List of interview questions posed to me by Google after I applied recently.
Are you applying for the senior developer position?
How are you?
Have you ever been convicted of a felony?
A weblog by Hao Lian.
A journey into the soft of night.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
Are you applying for the senior developer position?
How are you?
Have you ever been convicted of a felony?
In the dream, you are sitting with all your friends at a diner. She with her long hair and twinkling eyes sits across from you, and around her are the arms of another man. The conversation bounces back and forth, always missing you by such and such. It is bright outside, and you stare out the window at the parking lot, waiting for the charade to end. “Even in your sleep, you’re alone,” you think to yourself. You wake to a pounding headache and drag yourself out of bed as you mechanically dress and prepare for another day. You decided to go for a walk, and you hardly notice it is raining the entire time.
From shinynew:
My sister did this to me when I was younger, but not quite as hard.
“If you rub your hands together it will smell like raspberries.” (Easily testable and not completely unbelivable.)
Does it and is hit.
“Why did you hit me?
“Why did you put your hand to your face?
“I … I trusted you.…”
She felt pretty bad about it.
John Hodgman, everybody, lecturing the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner on nerds and jocks. I like how CSPAN has nearly completed its transformation into a comedy showcase of my favorite people. (via Daniel Jalkut)
Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass. Good night, everybody. We’ll start storyboarding the next chapter of the internet tomorrow because this one just ended.
As you know, I like to think of The Dark Balloon as a place where you can come, set your suitcases down, and get some sound financial advice. As part of my continuing effort to turn you from a poor orphaned elfling into a rich orphaned elfling, I’ve compiled lists of ways you can make money off of simple household items. Today’s household item: love.
You kidnap your rivals’ girlfriends, leaving a business card that contains only the URL of your website. The website is a Netflix knock-off for parts of said girlfriends. After signing up, users can choose to spend unlimited time with two queued parts, and then return them to receive the next two parts. Is this week more of a thigh-and-waist or elbows-and-fingers? Choose carefully! Your first month is a free trial. There is also an “Instant Watch” feature but, really, it’s just a gruesome photo gallery.
At a bar, you wait for a woman to spill a drink on you. You create an optical illusion in which the woman thinks you are giving off electrical sparks. You introduce yourself in a robotic voice. She introduces herself, intrigued by your metallic accent. She asks you about it; you tell her you are a robot—a love robot. You two hit it off. Your relationship quickly progresses, but she knows deep down inside in her heart of hearts—she is part bovine—that your callous lack of emotional ability will stymie all hopes of true love. You tell her there’s a wonderful robot artificer who is willing to upgrade your emotional circuits but it’s too much to afford and you only have half the money saved up. She takes this news sadly. One day, she surprises you with the other half. She has been cutting corners and saving up ever since you told her about the miraculous surgery. Mechanically, you thank her as heartfelt as you can; she knows that in a few hours you will be able to truly express your feelings. You run away with the money. She dies alone, in poverty. As time progresses, you realize your heart has solidified during this long confidence game and, in a fit of irony, you become the robot you always pretended to be.
You open an amusement park where visitors pay money to experience love. The nearby people are surprised; they had not seen nor heard the construction. Everybody comes for a look-see; you generously charge $5 for admission. At the entrance, the most wonderful fried foods are offered, from sweet to spicy, from juicy to crunchy. Visitors engorge themselves, and the food seems to always have the same warm, giddy effect on everybody, as if all the troubles in the world had melted away, as if nothing else mattered but that sensation of ecstatic happiness. The people amble toward the rides, knowing the emotion will never end. But no matter which ride visitors choose—be it the merry-go-round, the hula hoops, or the roller coaster—they end up vomiting. People begin looking for trash cans but there are none. Soon, vomit covers the entire ground and then the booths and then the rides themselves. As visitors wade through the Katrinaesque splurge toward the entrance, which turns out to be the only exit, they find you, the ticket taker, are gone, and so is that feeling of life and humanity that had so enraptured them earlier. Now they only feel hollow and aimless. And they return back to their prosaic, loveless lives while you escape with the money to your prosaic, loveless life, hoping the stench of dirty money can mask the stench of a dirty conscience—but it never will.
You put yourself in a cage and hire somebody to paint a sign next to it. The sign would read “World’s Worst Person”, and you could have someone charge tourists $5 to watch you silently dance in uneven circles.
Jeff looked nervous. “This is a very nice restaurant,” rumbled María, rubbing Jeff’s shoulders. “I feel like a hill again.”
“Primary-succession ecosystems only,” whispered Jeff, grateful for the compliment.
They sat at the dinner table, staring at their menus, finding what he or she had already decided to order, and putting the menu back down.
Jeff went to say something. He put his mountain hands on those of María, who pulled hers back. Jeff blushed and pulled his as well.
“Look, this is moving a little too cretaceous-tertiarily for me.” María said, as if she had been rehearsing those words all night and suddenly, like a flank eruption, could no longer hold it, as if that was how she felt all along. “I think we should just be friends.”
“But we are already friends,” Jeff said, quietly.
“What’s the level below friends?”
“Rangemates?”
