the fourth wall. While fourth-wall-breaking normally bothers me, it seems natural enough in “Better Off Ted” that I’m OK with it. The only thing wrong with it is that it feels like a vestige of “The Office”’s mockumentary format.

Of course, since it resembles “Malcolm in the Middle” so much, by transitivity it resembles “Scrubs” quite a bit too. But it doesn’t resemble Scrubs in tone at all. Like “Malcolm”, and unlike Scrubs, “Better Off Ted” plunges itself headfirst into comedy with nary a dramatic moment. It’s all about the silliness. However, three of the thirteen episodes were directed by former Scrubs directors, Gail Mancuso and Michael Spiller (who, incidentally, has directed some “Sex and the City” too).

Through the absurdity, the show often musters some absolutely vicious social commentary, especially episode 4, the latest one I’ve watched. The plot of the episode revolves around some new motion detectors the company installed to save money by, for example, turning off lights when there is no motion in a room. Trouble is, the motion detectors operate by detecting light reflected off skin, and as a result, cannot see black people (like Lem). Hilarity (really good hilarity) ensues.

There’s one area of the show that’s not quite like the others: the relationship between Ted and Linda, which is, predictably enough, fraught with sexual tension and emotional confusion. It doesn’t involve the same unabashedly ridiculous situations as the other plotlines, but it’s great nonetheless. Early on, after they end up holding hands during a tense moment, Ted claims that he didn’t hold her hand; he held onto her hand after she held his hand. Linda, first coyly: “Oh, that’s how we’re playing it?” Then disgustedly: “We’re gonna play it STUPID?”

In contrast to this obviously meant-to-be relationship that just causes a lot of awkwardness, there’s the relationship between Ted and Veronica, where they occasionally hook up, think nothing of it, and experience no awkwardness as a result. It’s all very quirky, funny, and in the strangest of ways, believable. It’s the only believable part of the whole show.

Granted, I’ve only watched four episodes, but I have high hopes for this show. For its potential to entertain me, that is. Naturally, since it is a very funny, offbeat comedy with a devoted following, it has terrible ratings and probably won’t survive beyond two or three seasons. Such is the cruelty of television: a great show like “Better Off Ted” gets shitty ratings and has its first season cut short, while stupid bullshit like “Hell’s Kitchen” rolls along for infinite numbers of seasons and has viewerships in the zillions. Such disappointment is the price of having good taste in TV shows.

I just got around to watching the unaired thirteenth episode of Dollhouse, made famous by Felicia Day on Twitter amid some contract-related angst and FOX asshattery.

I’ve always been strongly drawn to post-apocalyptic stories (with the notable exception of zombie-apocalypse stories). It’s why I like Stephen King’s The Stand, and the Half-Life series, so much. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I’m helplessly fascinated by pondering the circumstances and events in which civilization as we know it can collapse — and what happens to ordinary people as the world falls to pieces around them.

Best of all is when, in a series of fictional works, someone stumbles across a ruined relic from the far-distant past — a relic that was covered in the present time of a previous work in the series. The first time I can remember this happening is in the Redwall series: in “The Long Patrol”, the characters stumble across the buried ruin of the castle from “Mossflower”, which appears to have been set hundreds of years before in Redwall-time. Many years after I read the Redwall books, that is the only one that truly stands out in my mind, exactly because of this post-apocalypse fixation I have.

Epitaph One does exactly this. OK, the time difference is only 10 years, but it was apparently a very eventful 10 years. From what I can gather, the Dollhouse’s technology got into the wrong hands and turned wireless, so the concept of identity was largely meaningless, and then civilization busted apart. In parallel with this, somehow Echo, Ballard, Boyd and possibly the other main-character Dolls were working on subverting the Dollhouse. I don’t quite understand what they were doing as the world was ending, but eventually they led a bunch of people out into the world, from being holed up in the Dollhouse, and we don’t know what became of them.

