I agree on the Hodgman plot. I'm not a fan of the "randomly has a conversation with a stranger that makes everything better" story, so I enjoyed both the follow-through ("Oh, we get to see him again!") and the subsequent reveal that, nope, he's just a fraud. And I think it was very much clued in the earlier episode.

This explains why I always had a hard time playing a recorder, even when I was a flute player. Thanks!

In the music theory/composition sense, sure, they're all tunes. In the colloquial sense of "just a simple, hummable melody", no, it's not a tune. There's plenty of points where that melody isn't heard at all and plenty of parts that never play it.

Every time Ana Maria or Rodrigo plays the violin I just close my eyes and listen to the nice recording. I normally never notice editing cuts where things change enough to show that they're different takes, but I immediately noticed one last episode because Ana Maria's bow was so far up the neck of her violin that I…

It's weird to me that you keep calling the 1812 Overture a "tune". It's not just a tune, it's a long orchestral piece that involves a lot of individual random parts coming together to make a whole. I don't mean this as classical music snobbery here — certainly all music with more than a few performers involves a lot…

Yep. I like to sing karaoke, which involves memorizing the solo melodies for lots of pop songs, and that is really easy to do. Memorizing the major theme of the 1812 Overture is also easy. But memorizing the entire overture is not, because most of the time you don't have the melody — you have a harmony part or…

Wow, I had no idea conductors could make that kind of money.

#1 really annoyed me — it wouldn't have been difficult to just add a line "He told us to bring sweaters and our outdoor instruments" or "Oh, this is why we had to bring spare instruments" or "Good thing we brought our spares, the humidity would have wrecked the Stradi!". I mean, I understand taking dramatic license,…

Huh, I really like your point about the show needing someone to counter Michael! I strongly agree with that, actually. It would undercut that dynamic too if she ended up working for Sin Rostro.

I reread my original comment and realized it came off harsher than I meant it to. I was actually pretty surprised myself after watching it. Yes, the comedy involves a lot of dick jokes, but if you pay attention it actually becomes pretty clear that the creators know exactly how stupid the dick jokes are and are pretty…

I upvoted this originally, but recently saw the movie (my parents wanted to watch it FOR FREEDOM), and it's actually the opposite of this. No, it doesn't go so far as to show concentration camps, but basically the entire plot of the North Korea sequences is centered around how that bumbling edifice we like to mock is…

It was a little strange when Boyd Crowder started clogging during Faure's Requiem, but that paid off later in…you know. That scene.

I don't really know what to make of that Cynthia/Rodrigo scene either. Is the point that she really likes fucking conductors? I feel like Cynthia was supposed to be this mentor character, and then one of the writers was like "Mentors are hot. So she should be sexy too!"

There's actually very little sex after the pilot and not that much drinking either. I don't know enough about conducting to say whether that gets any better. I will say that the visual aspect of the instrument-playing definitely isn't good (particularly with the violins, although I might just notice that more since I…

You're going to have fun when you see Gael Garcia Bernal pretending to play the violin. (Although I like the show, I quickly instituted a policy of closing my eyes whenever that happened.)

Having watched the whole thing, she comes across to me as being drunk but trying to actually act through it instead of just going "fuck it" (which, to be fair, is what Smash deserved).

Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy on this topic. I don't even particularly mind when people are dissatisfied with the ending, I've just seen a lot of thinkpieces of media outlets going "Was Serial's ending satisfying enough for listeners?!?!" which strikes me as condescending and missing the point, so I was…

Maybe it's because I don't listen to any podcasts*, but I'm kind of surprised at people who evaluate Serial as just another narrative drama and then don't like the ending not tying everything up. I feel like Koenig was very, very clear throughout the run of Serial that it wasn't a narrative drama, but as close as you…

I took an Ariana Huffington bus down from NYC. That was a clusterfuck like no other.

Funny story, I actually work in a building right next to Draper University. We can see their roof from our office kitchen. They're very weird.