scowl

The show has really failed to explain the Soviet mindset. Elizabeth probably feels that the pretty nice life for middle class white Americans has come from the exploitation of the poor and minorities. She sees Americans with more money than they can spend while other Americans starve. The Soviet Union felt that it was the victim of capitalist nations conspiring to starve and overthrow it. America became rich during World War Two while the Soviet Union was attacked and torched by the Nazis. The Soviet Union was still surrounded by enemies while America sat safely between two oceans. They thought that if they didn't have to spend a huge amount of its budget on defense, it would have more than enough resources to create a socialist utopia for all of its citizens.

One thing they missed this season is that most male hipsters in Portland have big bushy beards right now. It reminds me of those pictures of the House of David baseball team. Almost every guy has some kind of beard. If you don't have a beard, they assume you live in the suburbs. It's sad that Portlandia shoots during the summer because the city turns into pure comedy when it snows. Not only do we not shovel our sidewalks, many people dump the snow from their driveway right on the sidewalk creating two mountains of snow that people have to climb over to walk past their house.

I'm glad the show has started off with some things sort of specific to Soviet philosophy instead of being the generic spy action drama show it turned into over the seasons. I'm hoping they'll stick with it.

RetroTV has dropped MST3K leaving Comet as the only network carrying it now. Comet also has commercial breaks that are six or seven minutes long and they edit the episodes pretty hard. One episode ended right when the movie ended -- went straight to credits!

I wasn't. I was blowing them into the big yard debris container. Portland had a great idea to make some revenue: charge everyone for leaf pickup. Over half of Portland have opted out of the plan.

I could see they were going to do something terrible with the character from his first scene. Hey, why not suicide? We already have two characters dying from diseases.

Ryan looked like a complete idiot from the beginning and now looks like a tragic idiot now. He stole a company's entire product and he will never never ever get another job in the industry ever again. He'll be lucky if he can find a job reading gas meters. They sure don't make these characters very deep or surprising. I've really lost interest in this show. It seems like most plot points involve someone doing something stupid merely to get the plot moving then acting like spoiled children when the inevitable consequences arrive. I know that's what passes for drama on basic cable these days and that's why I don't watch much of it. It's also making the technical mess ups even more irritating to me, like Cameron instantly getting an amateur radio licence like it was a CB radio and just happens to find Gordon on one of thousands of frequencies. And it's the "fresh start" thing again, just like last season. Fresh start means more of the same.

Or like they did with Kelsey Grammer in Boss when they didn't know what to do for a second season?

I finally watched this. Well CrazyCam is back! She's protecting her precious spaghetti code from the dumb people who don't love it as much as she does. This brings back two great memories from me. I apologize in advance for the boring tech stuff in this post. Back in 1991 there was a guy who wrote a tool from scratch and the code was terrible. He was pulled off of the project and he was furious. He couldn't believe that they were going to hand his code to... me, who else? He wouldn't talk to me or help me figure out the crap he wrote. He thought that this thing would be his dynasty. There are even adult programmers who act like this. More recently I had to fix some old code that was very interesting indeed. The code should have been a simple decision list but the guy who wrote it thought that would be boring so he used set algebra to tie variable values into a formula whose value then decided what the code would do. To make it maintainable (hah!) he put a large "truth table" in the comments to describe the "inputs" and "outputs". This is like a Tic Tac Toe board with X's and O's to show "true" or "false". Cameron would have loved it. It only took me a day to rewrite the entire thing. The languages in this show don't sound right to me. I didn't hear about C++ until about 1989. We didn't use it because it was big, slow, and programs took forever to compile even on our fast mainframes (it took your little "hello world" C++ program and turned it into a giant mass of C that all had to be compiled). Even Objected Oriented programming was an academic topic as far as I remember. And PL/M? I can't remember anyone using that but maybe that's exactly the kind of thing Cameron would use. I still have the same complaints: Ryan sounds like a wide-eyed little boy instead of a super-smart programmer and the Mutiny programmers do nothing all day. Why aren't their bosses yelling at them to get to work. And that brings me to one of my favorite memories thanks to that guy using the three-letter f-word in front of Joe. In the summer of 1981 I was a kid working at a doomed game company. Six of us had a work area not unlike what we see on this show, except we actually worked and were normally quiet and respectful. Except for this one day. Someone brought in Devo's new single, "Working in a Coal Mine" on a cassette and we all started rocking out like the boys on the show. It was raising morale to the roof. Well, our older boss who preferred Led Zeppelin and Foghat peered at us through the window in his office, then he stomped out and screamed at the top of his lungs... "Turn that faggot shit OFF!!!" We did not laugh. We immediately turned it off and got back to work. We were actually scared of him.