Quite apart from the end-of-the-world grittiness, we learn several very interesting facts about “present-day” Dollhouse-world:

• DeWitt has a conscience, and there is an ethical line she does not want to cross.
• The larger Dollhouse organization was the shady puppet-master ultimately behind the world’s destruction, and apparently the tipping point was when they started selling Dolls’ bodies for people to live in. It’s unclear (and a very interesting question) whether or not they were fully aware of the consequences of this.
• Topher was not the original architect of the Dollhouse’s technology. He made it much better, but it still means that there is or was someone else in the world who created it.
• Ballard and Boyd were apparently both double agents. Is Topher the only major male non-Doll on the show who isn’t?
• Whiskey/Dr. Saunders did a variety of things that I still can’t get my head around. She developed a way to resist the imprinting process (while imprinted as Dr. Saunders?), then remained in the Dollhouse for 10 years in her blank state? Does this mean Dr. Saunders (the original, briefly seen at the end of the season in flashback) was a double agent, and that got preserved in the imprint? Or did Whiskey somehow develop this urge while imprinted? Or something else? Who knows?
• Echo continued in her composite-of-imprints state for some time, apparently, after the end of the previous episode.

Now that we know all these facts, the futures of the main characters, and the future of the world in ten years, what is going to become of Dollhouse the show? In particular, is this foreknowledge of the future going to dampen the intrigue of the present-day Dollhouse story?

I really don’t think so. As I noted above, stories are entertaining when set both during and after apocalyptic events. I’m still interested to see what Echo and company are doing to subvert the Dollhouse, how that goes for them, and especially to see the world begin to crumble (and to see Echo and company deal with it) as the technology leaks out and starts to be used for more and more reckless purposes.

Just because the world in ten years is a total wreck doesn’t mean there isn’t still hope. This episode leaves the ultimate fates of Echo and company unknown; perhaps they’re still alive. Perhaps the world isn’t irrevocably broken. Perhaps there will be heroism in the downfall.

In fact, this glimpse of the future, of the ultimate consequences of the Dollhouse technology, serves to darken the backdrop of the present-day show. The mystery of “what trouble could this technology cause?” is gone, but the answer is rather horrifying, which puts Echo and company’s present-day struggles into perspective. We already know that if their aim is to prevent the technology from harming too many more people, they’re fighting a losing battle, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested to see how the battle plays out. It’s like watching Star Wars Episode III. You know what’s going to happen in the end, but watching it can still be entertaining.

To sum up: Epitaph One answers a lot of questions, but raises quite a few as well. This is what’s known in the trade as a game-changer: the loose ends have not been tied up, but merely rearranged.

I have a few other random notes. Eliza Dushku still can’t act, though fortunately this episode let her play to her (few) strengths. She also probably didn’t speak Russian very well. I don’t know Russian, but I know that she sounded like a person making sounds she doesn’t perceive as words. And I’m still scarred from the French incident, so I assume any foreign language spoken on Dollhouse is done badly until proven otherwise.

Speaking of which, the dialogue writing is still bad. A lot of the worst writing was during the future scenes, when during an otherwise intense moment, some guy in the group would spew out a line that sounded like something written by a first-year poetry major. When I heard someone say, “Nice little display case for our potential corpses,” I had to pause it and yell out “WHAT”. Then I replayed it to make sure that was what he actually said. I swear, Dollhouse in its 13 episodes has racked up more People Don’t Talk Like That violations than basically all the episodes of every TV show I’ve seen.

Near the beginning, when Felicia Day’s ragtag group of “actuals” is approaching the Dollhouse, they come across an old radio blaring something meaningless. I can’t help but be reminded of Portal. I know the chances are slim, but I’m choosing to believe that was a deliberate homage to Portal (a post-apocalyptic story of its own, in a way) because that makes me happy.

This surprised me: even though I’ve only ever seen Felicia Day in “Dr. Horrible”, I could take her totally seriously in this episode. This is in contrast to Neil Patrick Harris, although to be fair I’ve only ever seen him in things where he’s in a role that makes it impossible to take him seriously anyway (like the Harold and Kumar movies).

Dollhouse sure does have a deep and enduring love of shower scenes, doesn’t it? Especially shower scenes where someone bites the dust. (Speaking of which: how did a person in a child’s body manage to reach high enough to conk that girl on the head? And how did she do it with enough force to knock her down?)

I sure feel sorry for anyone who actually wants to follow the plot and starts watching season 2 without watching this episode.

I will certainly be watching season 2. If only this show can be like “Chuck” — stumbling at the beginning, picking up towards the end of the first season, and knocking it out of the park in the second season. I’d be pleased.

Well, I just bought a ticket for a concert that will complete the “bands I want to see live at some point” set.

The part of the set that I’ve already seen:

• Rush
• Dream Theater
• Tool
• Queensrÿche
• Yngwie Malmsteen

The two I’m seeing in the remainder of 2009, to complete the set:

• Def Leppard
• Metallica (just bought)

Yes, I’m finally seeing Metallica. I don’t know what I’ll do after I complete the set. Actually, I have a couple of other bands that weren’t in my original goal set, but I would definitely go see: ZZ Top and Journey.

