Second Exodus

Remember that guy who was in that movie?

2010-10-29T23:47:00.000-04:00

So I'm a little out of practice with the blogging, but I want to get back into the swing. Future topics may include a retrospective on the "answers" that came out of the final season of Lost, fictional press releases for a fictional band, and and exploration of the modern "Girl Friday," who is best embodied by Jack Bauer's trusty techno-hag, Chloe O'Brian.

For now, though, I'm gonna just ease back into it, and here's how: You know when you see a movie or episode of your favorite show, and one of the actors looks familiar? Happens to me all the time. Usually what I do is get on IMBD and look him/her up. What I want to do here is give those guys a little free publicity. They are not the stars, at least not now, but, really, where would Schwarzenegger be right now if he didn't have "Thug #2" to kick around?

For instance, Michael Emerson wasn't always Benjamin Linus, or even Henry Gale. He played villains in two separate episodes of two different Law and Order series, the first of which was an habitual liar and manipulator who cared for nothing more than keeping his precious house of cards from falling down. Sound like someone we know? In the first installment of the Saw series, he played an orderly in the hospital where John Kramer was getting his cancer treatments, and served as the red herring for most of the climax of the film.

Speaking of John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, the actor who played him did a lot of bit parts before becoming a genre idol in those much-maligned Saw films. Tobin Bell played bit parts in The X-Files, Stargate SG-1, Nash Bridges, ER, Alias, The West Wing, and had quite a memorable role in the Sopranos as an admissions counselor at a military academy. "2100, lights out. What's missing? Give Up? Television."

He first came to my attention in season 2 of 24, as the season-ending villain Peter Kingsley, a cold, calculating man who had been hired by unnamed business interests to blow up a nuke in LA. The success Bell is enjoying now is long-earned and well-deserved.

So that's it; watch this space for more...

This used to be so easy....

2010-10-23T16:58:00.000-04:00

I would just sit down and the words would flow out of my hands with hardly any input from me. The gunslinger would understand; the curtain comes down and the hands take over and work on their own. Now, I can't think of anything to say. It's a fucking chore is what it is. Am I bored? Complacent? Out of practice? Have my 35 years made me dumb? Have I grown soft on wicked rock bands and horror movies?

You did it, Saul. You brought them home.

2010-10-08T04:36:00.000-04:00

Not all of 'em.

2010-07-20T03:13:00.000-04:00

The real ending of lost:

2010-06-08T00:59:00.003-04:00

There was a fake rumor that turned into a running joke on the Lost podcasts: that the show would have a mysterious 7th season, known as the zombie season. No one took it really seriously, but, in retrospect, the idea is worth considering. Maybe they did make a zombie season: season 6. Think about it: all the main characters in 1977 were at ground zero when Jughead went off, and those in the present were all clustered around the statue with the Smoke Monster inside. Everyone died and went to the alternate timeline/afterlife, but before their souls left the Island, they had a shared hallucination about fighting the Man In Black.

It's not a real theory, and if you think about it, it falls apart very quickly. It's just my rational mind trying to make sense of how disappointing season 6 was. Sure, there was the temple massacre, and the Richard flashback, and Desmond's "Dr. Manhattan" moment, but it just sort of fell flat in the end. The alternate timeline was pretty cool, and I'm not against the idea that it was the afterlife, per se; they just spent WAY too much time on it. They could have introduced the alt about 6 episodes from the end and accomplished the same level of emotional resonance. In the original timeline, the whole cork thing at the end seemed way too easy, and it didn't even respect the rules about the Source established 2 episodes earlier. Mother said going into the light meant a fate worse than death, and we saw it was true when the cave gave birth to Smokey. Jack, however, and Desmond had no problem. I know, Desmond's special, but you never got the sense that there was something special about his destiny, something he was "supposed to do."

It would have been better if Lost had ended last year, when Juliet hit a bomb with a rock. There are parts of the mystery we would miss, but if we have to suffer an end with hardly any answers, it would have been better to go out on a high note. How many series end with a huge cliffhanger? It would have been risky, and edgy, and we'd be talking about it for years. Did they live happily ever after, or did they all die needlessly tragic deaths?

This is how I feel now. I think I probably owe Lost at least one more viewing of the entire series before I pass my final judgment, and I'll try not to write about it here much anymore.

That is all.

This is why I love wikipedia...

2010-05-27T01:57:00.002-04:00

The End

2010-05-26T02:18:00.005-04:00

So I'm still formulating my thoughts on the finale; I go back and forth on it. It was an awesome ending, probably would have been a lot awesomer if the Alt had been introduced much later in the season. Imagine a 6th season where everything on the Island happened the way it happened, but the flashbacks were the history of the Island, until the 3rd or 4th to last, when we would see 815 landing at LAX and a much shorter version of the "awakening."

But I want to like it because the action was awesome and I finally didn't think Jack was acting like a total d-bag.

Anyway, I got this quote from a blog comment; the poster credits someone over at New York Magazine. I don't necessarily disagree, I maybe would be a lot more measured about my reaction:

"knew this was the ending we would have THE MINUTE that damn recap show started. When the producers started babbling on and on about "how this show was really about these characters and the relationships with each other and not all this other stuff" I went "Oh SHIT. No one is going to explain anything tonight but we sure are going to see a lot of crying and people telling Jack not to 'go'". Yup.

Also, those dumb "Goodbye Lost" messages said a lot. We're not the people they wrote this show for...us who were fascinated by the time travel, mysterious numbers, looping dimensions, concepts of good and evil, ancient mysteries...nope.

They wrote this show for the people who took time out of their day to write "I'll be "Lost" without Jack!!" and "This show will always have a 'Locke' on my heart" emails. The people who think "Jack and Kate" are "super hottt!!".

When I saw those messages, I knew the finale was fcked."

Next up: Lost, BSG, and spirituality...

The End is frakkin' nigh...

2010-05-23T03:58:00.005-04:00

I don't really have a lot to say about it, surprisingly. I've enjoyed watching these last chapters unfold, and I know I'll have a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts, a lot of work to do to put together all the pieces, but for now I'm content to let it just happen without too much theorizing.

Quick hits:

1) Don't call them Darlton. What are you, 13?

2) Don't call it New Otherton; it's the fucking Barracks.

3) The Man In Black is not called Esau. You just made that up. Ditto Smocke and Flocke.

4) I really hope that Ben is running a con on MiB.

5) Will we see in the closing scene a layer of reality stripped away, the world on the other side of the Looking Glass?

6) Am I the only one who thinks that sweaty, greasy, I've-been-wearing-the-same-shirt-all-season Kate is SO much hotter than shampoo commercial Kate?

7) Richard? Frank? Miles?

8) Would it kill them to tell us the Others' backstory, even in three lines of dialogue?

That is all. I leave you with this snippet of a poem by Glados; it seems oddly appropriate.

This was a triumph!
I'm making a note here:
"HUGE SUCCESS!"

It's hard to overstate
My satisfaction.

Aperture Science;
We do what we must,
Because we can.

For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.

"Charlie! Do you know how they got the hatch door open?" "No, but if you hum a few bars, I can pick it up."

2010-05-10T23:52:00.004-04:00

So here we are. There are 2 episodes left until "The End", which, I can tell you without fear of spoiling you, is the name of the last chapter in the story that has had us all so wrapped up for the last 6 years. (5 years for me, really. 9/22/04, in my timeline, was a scant number of weeks after a certain harpie had ripped out my heart and stomped on it, and I was too self-absorbed that fall to start a journey like that. I rented the DVDs of season 1 when they came out, bought the set after I had seen the whole thing, and by the time season 2 premiered, I had seen season 1 through twice.)

Jin is dead. Ditto Sun and Sayid. Kate has been shot, and Hugo cried, good ol' funtime Hurley. I don't know why I believed MIB when he said he needed all the candidates to be with him on the plane; everything else he said was so obviously lies and manipulations. Of course he double-crossed our survivors. Better, he conned them into double-crossing him so he could get them all in a confined space together where he could get them to blow themselves up. James should have listened to Jack and left the bomb alone. I guess that makes them even for Juliet. (Season 2 was fun times. I had just turned 30, I was dating a girl I wasn't in love with, who was, prophetically, named Ilana, and we had some fun. Starbucks was on the rise, and so was my career with them; this was before the coffee giant hit the skids and started really putting the screws to their "partners." Dr. Marvin Candle and the Dharma Initiative really fired my imagination, as did the Button. The Button was everything: it was work, it was blind faith, it was social science and politics, it was a bit of civilization in the wilderness, it was isolation, and it was the canvas upon which was painted the stark conflict between the Doctor and the Hunter, the Man of Science and the Man of Faith.)