Some rich people will give you money and take away things from you that are worth more than money. I'm sure someone famous said this but I'm drawing a blank.

So I guess it was time for them to screw up ham radio. How did Gordon build a radio that was built in Japan? Yaesu did not sell kits. His sad plea "CQ, is anyone using this frequency?" was hilarious. If you can't hear anyone then no one is using it! If you tune through the amateur bands and you don't hear anybody you're either tuning the wrong bands for that time of day or your antenna is busted. They were even more busy in the 80's. Gordon is once again the most pathetic person on television. Mutiny and Joe are fighting over some guy that really doesn't seem like much of a catch. He starts every sentence with, "Um, like, uh, what I mean is..." Hey Ryan, you're going to march into your boss's office to give him a piece of you mind, perhaps you should think about what you're going to say before you open the door. And Joe... I can't remember what he did to make him the new Einstein. Some virus software? The show is modeling him like Steve Jobs and his rich buddy Larry Ellison who was famous for applying Asian architecture and design where ever he wanted it even if it was impractical. Back the 80's everything Asian was hot and trendy and rich people were all over that shit. On the good side I like Cameron a lot more this season since she hasn't done anything stupid yet. Her shocked facial expressions all through this episode cracked me up. I give credit to the DP who is framing everything in strange ways like cramming the main character in the corner with tons of background everywhere else. Nice to see that someone is trying something new. I also like the Kraftwerk-esque theme song. Boy, I don't remember much from this episode.

I saw it more like Joe was ambushing Gordon in a high-pressure situation so he could watch him squirm while trying to make a decision. Joe is the kind of guy who would offer you 80% of his company and then burn it to the ground leaving you 80% of nothing.

That's exactly the feeling I always get with this show -- I hate the whole lot of them. I had this problem in the final seasons of Mad Men too. I wanted every single one of them to end up living in a cardboard box on the street. The coders aren't the nice introverted ones I know but are more like the frat boys who beat up nerds. Throw a firecracker at me and you won't get my help with any of your projects. Do these guys do any work? Cameron is more tolerable this season (so far) and seems more diplomatic and responsible (so far). Good because Mackenzie Davis looks great in a tank top. I kind of like Bosworth but I still hear Khan and Cotton Hill every time he speaks. Gordon is just too self-destructive for me to root for. Joe's character is now over the top for me. I was waiting for him to shout "Get down on thy knees and worship me as your new god!" at his stalker who wanted to work for him. In the first season I laughed because he was the epitome of the worst manager in software, one that gives you impossible specs to code to then every week he changes everything in the product except the delivery date. Now he's just some lunatic behind a desk. What does he do? Technical stuff: this show is still a joke. A mainframe with wire wrap? The last mainframe I saw that had been wire wrapped was a CDC system built in 1968 as it was being wheeled off to the landfill. And IBM mainframes did not run freaking MS-DOS!

Just ten episodes starting in late August.

Google says this season won't start until late August. I thought they'd keep this series summer filler.

Is the fourth one any good? I don't know why I just asked that.

I just discovered that James Cromwell had been in all three Revenge of the Nerds movies. Is he coming back this season?

Damn these DVR's! Or damn FX for sending out bogus scheduling information.

Just what I feared: little kids doing what their smoochy parents tell them is dancing.

The finale of season 28 a few nights ago was quite a contrast to the season 15 episode I saw. Contestants jumped off of a building to grab a clue and every team did it. So I saw the season 15 episode in which Mika gave up and was eliminated because she didn't want to go down a waterslide. She whined and whined! "This is stupid! Stupid stupid STUUUPIIID!" She made Flo sound like a mature adult.

One thing that made me feel better about this season is going through the spoiler thread and seeing how much worse it could have been if some spoilers had been true. A final four of Neal, Julia, Michele, Scott, and Jason? Yikes!

This was yet another season that reminded me that making good decisions doesn't help you if you aren't a likeable person.

The "jump for the clue" made me dizzy. I don't know how anyone can do that. It was scary when they first had it in season 13 and that was just forty feet in the air. I would have been hanging onto the line like Sheri every single time.

In the next episode we see Maria and Tiffany destroy a car with no real penalty because a new one arrived before they finished the task. In the same episode, pretty Mika is driving down the freeway saying how much she loves the car because she feels like she's only going 60 MPH when the speedometer says she's going 120. Looks like it will be a good season.

And this is the season in which a team came in first but was eliminated because they lost a passport. Nice to see real people living my nightmare.