And I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing Rush again, if they don’t die of old age before they can go on tour again. Plus I plan on seeing Trans-Siberian Orchestra every year until I leave the country.

After the Metallica show, I’ll have seen basically all the bands I listen to regularly, except for ones that are impossible to see live anymore: Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses (I know they still exist, but their lineup is so not even close to what it was in their heyday that it’s a stretch to even call them GNR anymore).

Well, there. Metallica, bitches. Now I need to figure out how to dress for a Metallica concert before December 12.

I recently came to the conclusion that if, in the next, say, 10 years, I get the chance to live in Japan, I will take it.

(BTW: I will strive to avoid making this post entirely about me, because I am a boring topic, and nobody likes a self-indulgent blog post.)

For the longest time I’ve assumed that if I moved to Japan, I would swiftly die. Unable to communicate with anyone, I would be rendered helpless, hopeless and isolated. Overwhelmed by the inherently stressful nature of life in Japan, I would succumb to the ineluctable forces of language barriers, zillions of people, and stomach ulcers.

I thought this up until two months ago, when I actually spent two weeks in Japan, having not been there for at least five years previously. And shockingly, I found the whole thing very pleasant. Maybe it was because I was traveling with someone fluent in both English and Japanese, but I remain convinced, however foolishly, that if I were left to my own devices and had to avoid swiftly dying in Japan, I could.

I’d had horror stories in my head, told to me by what I thought was “a bunch of different people”, but I now remember to be just one excessively negative person. The horror stories generally revolved around the constant presence of a meaningless cacophony in a passively hostile society. There were always too many people around. You couldn’t understand anything, and couldn’t make yourself understood. It was so crowded. There was no space. Everything was expensive. On and on.

I’ve since realized that I’ve only heard such horror stories from one excessively negative person, and that the rest of the accounts I’ve heard of living in Japan (as a non-Japanese person) range from mixed at worst to overwhelmingly positive at best. That one person was making a critical mistake: trying to adapt her surroundings to match what she was used to, instead of adapting herself to match her surroundings.

Yes, Japan is very different from Western Europe. If you try to live a Western European existence in Japan, you’re doomed to failure. The food is different. The buildings are different. The society is different. Obviously the language is different. Even the tiny things you never think about, like ironing boards, are different. (Japanese ironing boards stand about a foot off the ground — you’re supposed to use them kneeling down. Also, they’re tiny, to save space.)

It’s a matter of changing your expectations. If you judge the quality of the food based on how similar it is to Western European food, well then of course it sucks. For example, Japanese people really should never have been allowed to get their hands on the concept of pizza. If you try eating pizza in Japan, then you’ll rapidly become convinced that the universe hates you. You have to let go of Western expectations. Once you do that, you’re set. The one lasting impression I have from my most recent trip to Japan is that if you’re having a subpar gastronomic experience there, you must be putting some serious effort into it. You have to really try to find poor-quality food in Japan, or else you have to have a seriously wrong definition of quality.

For the two weeks I was there, excluding breakfast, I almost never ate the same kind of dish more than once. (And to all my readers who conflate “Japanese food” with “sushi”: despite eating about 20 different types of Japanese food, I never once ate sushi.) All of it was invariably great or better, all of it on a higher plane of quality than I’ve been used to in the US. Uncharacteristically, my happiest memories of this trip all center around food, not trains. I had a couple of culinary experiences that I have no words for other than “foodgasm”. The best was at a sukiyaki restaurant on the top floor of a building on the central plaza of Kyoto. When I first bit into the meat, I literally gasped. Normally very reserved about showing enthusiasm for anything, I had to try very hard not to giggle and moan as I ate.

Every night I went to bed feeling pleasantly fat and vacantly happy. More than once I was squarely sloshed on good sake. But the most incredible part was that every lunchtime and dinnertime, we could wander around and choose a restaurant pretty much at random, with total assurance that the food would be excellent. Even the tiniest hole in the wall was guaranteed to be great, more so because you could watch your food being made and maybe chat with the cooks as they made it.

What I was trying to say without too much irrelevant gushing was that I am not worried about starving to death if I lived in Japan, or even about being dissatisfied with the food. In fact, if I had to choose a cuisine that I had to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Japanese hands-down. (Real Japanese cuisine, though — not the bogus pseudo-Japanese stuff they have outside Japan.)