It all has to come back to the Swan eventually. Our survivors caused it to be built, and the system failure 27 years later caused the crash of flight 815. Locke's crisis of faith not only destroyed the Swan but made the Island visible to the outside world, allowing Penny and probably her father to find it. Desmond's role in the Swan's destruction turned him into a time-jumper and probably made him capable of whatever feat he was brought back to accomplish. All of this and we still have the big question of exactly what happened after Juliet hit a bomb with a rock at Swan Ground Zero. (Season 3 was good times. I was single and loving it, the Others had a book club, Tom was gay, and it was awesome. Kate, Sayid, and Locke trekked to the barracks in the second half of the season, and it was a grand adventure. They met Mikhail, had some iced tea, they blew the place up, and when they arrived at the sonic fence surrounding the barracks, they gave us the porno tree. See for yourself:

Electromagnetism, love, deception, loss, redemption, free will, destiny: this is what we have to work with. And history. Please, history!! BSG was kind enough to devote an entire episode to two conversations that revealed the entire backstory of the Cylons and the Final Five. I'm sure we won't see that, but I want at least one long scene where a character explains everything, maybe like how Dumbledore explains the prophecy to Harry at the end of book 5. Interesting analogy, that. Dumbledore made a point of saying that the prophecy was meaningless until Tom Riddle believed it and made it true. (Harry Potter, season 4: the year I fell in love with a Potternerd. She was a coworker who wanted to be in on all the Lost conversations at work, so I invited her to the house to watch season 4. 2 years later, we are living together and hosting our friends every week for Lost. Aside from that, season 4 was a blast. They found 815 at the bottom of the ocean? They're all dead? The doctor washes up on the beach with his throat slit hours before he is killed? Daniel, Frank, Charlotte, Miles, the survivors splitting into 2 camps under Locke or Jack, and O MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FREAKIN' ISLAND?!?

)

The Others, I want more about the Others. What is their work, what is their governing ideology? What is their relationship to Jacob? Was he conning them? Did they only exist as obstacles for our survivors? What do they call themselves? One thing's for sure, after the Richard story, they are not indigenous to the Island as they have claimed. Everything else: the glass eye, Radzinsky and the Purge, Libby, I know we aren't going to get answers. Someone is eventually going to come along and write a book filling in all those gaps, but I want the Others to be explained. (Season 5 , jumping through time. Wicked unhappy at work, hands on fire, love my girl, hey, we're in the 70s, everybody! Oh, and the Oceanic 6, they were just kidding: they haz to go back. Locke is dead, then he's alive, then he's in a box, and, my god, if he's lying dead here, who's in there killing Jacob?!?)

Which brings us to season 6, the final battle between light and dark. If you haven't seen the extensive theory over at Lost is a game, do yourself a favor and check it out before the finale. It's the most extensive theory I've read, and it has a lot of potential. There's a bit of a stretch, and his timeline is a little off, but there's always been a 2-day discrepancy inherent in the timeline, anyway: remember the calendar on the boat? Strap in, hold on tight, the ride will be over before you know it.

Quick hits:

1)I still believe Kate is a candidate. Her name was not crossed out on the lighthouse wheel. Kate is The Mule in this scenario. (The Mule=the unpredictable element, the variable.)

2)Miles is pretty useless. I wonder if he's gonna do anything meaningful before he dies. If he had only accepted Bram's offer back in season 5, maybe he could have been somebody.

3)Why is MIB keeping Claire around? Like Voldemort, I don't believe he is capable of caring about someone, and Claire may have been useful in recruiting the other survivors, but he's probably gonna kill her soon.

4)Prediction: the mother of Jack's son in the flash-sideways is Juliet. She looks just like her.

5)As the only person I know who doesn't hate Kate, I really hope she makes it.

6)I am going to have so much fun this summer and fall watching it all again on Blu-Ray disc.

7)Ben needs some closure for his big feud with Widmore. I hope they get to face off. Maybe they could have an Old West style duel, y'know, 10 paces then turn, draw and fire. My money's on Ben.

8)Unrelated: 24 is also ending its run this spring, and, man, it has been so exciting this year. Katee Sackhoff has been a great villain, and Jack Bauer has finally gone off the deep end for real. He is out for blood, and he's gunning for a former president. I don't think it's going to end well.

That is all. Bon Appetit!

I love my ma!

2010-05-09T04:02:00.001-04:00

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

The Candidate

2010-05-09T00:58:00.002-04:00

I've been a bit off, blog-wise, the last couple of weeks, but I assure you I have been keeping up; this week's "Across The Sea" promises some answers, and I am positively frightened about the penultimate episode, which I won't name, as you'd probably think it rather, well, spoilerish.

Anyway, I guess they've been doing these videos for a while now, but this is the first I've seen. It's a recap of last week's episode by a muppet version of Dr. Pierre Chang. High-larious!

Post #250: Vacation

2010-04-19T01:48:00.003-04:00

So the Toaster is taking a quick jaunt to our nation's capital. I'll probably miss Tuesday's installment, but you bet I'll see it as soon as I get back into town.

I didn't tell you what I thought of the Hugo episode; I loved it. Libby was back, but of course we didn't get to see why she was at Santa Rosa in the original timeline, unless we did. Think about it.

Love seems to be coming front and center these days. Also free will, which reinforces the prediction I made earlier: Kate is going to have to choose between Jack and James one final time, this one for all the marbles. Mark my words.

Ilana!!! Man, I gasped when she blew up, and I really hope we haven't seen the last of her.

Ok, I'm off...

funny, but so wrong...

2010-04-12T05:02:00.000-04:00

Another thought....

2010-04-08T02:16:00.002-04:00

Q: Why did Widmore take Jin and Jin alone? He didn't try to get Kate, Jack, James, Hugo: Why?

A: Remember when Sun and Widmore met in the airport? What does Widmore want? He wants the Island back, and he wants Ben. What does Sun want? Jin, and only Jin. We will see that Sun and Widmore made a deal: he would keep Jin safe and reunite them, and she would deliver Ben to him.

You'll see, I'm right.

Happily Ever After, hopefully not the most ironic title ever :(

2010-04-07T01:40:00.002-04:00

"Something has happened in the part of my brain where "Lost" lives. As we get closer to the end, I’m becoming far less analytical, and just watching for enjoyment. I love reading other people’s theories and acute observations, but I am no longer so interested in scribbling down notes during the show and trying to connect the many threads. In time, it will all be laid out before us. "

I found the preceding in a comment on Nik At Nite, one of the blogs I follow in-season. It really sums up where I am at with this story right now. I read the blogs, and the wiki talk pages, but I am quite happy to suspend theorizing, to just sit back and enjoy.

HOWEVER, I continue to notice things, make connections, have thoughts, such as:

1. Desmond, turning and turning in the widening gyre. Didn't that scene of him taking a big EM bath in Widmore's outhouse remind you of Dr. Manhattan, from Watchmen?

2. This is the second Desmond episode in which he plays the Picard role in a story taken nearly directly from an episode of ST:TNG. "The Constant" was based on the TNG series finale, in which Picard became unstuck in time, and, cycling through three different timelines, had to identify the commonality between all three in order to be saved. Tonight, Desmond was knocked out by an EM field, and woke up in an alternate reality, just as Picard did in The Inner Light, one of the most heartfelt, emotional episodes in the Trek canon. Picard lived an entire lifetime as a different man, a family man and scientist rather than a Starfleet captain, and when he awoke, it had only been 20 minutes since he had been knocked out. Both men seemed to have a profound experience. A lot can can happen in 20 minutes.

3. Still waiting for the backstory of The Others, to me, the last real character mystery of the series. They seem, despite all their disguises, to be deeply Catholic in their morality. One thing I keep coming back to is the lists. It was said, by various Others, that Jack, Kate, Sayid, and the rest were not on Jacob's lists. The lists Jacob gave to the Others were lists of people who Jacob wanted to become Others. Here's the thing: none of the Others knew anything about candidates, except maybe Dogen, and I'll bet he was also the only one who knew the true nature of the Monster, that he was a man. The events of Richard's flashback lead me to believe that there was no one on the Island in 1867 when Richard arrived, or at least, if there was anyone there, Jacob had no interaction with them. Another thing I keep coming back to is the runway. That's right, the runway Kate and James were forced to work on when they were in the Others' custody. Jacob told the Others to build it, because he knew about Ajira 316. It's entirely possible that the sole reason for the Others' existence is as an enemy, or an obstacle, for, first the Dharma Initiative then the survivors of Flight 815. That is, Jacob created them, shaped them for one purpose, just as Eloise groomed Daniel his whole life to die at her own hands. Of course, various Others have talked about their work, referring to "this whole thing we're doing," and I wonder if the Others are not just stooges in the end, like the denizens of the Pearl: they think they are are doing the science, but ultimately are just rats in a maze. With no cheese.

4. Another series is in its final season as well: 24. I know a lot of people have stopped watching, but I never did; even during the shitty years, I saw it every week without fail, and guess what? It's as good now as it's ever been. I won't talk too much about it, except to say this: After 9 years, it's a series that still keeps me on edge. They never lost their ability to sucker punch you. If you never thought Forrest Gump's best good friend Bubba or Milton from Office Space could be badass, this is the season you've got to see. And Katee Sackhoff as the duplicitous analyst with a dirty past is soooo nerd-tastic!

5. "Not Penny's Boat." I'm just sayin'. Still gives me chills.

That is all. Alohomora.

mmmm...cake

2010-03-23T19:00:00.001-04:00

Upcoming episode titles...

2010-03-23T15:35:00.006-04:00

Tonight's episode is called "Ab Aeterna," which is latin for "from the beginning of time, and it looks to be a Richard episode. Look for big answers, probably the last big ones we'll get until the finale, unless Jacob or MIB get a flashback.