“We’ll be rangemates,” María said in an as cheerful and comfortable tone as a mountain that was neither cheerful nor comfortable could be. She reached for her glass, drank, and shot another smile with the sincerity of an ostensibly slow-moving magma flow.
Jeff could only stare at her. The mountain elephants on Jeff’s south face, who had watched with the interest generations of mountain elephants could muster over centuries and centuries, whinnied softly, embarrassed. María stared at her hands and stood up and left.
Mountain elephant said, “You moved too fast.”
“Mountain elephant, what knows you in the ways of mountain love?” Jeff said, avalanches gently rolled down his slope, stopping a comfortable distance away from harming anyone.
It’s your story, your voice, your choices, and I don’t want to question them, but why these words?
Comments Written By Actual Students Extracted From Workshopped Manuscripts at a Major University, collected by Tanya Rey for McSweeney’s.
Once, on the first day of class, Angela Carter, who taught at Brown, was asked by a student what her own writing was like. She carefully answered as follows: “My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis.”
A profile of American creative writing education by Louis Menand on The New Yorker.
Advocacy groups and advocates everywhere are mourning the loss of Kansas pro-choice doctor Dr. George Tiller following a fatal shooting during religious services yesterday.
“George Tiller was a great man,” says pro-choice Director Jeff Maloney of the Spangled American Liberties Committee of Truth and Beauty. “He was everything you wanted in a symbolic figure truly abstracted from whatever it was that he did.”
Pro-life Director Jeff Maloney of the Beautiful Spangly American Coalition for Liberties and Truth offered similar condolences. “You could really eviscerate Dr. Tiller. For years we were lost in the wilderness without a guiding light. Who do we attack? Where’s the face of pro-life antagonism?”
Director Maloney paused in a moment of staged drama and pretended emotion.
“George Tiller was that man.”
Director Maloney of the Liberties Committee extended his commiseration to Tiller’s family. “We hope they make it through this time of hardship and become an equally great symbol for our pro-choice advocacy with the same great ability to be transformed into something empty of their actual actions and humanity.”
Upon this remark, pro-life advocates reacted with outrage. In one pointed criticism, individual Jeff Maloney unintelligibly shouted, “I can’t believe these murderous communistic fetus haters would paint George Tiller in such broad strokes.”
“Clearly, he’s a pro-life symbol,” a statement to which pro-choice individual Jeff Maloney hysterically screamed, “Nuh-uh.”
Ultimately, of course, at the center of this awful situation is the death of a courageous man whose shooting can only be seen as a warning sign for the increasingly heated abortion debate.
“It’s true. George Tiller’s death will be his last great symbolic contribution to the visceral bile from both sides,” says Jeff Maloney.
“It’s tragic, really,” says Director Maloney, “that George Tiller can only die once.”
I went to see some live heart surgery yesterday. Sat in a auditorium for three hours watching the queer thing beating, then not beating for a bit, then beating again. Didn’t lose concentration once.
Glee opens on a scene of cheerleaders with abrasive coach Sue Sylvester; it’s Jane Lynch playing the same role she played in Role Models. Cut to title scene “Glee”.
Do the cheerleaders or Jane Lynch play an important role in the narrative of Glee? No. In an impressive directing decision, the cold open completely fails to illuminate neither the show’s story or characters.
Cut to scene of our protagonist Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) pulling into the parking lot, where jocks throw a nerd into the dumpster.
“OK,” says you. “One of the show’s central themes is that high school is hard.” Accurate guess, were it not terribly wrong. Yet more impressively, Strangers with Candy does a better job of conveying that than Glee ever does. A better theme for the show would be the word mish-mash. “High school is tough” is mish-mashed with “Teacher Will Schuester struggles with making performing cool” is mish-mashed with “Rocky marriage turns into family and romantic drama” is mish-mashed with “Bully struggles with peer pressure” is mish-mashed with “Unpopular kids finding their place in the world” is mish-mashed with “Woman finds unrequited love in married man”. Glee spends all of 12 minutes (act one) packing these plots and subplots in before cutting sporadically in and out in the longer act two.
(In the interest of fairness and disclosure of my own laziness, I stopped watching after the second act.)
“OK, the plot has problems, mainly that I’ve seen both Strangers with Candy and Hamlet 2 and High School Musicals 1 Through 9. What about the characters?” You can’t see me, but I’m patronizingly ruffling your hair right now. Will Schuester is a teacher going against both his administration and the de facto social structure. Someone we can root for, until he frames athelete Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) for marijuana possession. “A complicated character,” you say. Great until you take two steps back and realize that he did it to force Hudson into joining glee club at which point the Disproportionate Action-Motivation Train rolls into town and everybody gets on board for a magical journey far far away from Suspended Belief Land. Schuester is a Good Guy; the story hammers that enough into the viewer like any good “teacher against odds” plot (subplot? sub-subplot? main plot? impossible to tell?). If the writers wanted Schuester to be a Good Guy with Flaws, they took the certainly took the most heavy-handed approach possible.