I imagine it’s much easier to let go of your expectations when you’re just visiting than it is when you’re moving there long-term. I say this only in fairness, because I really think I could enjoy life in Japan without changing my mindset at all. Sure, I can’t speak Japanese very well, which is a major downside, but the upside is that I would be forced to learn it very quickly, and I can think of much worse things than being forced to learn a language. But I like good food. I like big cities and large crowds. I like good public transport and a conspicuous lack of car culture. Strangest of all, I had an indefinable sense of being at home in Japan.

Japan really isn’t my home though. I lived there from birth until the age of 18 months, and then never lived there again. I’ve visited a handful of times before — few enough to count on two hands. None of these visits lasted longer than three weeks. Japanese was the first language I spoke in life, and I spoke it exclusively until about age 4, at which point I switched to English. English is obviously my native language, but I do still retain native speaker-like instincts in Japanese. It almost feels like Japanese is a native language that I know very little of.

But when I walk around in Japan, I feel deeply comfortable. I don’t fit in there and I never will in the same way that a fully Japanese person does. But when I was there, nothing bothered me. Things that might seem odd to a Westerner, like the near-complete lack of swinging doors in residences, seemed eminently normal to me. Being there felt natural and somehow right.

I know consciously that Japan is not my home. Belgium is. But I bet I could eventually feel unequivocally that Japan is home, and if I get the chance, I’ll try.

Last night I had one of the stranger dreams of my life. Perhaps you can understand what it’s about better than I can.

I was standing in a field next to a dry creek bed. On the other side of the creek were some power lines. The power lines were riddled with little birds making lots of bird noise. There were also some hawks cruising around. I’m not sure how I knew they were hawks, but I definitely thought they were hawks, even after one of them dived onto some prey near the ground in the manner of a peregrine falcon. The hawks were generally sort of snapping at the little birds, occasionally grabbing them. The little birds didn’t seem too concerned by this, which I thought was rather odd.

Then there was the mind-bendingly bizarre part. I watched this one particular hawk. It landed on a power line, directly above another wire where there were three little birds perched in a row. I knew (somehow) that the little bird on the right was the mother of the other two. The hawk’s feet were literally a couple of inches above these other little birds’ heads, but they didn’t seem to notice. Then, the hawk just sort of casually bent down, grabbed the middle little bird in its beak, and flew off. It was a very lazy beak-grab, sort of in the manner of a person absently chewing a pencil. Anyway, the hawk flew off a little ways and then settled on a pylon, where, after struggling a little bit, it swallowed the little bird whole.

I kept watching that hawk. It stared around regally, then took flight and cruised around aimlessly for a bit. Eventually, it landed back above the remaining two little birds, who were still oblivious and had apparently not noticed the absence of one of them. The hawk stared deliberately down at them, first one, then the other. Then it hopped down, between the two little birds. It turned to the child bird and lazily beak-grabbed it. But it just stood there, holding the bird in its beak. Then the mother bird suddenly noticed the hawk and started yelling at it in a very strident manner.

Now I remember finding this next part absolutely unbelievable: the hawk, after a few seconds of being yelled at, let go of the child bird (which did not appear to have noticed anything), lazily turned around, opened its beak impossibly wide and ate the mother bird. It was the motion that was the strangest part. It opened its beak, positioned its head directly above the mother bird, and then just moved its head downward. GLOMP.

I remember it all very vividly, probably because it was so very remarkable. I’m mildly concerned that I may be insane on the inside. But I tell you what: if in a future life I come back as a hawk, I aspire to be like this one.

You have to be cynical about the chances of a show like this, so I imagine that this was the last episode of “Dollhouse” that will ever air on TV. You have to keep this context in mind when considering the implications of the finale, and the creators’ intentions for this episode.

My lasting impression was simply that they tried to do too much in too short a time. And you can understand why. They wanted to bring the story to the kind of point you’d like to leave it at for the end of a season. The story needed two episodes to cover that distance; FOX wanted one.