The next three, and I only have the titles, because I think spoilers are dirty, are called: "The Package," "Happily Ever After," and "Everybody Loves Hugo." You'll have to highlight them if you want to see them; I know some people consider even titles to be spoilers. Particularly excited about the last one. You know who else everyone loves? Jesus.

Who is this woman?

2010-03-23T15:11:00.000-04:00

By the Gods! That Michael Emerson is a fantastic actor!

2010-03-21T00:18:00.003-04:00

So there was no written post last week for "Dr. Linus." Instead you saw pictures of 6 moments from the story that stick out in my head as the most iconic. (When I say iconic, I mean those moments that encapsulate the entire story while only telling a part of it. When you see it, you just say, "Wow.") I had fun posting them and probably will do more, but you should notice about the first six: Only one directly references the grand mythology of the story, while only one more does so even tangentially. They are, for the most part, character moments, and "Dr. Linus" was a character story through and through.

If we thought Ben Linus had fallen from grace by the time he turned the frozen donkey wheel, he never hit bottom until he ran away from digging his own grave, driven by desperation, guilt, and longing to the dark side. When Ilana caught up to him, he was penitent; he confessed and laid his soul open to the quick. This was truly the first time we have seen Ben being honest, the wheels which constantly turn in his manipulative mind silenced. It was truly an awesome moment. Ben's captor and executioner, Ilana, heard his confession and gave him absolution. "I'll have you," she said, and in that instant she was his mother, she was his lover, she was the Island, she was the world, looking into Ben's heart and seeing light instead of darkness.

Character, man, character. Without 'em, all you have is a board game.

LOST: iconic moments volume 42

2010-03-10T00:06:00.003-05:00

"Let's look death in the face and say 'whatever,man.' "

LOST: iconic moments volume 23

2010-03-09T23:43:00.003-05:00

"I'm alone now… on the island alone. Please, someone come. The others, they're … they're dead. --it killed them, --it killed them all."

LOST: iconic moments volume 16

2010-03-09T23:32:00.002-05:00

LOST: iconic moments volume 15

2010-03-09T23:30:00.002-05:00

"Every 108 minutes, the button must be pushed."

LOST: iconic moments volume 8

2010-03-09T23:23:00.002-05:00

"You taste like strawberries." or "Chain gang looks good on you, Freckles."

LOST: iconic moments volume 4

2010-03-09T23:09:00.002-05:00

"So I guess I'm out of the book club."

That's not work. That's a...that's a joke. Rats, in a maze. With no cheese. -John Locke

2010-03-08T23:04:00.002-05:00

At the beginning of the season 2 episode, "?," Mr. Eko has a dream in which his brother Yemi tells him he has to find the question mark on the Island, and that John Locke has to help him. Later in the episode, Yemi appears again, this time in Locke's dream, and points the way to the question mark. We know now that the Man In Black appeared to Eko as Yemi and killed him. It appears to me now that the Man In Black wanted John Locke to find the Pearl and lose his faith in the button. Why? The Swan is still a mystery to us. I don't know whether Jacob or MIB knew or cared about the hatch, and given the fact that Kelvin waited at least ten years for his replacement, untouched by the Purge, the Others probably didn't know about it either. Given that life on the Island pretty much continued normally after the Swan implosion, there was nothing permanent or imminent about the potential danger of not pushing the button. It's likely that the DI could have not built the Swan, but then they would have lost out on either or both of the following: the use of the near-endless supply of energy at the site and the opportunity to do some really creepy social science experiments. Locke believed for a long time that it was his fate, first to get into the hatch, and then to push the button. It was MIB who used Eko to cause Locke to lose his faith and ultimately destroy the Swan. Was MIB only interested in sending John Locke along the spiritual path that would end in his death, or did it also benefit him that the Swan was destroyed? Remember those times when Locke did something crazy and you just had to say, "Locke, what the frak are you thinking?" Like when he stopped pushing the button and the Swan was destroyed, and when he entered 77 and blew up the Flame, or when he blew up the Dharma sub, or when Ben blew up the chamber at the Orchid because Locke told him it had to be done. MIB used Locke on numerous occasions to destroy the infrastructure of the Dharma Initiative, whose people had been wiped out to a man 12 years earlier. I think that Jacob and the Others were not just holding MIB prisoner; he was a slave, a sentient creature enslaved as a security system, to check out new arrivals, issue judgments on who is good and who is bad, and protect the Island and its secrets. Remember when Ben used the MIB as a weapon against Keamy's men? Slavery, plain and simple. Add to that kidnapping, lying, murder, and you have Jacob, or at least the people who act in his name. And now Jacob is dead, and MIB is free. And, boy, is he mad! He's recruited Claire and Sayid, and possibly Sawyer and Jin, and he's now wiped out a large number of Jacob's people at the temple. This was without a doubt the best Smoke Monster scene ever.
The point is that the balance of power has shifted, the tables are turned, and MIB is the one who has followers now, while Jacob is mere ash. If MIB's people lie, and cheat, and manipulate, and commit murder in his name, what makes him any worse than Jacob? Maybe MIB and Jacob are not the black stone and the white stone, but longtime rivals, both of them morally gray, who lure people to the Island, and, like flies to wanton boys, use them as pawns, like Locke's mousetrap game, or that Skinner box, the Swan.

When is Cindy's flashback?

2010-03-03T04:03:00.001-05:00

The Ascension of Hugo Reyes

2010-02-27T02:46:00.003-05:00

So I went, in my wayback machine, to the early days right after the crash. Hugo needed the manifest so he could compare it with the census he'd taken. (Of course, it was Hugo who alerted the survivors that they had a mole among them. Key.) James had the manifest, only he wasn't James then; he was Sawyer. Sawyer was a mean guy who hoarded all the goods he could get his hands on, and anything you wanted from him came with a price. So Hugo told Sawyer that he should just give up the manifest for free, "because, Dude, you could use the points." Sawyer gave it up with a comment about how Hugo knew how to talk to people. What did Hugo say? "It's a gift."

Later he conned Sawyer into being nice to everyone by telling him he was about to get banished from the beach camp, and let's not forget when he conned Sayid, Kate, and Miles when they came to the Barracks looking for Charlotte. Hugo knows how to talk to people, how to appeal to their better nature and make them see that it's in their best interest to do what he says. These are the qualities of a natural leader.

We've seen a couple of times now that Hugo is the one Jacob has chosen to talk to, dead though he is. Jacob appeared to Hugo shortly after the time-travelers had returned from 1977, just after Ben had killed him, and told Hugo that he had to lead everyone to the temple. This week, Jacob told Hugo that he had to take Jack out of the temple to the lighthouse, because someone was coming to the Island. Jacob works in mysterious ways, though, and it seems he was not altogether honest; he wanted Hugo to take Jack and get out of the temple because something bad was about to happen. Not Dogen, not Lennon, not Miles or Cindy or anyone else, Jacob made sure to protect Hugo and Jack. We've seen now for 6 years that Jack is a leader of men, and it's safe to say that he will lead the good fight against the Man In Black once the sides have been chosen for good, but doesn't every king need a viceroy? Doesn't every godfather need a consigliere, every captain a first officer? We've recently learned that although Ben made the decisions, it was Richard and Richard alone who talked to Jacob, who brought the word of God down from the mountaintop. Now that the Others have no leader (Dogen's position is unclear,) and Richard is on the run, hugo will have to step forward and take the advisory role Richard has played. That's my take on it, anyway...

(I stole the picture you see from Jorge Garcia's blog...)

Still working on this week's post; in the meantime, enjoy this:

2010-02-25T22:30:00.002-05:00

Better late than never...

2010-02-19T02:22:00.003-05:00

Things have been a little hectic in la vida del toaster lately, and I tried to write a bit on Tuesday but couldn't really come up with anything. Tonight will be better.

I've thoroughly enjoyed the first few episodes of the final season, and I know the fan-verse is abuzz with what has been revealed, but I'm of the opinion that we've not gotten answers, just more bread crumbs. Candidates to become the next Jacob, fine, if that's what you want, but it doesn't answer the only real questions:

1. What, exactly, is the nature of the Island?

2. Who, exactly, are the Others, I mean what do they call themselves?

2a. What, exactly, is their purpose?

3. What are the whispers?

4. What, or who, exactly, are Jacob and his mysterious nemesis?

5. Who will Kate choose, Jack or James? (Bear with me on that one.)

All of these questions were laid out in the first season. (I know, we didn't know who Jacob was or that he had a nemesis, but we wondered what the monster was, and what was the mysterious force that seemed to push all the survivors onto that plane on that day. So many questions have come and gone since then, about the Dharma Initiative, the Hatch, Widmore, Rousseau, Faraday, and all the myriad characters we've met, and even the questions that remain are unlikely to be answered. I find it highly improbable that we'll get one BSG-style episode consisting of nothing more than expositional dialogue, let alone the two or three it would take to tie up every loose thread. More likely, we'll get a lot of action, conflict, and character development; as the story of the Island crescendos, so do the character arcs, and somewhere along the way we'll get answers to those big questions. Once we have those, we'll have to go back over everything again and put the pieces together, for I am sure that there are enough clues and easter eggs along the way, clues that we could never understand only because we didn't have enough information, so that we can find the answers to the little ones on our own. This has been the most engaging, thought-provoking, interactive series I have ever seen, and I am sure that, even after all is said and done, we will have to find most of the answers ourselves.