But at least Schuester is not a flat character. Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) is the over-ambitious student learning to tone it down a notch; done to death. Finn Hudson is the school quarterback who’s more thoughtful than he lets on: no drug use, cares about his academic record, and wants to be successful in life; done to death. Sue Sylvester is Gayle Sweeney from Role Models with better lines. Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley) is the stereotypical sassy black woman; even 30 Rock can’t pull that off without seeming pretentious or over-trodden despite that show’s self-referential nature, Sherri Shepard’s role as Tracy Jordan’s wife, Johnnie Mae’s wonderful conversation as an airport screener with Liz Lemon (“Sandwich Day”), and the show’s generally gorgeous writing. The one-off flamboyantly gay ex-glee club teacher sexually harassing a teenager at the beginning … in the pilot … of a musical comedy series—well, it’s hard to tell if that’s a stereotype or offensive mistake or who knows how you’re supposed to feel about that in all of the three seconds the show devotes to it. The school’s jocks are jocks; the school’s cheerleaders are cheerleaders; never mind that these cliché cliques rarely form along such clean lines in high school or with such sheep-like meanness. And now you know the inhabitants of the overpopulated Glee universe.
Yet it’s clear despite the suffocating writing and haphazard plotting and epileptic directing that the acting is decent if not wonderful. Jayma Mays is fantastic as Emma Pillsbury (pictured in the Hulu thumbnail), a character we can actually sympathize—possibly the only one—with saddled by the writers with a germaphobic quirk that’s neither realistic (as in Monk) or funny (as in Monk). Cue a five-second scene where Pillsbury cleans a table that neither drives the story or character forward nor provides laughter. Principal Figgins (Igbal Theba) deftly strikes the balance between hard-ass and fatherly as the slightly cynical principal. And perhaps with more time and breathing space these characters can become people with depth and humor and drama and backstory, with whom we can empathize and I certainly have no reason to doubt that. But by throwing them into an overflowing cauldron of a pilot episode aboard the Disproportionate Action-Motivation Train chugging at light-speed away from Suspended Belief Town into Weird, Mish-Mash Plot Land, Glee does a great disservice by handicapping the story and the characters for what appears to be no gain.
Perhaps the greatest roast beef I have with Glee is that it’s billed as a “musical comedy”. For the first part, it should be noted that no original music is being written for the show; that is, the music itself is not actually comedic. Nor is it staged particularly comedically. It’s telling that the funniest music scene is the regional glee club competition, and even those laughs are pulled off by contrast not actual music (for reference, see Little Miss Sunshine). As for the second part, Glee treats comedy as a filler in between scenes of drama leading to a particularly flawed form of comedy-drama—which is a much more accurate, if more nebulous, genre if we’re going to be assigning those as the cavemen did—where comedy and drama are in separate rooms and try to take peeks at each other through a single small muddy window; meanwhile, the writers take turns throwing mud at the window. In pointing out the places where comedy drives the story or the character development, I could give you the scene with Hudson by the dumpster or Berry on the receiving end of a berry smoothie, but I’d be hard-pressed to offer anything more substantial. In a strange way, Glee takes the same approach to comedy that Family Guy or Punk’d or Sit Down, Shut Up or a large chunk of Adult Swim’s programming does: a vehicle for jokes, one-liners, quirky characters, and pie/smoothie-to-the-face jokes mostly devoid of basic human compassion for the characters involved, something that propels Arrested Development or 30 Rock or even Everybody Loves Raymond to a level far above Glee.
But this is just a pilot. Glee is a decent show at heart that certainly deserves to become the success everybody else already thinks it is provided, every now and then, it lets itself breathe and expand. I’ll be rooting for it.
It was a fantastically beautiful geological era. And, even though all the other landforms were out partying, Mount Jeff was home, checking his mountain email for the tenth time in two minutes.
“Nothing but spam,” he thought—a thought that spanned decades of erosion and climate and tectonic activity, all pockmarked, however slightly, with a distinct yet indescribably sad current of mountain loneliness.
Mount Jeff let out a mountain sigh, badly disturbing a billy goat.
With nothing to do, he checked his mountain email spam folder. “I’m so pathetic,” he thought. He read the first one.
“Enhance your albedo!” it read.
Mount Jeff chuckled to himself.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic—” (Even though Mount Jeff was only 2% iron and had no idea what it was like, he thought it was cool to throw that word around anyway.) “—if I bought some?”
But Mount Jeff secretly hoped it would work. All his friends with girlmountains had positively glowing faces. When he brought it up, they would rumble, “No; I think you look brilliant.” But he was convinced he looked duller.
Mount Jeff let out another mountain sigh. The billy goat bleated furiously, decided to seek solace in a more self-secure home, and left. “Just like all my dates,” Mount Jeff thought with his big, sad, boulder thoughts.
Ze Frank’s Hard Times: Optical illusions.
The Daily Show: John Oliver reports on the Parliament corruption scandal.
The Peter Serafinowicz Show: Ringo Starr writes the Goldfinger theme song.
Chris Milk: Last Day Dream: a man watches his life pass before him.
Peter Serafinowicz: Fifty impressions in two minutes.
The Peter Serafinowicz Show: The Brian Butterfield Diet Plan
Look Around You: Water.
The Peter Serafinowicz Show: The Brian Butterfield Karaoke Bar.