It does seem unfair. While it lasted, “Dollhouse” developed enough of a world, raised enough questions and provoked enough thought that it deserved a proper ending, even after such a short run. I don’t mind the fact that the story was left completely open — they had to allow for the possibility of more “Dollhouse”, however remote it is — but I do mind the fact that whatever led up to this point in the plot was not adequately explained.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, Ballard tends to serve as the audience’s representative because he seems to be the only good guy. And at the end of this episode, now he’s working for the Dollhouse? I feel like something must have happened between him catching the hard drive with Caroline’s brain on it and him agreeing to work for the Dollhouse and all of a sudden wanting to free November instead of Echo. (This is one of the more obvious casualties of the time constraints: Sierra and November get imprinted, and then what? Sierra is never seen again and November is suddenly being freed. Buh?) And what about Echo? What made her decide to just remain a Doll? I’m sure with her multiple-personality badass powers she could have escaped.

On the plus side, if the show does return, this gives us the dynamic duo of Boyd and Ballard, who for some reason I really enjoy seeing working together. I get the feeling that neither really understands the other, but they have a quiet confidence in each other nonetheless. And now they’re both centers of considerable moral ambiguity, which is always interesting. Boyd’s motivations have never been explained (and he dodges Ballard’s question on the subject). Ballard’s moral compass has obviously shifted somewhat; my best guess is that he’s working for the Dollhouse so he can have a role in protecting the Dolls from Alpha, figuring that if he can’t bring down the Dollhouse he might as well protect its victims as best he can. But it’s far from certain that that’s what he’s really up to. Hell, as far as we know that’s what Boyd is up to as well.

Alpha is this episode’s strong point. The actor, Alan Tudyk, was brilliant, the only downside to his performance being the way it exposed Eliza Dushku’s performance as mediocre (par for the course there). He made Alpha a genuinely frightening villain. He stole the most graphically disturbing scene I’ve ever seen on a TV channel that isn’t HBO: him slashing Whiskey and then gouging out his handler’s eyes. He convincingly conveyed a person with tons of personalities struggling for control and ending up a wildly, dangerously unstable psycho. I haven’t seen an insane villain played so well since “The Dark Knight”.

Obviously, there’s an awful lot more of this story to be told. Unfortunately, it looks doubtful that any of it ever will be. So in the end, am I satisfied with what’s been told so far?

My relationship with “Dollhouse” has been strange. There were only a few episodes that actually held my attention closely. Yet I kept watching because despite everything I was curious to see what was going to happen next. Watching “Dollhouse” didn’t give me as much pure enjoyment as, say, “Chuck”, but I did want to find out more about its world every week. So in that sense, yes, it was a good show. At least it didn’t completely lose my interest like, for example, “Lie to Me”, which I stopped watching after the second episode.

“Dollhouse” was built upon a very deep premise and had the potential to be a show truly out of the ordinary. It was out of the ordinary, to be sure, but it did not astound. It really did come quite close at times to being excellent, particularly during those moments when my head hurt trying to think through the tangle of deception that the audience was allowed glimpses of, and those moments where they took the lid off the more disturbing parts of the world. The show’s premise is inherently disturbing, and to the show’s credit it never held that back. Much like the beach landing sequence in “Saving Private Ryan”, that’s the only way it could have been done right.

So what killed “Dollhouse”? I can identify several reasons. Let’s look back at my midseason review and look at the four points at the top. In my mind, the first three of them have either cleared up or the show works in spite of them (with the possible exception of the sympathetic-character one; I’ll get to that later). The fourth is still a problem, and it’s gotten to be a bigger problem as the show goes on. Eliza Dushku just does not have the kind of versatility and talent the role requires. Though most of the other Doll actors are relative unknowns, they all manage the shifting-persona thing better than Dushku does. The non-Doll actors do fairly well for the most part. Tahmoh Penikett as Ballard occasionally starts acting a little too much like Keanu Reeves at critical moments. It conflicts with the establishment of the character’s obsession with bringing down the Dollhouse, to the detriment of his own life. Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz are probably the show’s acting-quality strong points. It may be because they play largely one-dimensional characters (evil and obnoxious, respectively) but they each do so quite well.

The reason I brought up the sympathetic-character beef again was that in the later part of the season, we mostly lost him. Around mid-season, I latched onto Ballard as a guy you could root for and sympathize with, because he showed up a lot and did good things. Then he mostly disappeared from the show, appearing in occasional scenes to stick out his manly jaw as he angsted about how his girlfriend’s a Doll. Then he went into the Dollhouse, and without too much fuss started helping them eliminate their biggest threat. Well, so much for the good-guy thing, then.

I can’t say I’m heartbroken that “Dollhouse” is probably toast, but I do have to admit I watched it with some interest and would almost certainly watch it again if the planets aligned and it were renewed. But I’m not holding my breath.