I realize that a lot of folks would not put the whispers on that list, but to me, they seem like the sine qua non, if only the transcripts of them I've read are accurate. Look them up on Lostpedia, they're gripping!

I further realize that most would think the resolution of the love triangle is trivial at best. Indeed, I have mercilessly mocked people for being so dumb that the biggest point on Lost they can discuss is whether Kate belongs with Jack or James, but I got a hunch a few weeks back after I wrote about Schrodinger's cat. We've heard numerous references to free will, the most recent ones coming from Jacob himself, reminding you that you have a choice, no matter what you've been told, and we definitely seem to be at a crossroads, more likely two crossroads: I assume that the time has come, after much preparation, for Jacob's replacement to be chosen, and there seem to be at least five viable candidates: Jack, Hugo, Sayid, Sun, and Jin, although it's possible that it is only Sun, or only Jin, or my long-shot bet, only Ji-Yeon. Who will be chosen, and how will the choice be made? This is the first crossroads, the second is this: which side is everyone on? Does Jack side with Dogen and the temple dwellers? Does James side with Smokey? Hugo? Sun? Jin? You see where I'm going now, right? The love triangle was not for nothing after all: Kate will have to choose, this time for keeps: Jack or James? Not a prediction, just an intuition.

Now, that being said, there are certain things we need to see, not for answers to questions, but closure to the story. We need to see Desmond again, just to make sure that he and Penny will live happily ever after. We need to see Widmore again; he needs to either find the Island or die trying. (I would love to see him on the Island in real time this year.) We need some closure for the kids: Walt, Aaron, and Ji-Yeon. We need to see a bit of what Cindy, Zack, and Emma went through after they were taken.

And finally, Ben Linus has been a little neglected so far this season, but we really need to see a proper ending to his story: he was the man, then he was brought low, then he came back in penitence only to be used by Smokey as a murder weapon. Is there any hope for Ben to find redemption? I hope there is; I hope that Ben can give his life, finally, for the Island he tried to protect for so long. (See, the only thing he ever said that I truly believed was what he told Michael on the dock: "We're the good guys.")

Muddying the waters

2010-02-17T02:37:00.002-05:00

This gets harder and harder every week. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

"Here I am thinking that free will still actually exists..." -Dr. Juliet Burke, deceased

2010-02-09T23:45:00.004-05:00

Here I am, trying to hammer out a post for the most recent chapter, "What Kate Does," and I am drawing multiple blanks. I see the suggestion of free will, the constant reminders that each of us chooses our own destiny, and I see the parallel between Claire and Danielle, who lost their babies and went seemingly mad alone in the jungle. I see Aldo, formerly the guy who fell for the Wookie Prisoner Trick, getting his ass kicked by Kate, and I see Sayid, risen from the dead and now infected, or claimed, by the Monster-Man In Black-Nemesis. I see James, mourning his love, and once again I sympathize with him: it started a while back, and you may not see it on first reading, or even second, but James, since he killed Sawyer, is the only one of the main characters to have redeemed himself. Everyone else is still broken, but James has become a community leader, a trusted man, a husband in spirit if not in law. Remember when Kate escaped from the marshal? She paid no attention to his briefcase, but we remember what she went through to get that case on the Island, not because of the gun, but because of the toy plane. Maybe the plane wasn't in the case this time around, because she never buried it in the NKOTB lunch box that she never got caught stealing, and Jacob never bought her the lunchbox because he was dead. Maybe Jughead killed Jacob? Who knows? The point is that I can't really come up with a cohesive thread for this week's post, so I'll just leave it there.

Stay tuned for my upcoming interview with Iroquois Pliskin, author of VersusCluCluLand.

It's the same, everything is just a little bit different.

2010-02-09T22:56:00.005-05:00

The language is clunky, because we have no real-world counterpart for what we see. We see two realities, side by side, each of them mutually exclusive, and we have no idea if one is more viable, more real, than the other, so we can't really say one is alternate. We've seen flash-forwards, and flash-backs, but what do we call this? How can we describe the relationship between the two? Well, a minor war broke out last week over there at Lostpedia; they're fighting over terminology instead of discussing their views of the story itself. As a life-long fanboy, first Star Wars, then Star Trek, and now any number of things, this quibbling over minutiae really pisses me off, because they're missing the point: it's the story, stupid! Sure, flash-sideways is an awful, awkward term, but it's what we've got. Deal with it.

Moving on, I just read an interview with D&C in which they discuss the parallel timeline and its differences to what we know. Yes there are differences, but it's not really crucial to our understanding to catalog them all and try to find out exactly where the timeline split. That being said, D&C want to bring our attention to all the things our people didn't think about as consequences to their action, like the Island being underwater. I won't tell you the whole thing, just read it for yourself. Also, check out this video from comic-con: a segment of America's Most Wanted, featuring our very own parallel Kate:

Also, I got my hands on something that I do not consider a spoiler, but some of you might: the names of the upcoming 3 episodes. I'll post them here and now, but in black text so you have to highlight them if you want to read: The Substitute, Lighthouse, and Sundown. That's all the info I have, and I wouldn't post anything more even if I did. I hate spoilers.

Schrodinger's Eye-Land

2010-02-03T00:56:00.004-05:00

Schrodinger's Cat is a physics story, which means that very few people can truly grasp the whole thing, but what it boils down to is this: When two possible outcomes exist, there exist 2 parallel universes, one for each possibility. Eventually one will collapse, but not until the other is observed. If you close your eyes and flip a coin, you split the universe in two, and it is only when you open your eyes and see that it came up tails that the other universe collapses and a single reality exists.

This is important to the story. How many times has a chapter begun on a shot of someone's eye opening? Tonight it was Kate, and what she saw was bleak. The survivors were thrown back to the future, all of them, and what they saw was bleak. Whatever happened, happened; it was all for nothing. They still built the Swan, and the plane still crashed. Out of 72 original survivors, now only James, Kate, Jack, Hurley, Sun, Jin and Sayid remain, and Sayid is nearly dead. Jack's plan didn't work and it got Juliet killed. Only Juliet wasn't quite dead; she lived long enough to almost tell James, after a teary goodbye and a bloody kiss, what she told Miles after she died: it worked.

In one reality, it certainly seems that way. We saw the flight of 815 again, with a lot of little differences and one big difference: it landed. The survivors had minor run-ins with each other, and there seemed to be the faintest sub-time recognition, but they went on their ways, and I'm sure we'll follow them as they are inexorably drawn to their destiny, because the universe has a way of course-correcting, you know, and I'm sure it won't be long before the passengers of flight 815 start shaking their fists at the heavens and screaming into the night: "We have to go back!"

So we have two possible outcomes, both of which, according to the cat, exist until the observer of the experiment opens his eyes and sees whatever happened. Juliet, near death, seemed to be aware of both, and tried to tell James what she had seen, but everyone else seemed to be aware of only one of the realities they were in. What I am getting at is a question: Whose eyes will open and collapse a universe? Who is the observer, if everyone is living their life and choosing their sides as if the coin had already been flipped? I have long believed that the main action in the story is being watched by some unknown party. Whether for scientific research, sport, entertainment, or some religious notion, I'm not sure, but I have an idea that the whispers we hear so frequently are the voices of those observers; the transcripts reveal clearly that whoever is speaking has some awareness of the people who hear them and their circumstances. Maybe they lost their feed when the bomb went off, or the House is still taking bets before revealing the outcome.

I have a feeling that the next time we see an eye opening, it will be the eye of the Man Behind the Curtain, and a universe will collapse, and the battle will begin.

The best Lost recap out there...

2010-01-29T02:31:00.000-05:00

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

2010-01-26T03:07:00.003-05:00

So. In one timeline we have a big hole in the ground, a pocket of electromagnetic energy, a hydrogen bomb, and one almost certainly dead fertility specialist, Juliet, whose detonation of the bomb left millions questioning over the hot, boring summer the nature of time travel, pondering whether you can change the past when you visit it or just play a role, ignorant of all that will happen, powerless to change your future.

In another timeline we have a man in black, wearing the disguise of a dead man's identity. The dead man, all his life he felt he was destined for something bigger, something more than the below average hand he'd been dealt, and the man in black, sensing desperation, knowing how badly the dead man wanted to believe, preyed upon him, told him he was special, led him down the path of his own destruction. The dead man was conned, not just by the father who stole his kidney, but by a devil claiming angelhood. And now the man in black has won. His rival is dead, thrown into the fire by his once most loyal disciple, whose doubts the man in black used to suit his own needs. This is inside the statue. Outside, in the shadow of the statue, those loyal to the rival of the man in black have just discovered that the dead man, he has not risen, and the man claiming to be himself is an impostor. The impostor, the man in black, has no name that we know, but his rival does; his name is Jacob. Not much is known about Jacob. We know that Jacob loves you, and we know that God loves you as he loved Jacob, and we know that Jacob made lists, and we know Jacob's last words, as his lifeblood was dripping out of him, before he was kicked into the fire like so much kindling: "They're coming."

Thus the stage is set for the final act. We've read books, we've heard music, we've studied names from the past, we've examined minutiae and theorized endlessly, but all of that is secondary to this: we've followed an extraordinary set of characters through their amazing, karmic, sometimes redemptive stories. We've seen through them how our lives are the sum of our experience, how every moment in our life has led us to this moment and this moment alone. We've seen that moment in their lives when their flaws are on display and never redeemed. The telling of this story has been a monumental achievement in writing before all. Is it going to end well? That depends. Some will hate it, of course. Some will love it. Some are worried even now that they will be disappointed, but I'm not worried. Life has jagged edges sometimes, I know this well, but these writers have not let me down before, and I trust them to listen to the characters and give them the endings they deserve.

Sure I have questions I want answered, but I know that the answers are never as much fun as thinking about the questions, and I know that ultimately the story is about the people in it, and I look forward to seeing these people finish their journey.

I didn't forget about you, loyal reader...

2010-01-24T11:15:00.002-05:00

The final season starts in 9 days. Watch this space.

This movie looks frakkin' awesome!

2009-12-18T03:31:00.000-05:00

If wishes were horses...

2009-12-12T15:13:00.004-05:00

Christmas time, and I'm dirt poor. I have a job, which is more than a lot of other folks, but I make a pittance. Not even a livable pittance is it. Christmas presents for the family, or eat? We haven't even turned on the heat yet because nobody wants to pay for it. So what's good?

Well, the lady Toaster is awesome; we've been living together for over a year now, and I couldn't imagine life without her. I love having coffee with her, talking to her, watching her play Xbox, staying up very late so I can wake her up for her obnoxiously early (5:30am!) shifts. Her dog, Eva, came to live with us this past spring, and she's a lovely little beastie. Eva is ten years old, a hair dog not a fur dog, which is good because I'd be sneezing and itching all the time otherwise. She and Prancy, my ten year old cat, have not really learned to get along well, but it's only been a few months and these things take time.

I'm reminded of the Monty Python sketch "Four Yorkshiremen," in which four extremely rich men are sitting around telling stories, each more preposterous than the last , about how poor they were when they were young. "We were happier in those days, though we were poor," the first says. "Because we were poor," says the second.

I am also reminded of something Stephen King wrote, although it may be a bit of pop culture wisdom he picked up somewhere along the way: "You can never be too rich or too thin, and if you don't believe that, you were never really poor or fat." The actual truth of it aside, it speaks to the longing for something more, something better than what you have now, something I can identify with. I don't really want to be rich, I just want to make grown-up money, enough to live on, enough so that I don't have to feel guilty spending 20 bucks on something I really want.

Why does everything have to be so fucking hard?

February, 2010: Benicio Del Toro as The Wolfman.

2009-11-09T03:58:00.000-05:00

I understand now..

2009-11-05T03:46:00.002-05:00

I understand now why Dr. Marvin Candle, in the Swan Orientation film, cautioned the button-pushers not to try to use the computer to communicate with the outside world: the Hostiles never knew of the Swan's existence, and he wanted to keep it that way. Possibly he also knew that Dharma would be wiped out, and he wanted to keep the button-pushers inside so that the button would continue to be pushed. The Mule in this scenario is Radzinsky: How did he end up pushing the button, 15 years after the Incident, and why would he be the one to cut out the warning from the orientation film? Given Radzinsky's extreme paranoia, wouldn't it be dangerous, from his point of view, to remove it?

I understand now that John Locke is, and always has been, "amenable to coercion." He was conned by his father, he was conned by Eddie, and he has now been conned by the Nemesis. Who put the idea in Richard's head that Locke would have to die when he left the Island? The Nemesis. Who did Locke hear it from? Christian, the same Christian who inhabited the cabin that we now know belonged to The Nemesis. (Speaking of the cabin, if Locke's vision of Horace is to be believed, Horace himself built the cabin. Maybe Dharma was one of the Nemesis's plans to kill Jacob and destroy his people.) We thought that Locke had been taken advantage of and put upon his whole life, until he came to the Island, but what if he was still being conned? The Nemesis played on Locke's fears and hopes, making him believe he had a destiny, all the while just using Locke to get inside the statue with Ben so he could see Jacob die. The Mule in this scenario is Locke himself: he's done just enough good, just enough to help Jacob and Jacob's people, to maybe thwart or at least delay the the ultimate plan of the Nemesis. Only time will tell.

Lost timeline reset would be a terrible idea, says local blogger

2009-09-29T02:03:00.002-04:00

BOSTON- Oceanic Flight 815 has to stay crashed in the final season of Lost, says F. Toaster, a local man who, owing to the fact that he was able to secure a space on a free, open to the public blog hosting site, has very important opinions.

"It would just gut the show," said Toaster, "for Jughead's explosion to reset the timeline of the show to where the plane never crashed at all. It would just be really stupid. Whatever happened, happened, right? Right?"

Bubbles and me: My 51 day journey through the streets of Baltimore

2009-09-21T18:10:00.001-04:00

[COLETTA FACTOR:THE WIRE:ALL]
Working at the neighborhood video store this summer, I decided to take in a new TV series. I considered Weeds, Dexter, Deadwood, and Rome, but I settled on the Wire, which had, as far as I'd heard, 100% positive feedback, from critics and friends alike. I'd heard that each season took a look from a different angle at the drug trade in Baltimore: one season about the streets, one about the port where the drugs come in, one about City Hall, the schools, and, finally, the newspaper, that famous enabler of a city's neurotic behavior. I'd heard that it was one of the most gritty, realistic, and one of the smartest series out there. I'd heard that I would see a lot of familiar faces, faces I'd seen on Oz, Lost, various cop shows, and even two faces from The Office. (Charles Miner, the new DM, and Michael's girlfriend Holly.)
All that I'd heard was true, and more. While each season has a different focus, most characters stick around the whole time, except those whose story comes to an end, one way or the other. (In Baltimore, that means dead or in prison.)
I'm having a hard time writing about this one, because it's so dense, and there are so many characters, each with their own arc, their own journey from A to B, I don't know where to start. My two favorites, I think, are Bubbles and Omar, each of whom makes it to the final season. (I won't reveal anyone's ultimate fate.)
Bubbles is a dopefiend, a hustler, a C.I. (confidential informant) for the police unit investigating the dealers. We see him steal, lie, try to buy drugs with fake money, and yet Bubbles is arguably the most morally centered character in the entire series, probably because he is not beholden to a bureaucracy like the police department or the school system. Bubbles is his own man, skillfully played by Andre Royo, who conveys the sadness, guilt, hope and hopelessness of a man at the bottom of everything.
Omar is a thief and a killer. He wears a kevlar vest and a trenchcoat; he carries a sawed-off shotgun, and every time he walks down the street, all the men and boys call out, "Omar comin' " and scatter out of the way. He makes a living by robbing drug dealers, and he's got a lot of blood on his hands: not only the people he's killed, but those who were with him, those who could be gotten to while Omar couldn't. For all that, Omar is a total badass, but he doesn't curse, doesn't drink or use drugs, and he would never turn his gun on "anyone who wasn't in The Game." He lives by a code; there is honor among thieves. Also, and totally incidentally, Omar is gay.
Nearly every other character is, in some way, enslaved by a system. The police are hamstrung by the need to report good numbers to City Hall, and we often see justice sacrificed in the name of protecting the department or one of its higher-ups. Officer McNulty, who is a lovable rogue of an Irish cop, gets the ball rolling in season 1 by telling a judge about a drug lord by the name of Avon Barksdale who has taken over the projects on the West side and is responsible for at least a dozen murders in the last year. The judge orders the creation of a detail to investigate and shut down the Barksdale operation, pulling officers from homicide and narcotics off their regular rotations. McNulty's superiors are none too pleased with him for talking out of school, and they miss no opportunity to berate, threaten, and otherwise interfere with the members of the detail, honest cops who are doing what cops are supposed to do, going after the bad guys. McNulty's dogged pursuit of Barksdale and his crew, which by season's end sees most of them dead or in prison, results in his demotion and assignment to the marine unit, the one place he did not want to go.
We see it over and over again: the union boss on the docks, driven by the slow death of business at the port, into bed with traffickers of drugs and sex slaves, the mayor who can't make a move without considering how the ministers and city council will respond politically, the teachers who can't do anything except teach to the test and babysit their charges. A modern American city has all these institutions, built up over the years, which are supposed to function for the people, but instead function for themselves, and the people, the good, honest people who got into public service to do good, end up compromising themselves and their work in order to protect the institution. As much as The Wire is a cop show, it is also a comment on urban America in the 21st century, a testament to how we have let our government and our businesses run rampant and grind everyone under the wheels.
There are so many other good reasons to watch, so many great characters, each with their own arc. Briefly in the first season, we hear about a city councilman named Clay Davis, then we see a bit of him again on season 3, but his story comes full circle in season 5, when he becomes the target of the investigation. The series rewards the attentive viewer; how many times do we hear about Fat Face Rick before we actually see him? The writers and creators are actually from Baltimore, and infuse the show with dialogue straight from the streets, so distinct it's almost a different dialect.
So there you have it: 60 episodes, 51 days, and I loved it, I wanted more. It's entertainment, yes, but I really feel like I learned something; it had the ring of truth, the feeling of reality, and I could think of no higher compliment. If you have seen The Wire, I ask, do you agree? What did you like, or not like? If you haven't seen it, what are you waiting for?

2009-09-12T14:02:00.000-04:00

Nerd alert!!!

2009-09-09T01:31:00.003-04:00

I just found out some totally geek-tastic news: Katee Sackhoff, aka Starbuck, will be joining the cast of 24 for its eighth season. There are so many ways this could be awesome: catfights with Chloe, chasing bad guys with Jack, laying the smackdown on dudes trying to kill innocent Americans. I wasn't sure I would enjoy another go-round with 24, but this pretty much guarantees that I'll be there, every Monday night, for the whole season.

What have I been doing lately??

2009-07-20T01:30:00.003-04:00

[COLETTA FACTOR: VARIOUS MOVIES, ALL HAVING BEEN RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC.]

So I haven't written in a while. Maybe I've been busy, or doing nothing at all. I can't really tell at this point. Either way, I have watched a hell of a lot of movies lately, And I've thought it would be really hard to write a post because it would be hard to narrow down what I want to talk about, but I'll give it a shot.

First, the bad. I had high hopes for In Tranzit. It's the story of Nazi prisoners in a Soviet prison camp run entirely by women. I know, I know, sounds like the setup for some awful Euro-sploitation flick from the 70's, but it starred John Malkovich and Vera Farmiga (more about her later,) and it had great production value: lighting, costumes, acting, location, all superb. It was really trying to be a dark horse Oscar pick, but someone forgot to write the damn thing. It looks like they got through the first draft, which must have been written by ten different writers, and called it a day. Way to waste the Malkovich, guys. Dishonorable mention to Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which I swear I've never seen, just for being so awful that that the 3 seconds I spent looking at the cover seemed to go on for 107 minutes. 107 dreadful minutes.

Eden Lake was good horror; a good example of the new horror where it's not supernatural or spooky or guys in masks, just people being awful to each other. Kelly Reilly, from L'auberge espagnole, stars in that one. You want Zombies? Try The Zombie Diaries. Maybe you don't want a Zombie flick, but you want to see some Zombies? You could see a pair of movies called REC and Quarantine. REC is Spanish, made in 2007, and of course, an American came along and made the damn thing again, as Quarantine. The story is simple: A young, pretty reporter and her camera guy are following a fire crew around for a night, and the first call they respond to is from an apartment building with some very ill, very violent people in. Once the camera is inside, all entrances are blocked; the building is quarantined by some unknown government agency, and we get to watch as each person locked inside gets bitten by an infected and becomes infected themselves. Shot for shot, it's almost exactly the same, except for a bit of misogyny added at the beginning for American audiences, and the end, where we discover the origins of the infection, which is far richer and more satisfying in the Spanish version.

Vera Farmiga, what can I say? The Departed, Dummy, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, each movie vastly different from the next, but she was a bright spot in each one. Surely we can, like a math teacher throwing out your lowest grade, just forget about In Tranzit? Also, she was in Nothing But The Truth, which was a fictionalization of the Valerie Plame affair. (You remember: Ambassador tries to discredit Bush's case for war, Cheney retaliates by outing Mrs. Ambassador as an undercover CIA agent. Scandal ensues.) Farmiga played the CIA agent in question, with a great ensemble of actors: Matt Dillon, Angela Bassett, David Schwimmer, Noah Wyle, ALAN FREAKIN' ALDA, and not one, but two police captains from Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Even with all this talent, it's really Kate Beckinsale's ballgame to lose, and she really knocks it out of the park.

Watchmen. There. I said it. Never read the novel, but the movie blew my mind. It had action, effects, cool costumes, great characters, and the kind of epic story you never see in a big-budget multiplex seat-filler. The story definitely bears discussion on so many levels: personal, political, moral, sociological, historical. I am particularly interested in Rorshach, Dr. Manhattan, and the parallel history of how the American Century would have gone if we'd had costumed heroes flying around (Spoiler: We "win" Vietnam, but it doesn't make a bit of difference.)

The Cinema? Star Trek Good, Half Blood Prince not so much. Anxiously awaiting Inglourious Basterds, GI Joe, and especially H2, aka "Rob Zombie's 4th film". (chills down my spine!)

That is all.

Stringer Bell is not impressed.

2009-07-11T02:46:00.000-04:00

sorry...

2009-07-10T12:41:00.002-04:00

I know, I know. I haven't posted in a long time. I feel terrible about it. I've been watching dozens of movies and am also one episode away from the end of season 1 of The Wire, which has not disappointed. I have a new job; it's not so awesome, but I do get free movies, and I want to write up reviews of them all, if I can remember them.
Hang in there, loyal readers, I'll be back with a vengeance...
Love, the T.

Rob Zombie does it again: H2 opens 28 August

2009-06-18T20:49:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you just need to have faith.

2009-06-13T04:06:00.002-04:00

Behind the counter at Starbucks: even the coffee cake is miserable.

2009-06-12T03:42:00.002-04:00

What have I been doing for the last 5 years?

2009-06-07T14:31:00.002-04:00

For the last 5 years, until a week ago today, I worked for corporate coffee giant Starbucks. You may have noticed in the past that I would mention my job, but not really get too specific about it, other than the fact that I hated it, and it was killing me slowly, causing my hands to swell up until they looked like lobster claws. You see, Starbucks has a team of people whose job is to patrol the internet, checking up on its employees. There was a barista a few years back who got busted selling stolen CDs on Ebay. The cyber patrol saw the CDs for sale, traced the seller's name back to this kid, checked at his store to see whether he had actually purchased them, and fired him after it was determined that he was indeed selling stolen property. Aside from the question of how they found out identity of the seller, most would see this as a diligent company protecting its bottom line. No harm there; a thief is a thief and deserves his punishment. What about the head office checking up on an employee's blog? Google analytics has confirmed for me that someone at Starbucks in Seattle visited my blog, typing the address directly into the address bar. This means that they knew exactly what they were looking for. I'm sure it's no coincidence that I shared the blog address with some coworkers the previous week. I did some checking, and it seems that courts have upheld a company's right to censor the speech of its employees, even in their off-time. Given the expectation when I am on the clock that I never speak ill of the company or its policies, it's only a short leap from there to being fired for talking trash about them on this site. My district manager, that scumbag, assured me that I had nothing to worry about, that they were only checking to see if any proprietary information was revealed, like sales numbers or yet-to-be-released products, but I remained unconvinced. So I kept my silence, waiting for this day, when I would be free from recrimination and able to tell the stories and name names.

And now the day has come, and I have so much anger towards this company, so many things I think the public should know, so many stories you should hear, stories that will illustrate the deep chasm between what Starbucks is and what they promote themselves to be. I have thought of writing a book, the polar opposite of "How Starbucks Saved My Life," a real book which is about to be made into a movie starring Tom Hanks. (No shit. That's for real.)

I have met so many wonderful people on both sides of the counter, including the Lady Toaster, who even now toils 8 hours a day in the Frappuccino mines. I feel bad for her, and the hundreds of other people who believed the lie that Starbucks cares about them, who now find themselves trapped, because of the contracting economy. People are their most valuable resource, they say, but when times get tough, it's just like George Bush's America: the founding principles are the first thing to go out the window. It started last year. You see, the weekly schedule of who works when is made by a computer program, based on input from the store manager. This program forecasts sales, figures in everything that has to get done in a day, like putting away orders, cleaning, etc., and gives a manager X number of hours in any given day to work with. Everything has a value. For example, every frappuccino might take 45 seconds to make, so if the forecast says you're going to sell 100 frappuccinos in a day, you get 75 minutes of labor to work with. Drip coffee is less time consuming, figure 10 seconds times 500 in a day. Grinding coffee, warming those stupid frakkin' sandwiches, going out and cleaning off the condiment bar because some asshole spilled his coffee all over it, all that is factored in, and you get a schedule that, in theory, has just enough people on the floor at any time to handle whatever is thrown their way. They must have seen which way the wind was blowing, because in January 2008 they started cutting the labor allowances slightly. Minus 2 seconds for each espresso drink, a little less time to put the daily order away, you get the idea. Not many people really noticed that everyone was working just a little bit harder each day, until they told us to stop pouring the espresso shots into shot glasses and just pour directly into the cup, reversing an order that had been in place for less than a year. (When they told us to start using the shot glasses, it was presented as a quality issue. When they told us to stop, they said it was a quality issue. Quality?) Ok, no more shot glasses, there's 10 seconds off each drink. Now everyone definitely realizes they are working harder. Fast forward to the fall of 08; the economy is in freefall, sales are down, Obama looks like a lock to win in November. Word comes down the pipe that they are making a massive cut in labor. We lost, in my store, 3-4 hours a day, and my closing shift went from having 3 people all night to having 3 people until 2 hours before close, then closing with 2 people. Ok, now everyone is working like dogs. Then they started in on our benefit time. No more personal days for anyone under the level of store manager. No more vacation time for anyone who's been with the company for less than a year, and anyone who's been with the company for less than 5 has the rate at which they accrue vacation time severely cut. This is no fun, but the worst part is that pulling the rug out from under us was their first resort. There was never any major push to cut down on how much coffee we waste, how much we order. Nobody had the idea to stop carrying products that were not selling, or to stop sending out all those damn posters and new menu board signs to every store every 6 weeks.

Now the kicker. Legendary service is the idea that everyone should come into Starbucks and walk out with the feeling that the people behind the counter are their best friends. We were expected to smile, be perky, chat up every single customer. (No shit, I was actually told that I had to make conversation with every single person in my line.) It's a great idea for a business; when I go into a store, a friendly, helpful employee can make a big difference, but they are not accounting for the diversity of personality on their staff. What about quiet, shy, thoughtful people? Do they have no place in Starbucks? And how am I supposed to make conversation in the middle of a morning rush, when I can see the faces of the people in line who just want to get their coffee and go to work? How the FRAK am I supposed to be cheerful when I am being worked like a dog for less than I was getting a year or 2 ago?

That's just a general overview of the last year or so. There are more stories, and maybe you'll hear them, like the one about the completely inept barista who went on Good Morning America and talked about how awesome Starbucks is, and was rewarded with a promotion, passing over a dozen better qualified candidates, or the one about how Lady Toaster lost her health coverage and was nearly fired because of it. Or how about the tyrannical manager who never worked nights or weekends and enforced the rules in an arbitrary and unfair way, and was rewarded with "Manager of the Quarter" and a wad of bonus cash? I got a million of 'em.

For those of you who were looking for a post on The Incident or the Loophole, have no fear, I am participating in the rewatch, and will be posting my thoughts as appropriate. This will not turn into an anti-Starbucks blog, I promise.

On a personal note, Happy Birthday, Sacramento!!! I hope you can escape like I did.

That is all.

I have only questions.

2009-05-16T03:15:00.004-04:00

[COLETTA FACTOR: LOST-CURRENT]

Jacob is a real person, but he's also some kind of deity, a God of Light who guides people along their destinies. Jacob has a nemesis with John Locke's face; the nemesis seems to be Jacob's opposite number, a God of Darkness. Question: Did Smokey Dead Alex know that John Locke was not himself, or was Smokey fooled as easily as Richard and Ben? Perhaps the impersonation is so complete that only Locke's body can be proof? Widmore said there is a war coming. Who are the bad guys? It seems like everyone is a good guy. Jacob can count among his allies Bram, Ilana, Richard, the Others, and, probably, Eloise and Widmore. (Widmore now seems to have been a red herring. Not to say he's not important, but he is certainly not the Big Bad Guy.) Ben is probably going to stick with the Nemesis, if he survives after Ilana finds out what he has done. (I wouldn't want to get on her bad side!) Who else? If the 1977 castaways come back to the future, will they all come down on the same side? Remember, Jack was pretty close to Ben this season, while Hurley and Sayid hated him. Sawyer is going to be a mess now that he's lost Juliet, but he may be the only character who has truly redeemed himself and become a better person on the Island. This would put him in league with Jacob, and if Jack is with Ben and the Nemesis, what will Kate do? It would be great to see the ongoing Jack-Kate-Sawyer-triangle-that-used-to-be-a-quadrangle finally have some relevance to the story.

Time travel? No more, please. Let's just take it as given that the Incident was always Jughead blowing up at the Swan Site. There's an idea out there that Ajira 316 was the universe's course correction to put the survivors on the Island after the erasing of 815 from history, but that would suck. If the first 4 seasons never happened, why did we watch it? If Lost has a point, it is this: Everything has consequences. We are the way we are because of the people in our lives and the choices we have made. I'm reminded of a great TNG episode called "Tapestry," in which Jean-Luc Picard is given the chance to relive an incident from his past, only to find out that he needed to make a stupid, near-fatal mistake in order to become the man that he is. "There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of... there were loose threads... untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads... it had unraveled the tapestry of my life." Didn't we see Jacob weaving a tapestry in the opening scene of "The Incident"? (The Lost folks are Trekkies; "The Constant" was based, in a very real way, on TNG's series finale, "All Good Things.") If 815 never crashes, it negates the story; it's the equivalent of "...and it had all been a dream."

The showdown at the Swan site was fantastic, epic in scope and import; the shoot-outs and the awesome fight between Jack and Sawyer were exciting, and the final scene, man! Juliet was never my favorite, but that will be one of the most memorable scenes of the show 10, 20, 30 years from now. Right up there with Locke pounding on the Hatch, Shannon screaming amid the 815 wreckage, and Daniel crying at the news of 815's (fake) discovery.

Juliet really got a raw deal. She thought she would have an awesome 6 month job on a tropical island, and ended up on an Island, with a bug-eyed megalomaniac who was obsessed with her. Things were going well for her and Jack, until he left the Island without her and shacked up with Kate. She was happy for a while, until Jack and Kate came back and destroyed the life she and Sawyer had built. It's just haunting, the sight of her, hundreds of feet underground, bloodied, banging on a nuke with a rock. And that fade!!! Is it another flash, sending everyone back to the future? Is Sayid gonna die? I bet Jacob or the Nemesis can heal him.

Rose and Bernard!! Vincent!!!! They're retired! But is Vincent really ready for retirement? Isn't he just waiting for Walt to come back? I'm gonna be really pissed if Walt doesn't come back to the Island next year.

No more time travel, please: pre-finale predictions post

2009-05-13T00:35:00.002-04:00

[COLETTA FACTOR: LOST-CURRENT]

First things first: let me plug a couple of my fellow bloggers. Jorge Garcia, aka Hurley, keeps a blog; it's called Dispatches From The Island, and it's good fun. Jorge seems like a regular guy, despite his international fame. Next up is Linda's Lost Blog, which is exactly what it sounds like. Linda is like me: she just wants to write down her ideas and hopes to start people thinking. Last, but not least, is themisfitishere. This guy, in his own words, is the world's greatest living or dead Lostigator and spoilergator. It's pretty indescribable, and pretty awesome; here's a sample: "J.A.C.O.B. = Just Another Chair Of Bens!!"

Anyway, enough of the time travel. It hurts my head. There are two ways a time travel story can happen: 1) Time travelers change something in the past and everything is different in the future or 2) Time travelers change nothing, because their actions are already part of history, despite their not having done it yet, relative to their own perceptions. The first, I feel, is pretty nihilistic; Donnie Darko, Yesterday's Enterprise, and The Butterfly Effect come to mind. These stories are characterized by chaos, and the time travelers don't usually fare well in the end. The second is far more interesting; we see the time travelers fulfilling their roles in history, exercising their free will all the way to the preordained outcome. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban comes to mind. At its best, this kind of time travel story comes together in the end like a jigsaw puzzle coming together piece by piece, which brings us to Jack Shepherd. Jack's got the wrong idea. He's like Locke in the season 2 finale: he's convinced it's his fate to change the future by changing the past, but he doesn't understand that fate never meant anything on the Island other than "what has already happened," and he can't change that anymore than Locke could deny that the Button must be pushed. I love that the Swan will be the focal point of the end of this season. I once had a theory that the Swan's implosion, when Desmond turned the key, was a singularity that sent ripples in time in both directions. I don't think it's that simple, but I think it's a safe bet that tomorrow night we'll see our characters, the ones who don't die, (Juliet, I'm looking at you,) sent forward in time to the point in 2008 where we've seen Locke, Sun, Ben, Frank, and those creepy shadow of the statue people. It will probably be some combination of the electromagnetic energy at the Swan and the radiation from Jughead. Will Jughead explode, or will it be buried under all that concrete? If it gets buried, does it blow up when Desmond turns the key? If it gets buried, you have the survivors of Flight 815 causing their plane to crash 30 years before it happens. Maybe one or two of them stay in 1977. Maybe they spend the next 30 years steering all the right people to Flight 815. I figure Jughead is about twice as likely to explode as not. The most likely death, given the state of the love quadrangle, is Juliet. Runner-up is Sayid, who's going to have a very hard time, in life or death, atoning for all the murders he committed for Ben Linus, the liar who lies.

What's up with those shadow of the statue people, anyway? What's in their crate? When is Frank gonna have something to do other than fly and get hit on the head with a wrench? And what about Jacob? Locke says he wants to kill Jacob. Will we see Jacob's face? Is he a man, or a spirit, or what? If he's a man, is he Horace Goodspeed, Walt, Christian, a 30 years older Jack?

Richard. Don't forget about Richard. He knows more than any other character, even Ben or Widmore, and he's always known. He's gotta know about 815 when it crashes, and he's gotta recognize Juliet when he recruits her to the Island via Mittelos. (Mittelos is an anagram for lost time.) Why would Richard leave the Island just to recruit a fertility specialist? I believe the only other time he was off the Island was when he was visiting John Locke.

Random predictions:

1. Marvin Candle will lose his arm.

2. Kate will kiss Sawyer first, probably right after Juliet dies, than Jack will get all pouty 'cause he still wants her.

3. Radzinsky will die and be replaced by an impostor, or else the Others and Dharma form some pact to keep the Swan running, the pact including telling Radzinsky there's a sickness and he can't leave.

Ok that's enough. I gotta go to bed.

Trekkies....

2009-05-05T02:40:00.002-04:00

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Apparently this new film contains some time-travel device which sort of resets the clock at the early years of the Enterprise, enabling JJ Abrams to make a whole slew of new films without having to adhere to established canon. There are a lot of fans upset about this one, as if the whole Trek universe will come crashing down on Friday. I disagree. I remember when TNG was announced. It was spring, 1987, and I had fallen in love with Trek the Christmas before after seeing the 4th film, "The Voyage Home," which enjoyed probably the most crossover success of any of the films, and is known to non-Trekkies as "The One With The Whales." I watched as many episodes as I could of TOS, I read books, fan magazines, and comics. I covered my walls with pictures of the USS Enterprise, and started the long process of accumulating an encyclopedic knowledge of every trivial detail of the show: episode names, character histories, timelines, alien races and cultures, etc. There were rumors of a new series being announced, set to take place nearly 100 years after the adventures of Kirk and Spock. It was to feature a boy genius, an android, a Klingon, and a blind pilot. I was so upset, I actually cried. No joke. That summer, I went to a convention and saw Majel Barrett Roddenberry give a presentation on the new show, complete with cast photos and images of the new ship. It looked pretty cool, but I wasn't really convinced. Of course, I wouldn't have missed it for anything, because it was still Trek, and I wanted to give it a chance. It premiered on 4 October 1987, 2 days after my 12th birthday. "Encounter At Farpoint" was cheesy, the costumes were terrible and the situations improbable, but the characters were fascinating, the ship looked awesome, and the story hit right to the heart of the hope and optimism that has been at the heart of Trek for over 40 years now. In a very real way, those TNG characters were my best childhood friends, and made me realize that the Universe is big enough to tell a lot of stories, and it's the stories and the people in them that matter, not the details. Trek is, at its core, about discovery, about the journey. When we turn away from what is new because it's different and might not fit into our understanding of the world, that's the opposite of discovery, the opposite of what the Great Bird Of The Galaxy intended when he gave us this gift all those years ago.

I'm ready for this new film, can't wait to see what Trek and Bad Robot can do...

P.S. I won a contest! The Grand Prize! I get a Trek t-shirt, a COMMUNICATOR!!, the graphic novel of the movie, and tickets to the sneak preview on Thursday night, so I'll see it a day before you. Don't worry, I won't post anything with plot details until Friday night, at which point it is fair game for discussion according to my strict Coletta Factor/spoiler guidelines.

Makes a lot more sense now...

2009-04-26T00:54:00.002-04:00

Dharma is back!! Remember the "Dharma Wants You" ARG game that suddenly lost its funding last summer? This is the video shown at the Comic-Con in San Diego. You may consider it a spoiler, so watch at your own risk. I include it only because it has already been released to the general public by TPTB, so I do not consider it a spoiler, but it definitely gives you an idea of what we may see in the next couple of weeks. Here it is:

wait, there's more...

2009-04-17T00:46:00.003-04:00

What about the real Henry Gale?

If Dharma was wiped out, why is Dharma food arriving on the PRD in 2004, at least 12 years later?

When the Others wiped out Dharma, did they have agents in Ann Arbor, killing all the off-island Dharma people?

Can we trust Locke's dream-hologram vision of Horace when he says that he's been dead for 12 years?

What lies in the shadow of the statue? If you look at the bottom center photo of the collage, there's a statue that casts a very tall shadow on the building. Who is in that building? His picture is bottom right; his name is Alvar Hanso, the money-man behind the Dharma Initiative. Alvar's great-grandfather was Magnus Hanso, the captain of the Black Rock, the slave ship that shipwrecked on the Island over 100 years ago. Possible the statue was still standing, and the Black Rock ended up directly in its shadow?

Other Than The Obvious Star Wars Reference?

2009-04-16T00:17:00.003-04:00

[COLETTA FACTOR: LOST-CURRENT]

It's been a while since I wrote about the happenings on that mysterious Island. This season seems not to lend itself to much speculation. With all the jumping around in time, theorizing seems so pointless; better to just enjoy the ride. Until now, that is. Now that our people, the few who are still alive, are stuck in 1977, they have joined the Dharma Initiative. We've heard 2 different explanations for why you can't change the future. Mrs. Hawking told Desmond way back in "Flashes Before Your Eyes" that he could not change the future he saw, that despite his foreknowledge of Charlie's death, and no matter how many times he would try to save Charlie, Charlie would die. Desmond saw the future and was unable to change it, so we know that the timeline is mostly fixed in terms of what will happen; everyone will fulfill their destiny regardless of their attempts or those of others to change it.

The past is a different story, right? If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, you would, wouldn't you, and so doing save the world a lot of unnecessary grief and pain? Problem is, what if you go back in time and kill your grandfather? Then he can't have kids, and you will cease to exist, in which case you will not go back in time and kill him, in which case he will exist and you will be born and go back in time and kill him, in which case you will never be born, and so on to infinity. This is called the Grandfather Paradox, and it makes a basic assumption: that when one travels backwards in time, they somehow step out of the natural flow of time and show up somewhen they have no right to be, where it is possible to alter the past and have an effect on the future to which one will eventually return. Enter Daniel Faraday. I told you last year that you had to listen to Daniel, and I hope you took my advice, because he was right when he said that you cannot change the past. It is not like Desmond, who kept saving Charlie, only to see his life in danger again. When you are in the past, you are not some interloper who has to be careful not to step on a bug lest you doom the entire earth; you are a person who is playing the role you have always played. Sayid always shot little Ben; if the 815 survivors had seen the 1977 Dharma photo on their first day on the Island, they would have recognized themselves, and still would have ended up there, doing exactly what we are seeing them do now. It's hard to conceptualize, but so much easier than dealing with all the paradoxes we've seen on multiple episodes of Star Trek. Our people are in the past; to an outsider, Sayid shot little Ben 30 years before he crashed on the Island, but for Sayid, in the linear timeline of his life and perceptions, he shot little Ben after spending 108 days on the Island, then 3 years off it as one of the Oceanic 6. Get it? They cannot change the past, because their involvement in the Island's history was written before they even arrived. Those are the rules.

However, rules were made to be broken. Desmond, who spent 3 years sitting on top of an electromagnetic anomaly, and was at ground zero when it imploded, seems to be an exception to the rule. Daniel, realizing that Desmond was special, knocked on the Hatch door during one of the time flashes; the date was sometime between 2001 and 2004. He told Desmond to seek out his, Daniel's, mother at Oxford University. The rules as I have outlined them above say that Desmond should have recognized Daniel when Daniel came to the Island on the freighter, but that's not what happened. Desmond woke up sometime in 2007 or 2008 and remembered the conversation outside the Hatch door. I'm not certain, but I think it has something to do with the fact that Desmond never travelled physically through time; his consciousness jumped back and forth throughout different periods in his life. Physical time travel keeps one anchored to the unchanging timeline, unable to effect any changes, but when your consciousness moves and inhabits your body from 5 or 10 years ago, you float above or outside of the timeline. This is all very confusing, and I hope it will be explained more thoroughly.

The important thing for us to remember, though, is that our people who are back in 1977 are witnessing the building of the Swan, the Orchid, and some of the events that will lead Ben Linus to Purge the Island of the Dharma interlopers. We know, or we've been told, that the Swan was built to study the unique electromagnetic properties of that sector of the Island, but at some point, there was an "incident." After the incident, a protocol was put in place whereby 2 men would stay in the Swan for 540 days at a time, entering the code and pushing the button every 108 minutes. Knowing that there are a new group of people on the Island now, people who seems to be unaffiliated with Ben, Widmore, or the "Others," knowing that both Widmore and Ben wanted Locke and the Oceanic 6 to get back to the Island, presumably because a war is coming, we can assume that our people will somehow travel forward in time, go back to the future. I am pretty sure that the Incident is nothing less than the event which will send our people back to where they will belong. How exactly this will happen I will not pretend to know, but I have some questions:

1: Whither Radzinsky? We know now that he designed the Swan, and that he was down there pushing the button as late as 1991, when Kelvin joined him after the 1st gulf war. We know that Radzinsky killed himself sometime after that. Was he locked down in the Swan when the Purge happened? Did he kill himself when he found out about the Purge? Why did he edit the Orientation film? Why the fiction of a disease and the shots every 9 days, when it didn't keep Kelvin, Desmond, or even Radzinsky, inside? ( I keep thinking that one of our people will end up taking Radzinsky's identity somehow and ending up as that brownish-red spot on the ceiling)

2: What about the Others? We know nothing about them. Why did they kidnap all those 815 survivors? Why were they interested in Walt? We've seen them as hillbillies, we've seen them using the Dharma medical station, the Hydra Station, the US Army camp, we know they operate a company called Mittelos Bioscience off-island. Now we are getting hints that they are related somehow to Ancient Egypt: the statue, the hieroglyphics, the appearance of the monster with the God Anubis on the walls of Smoky's lair under the Temple. I have the feeling that the Egyptian thing is just the latest layer of costume hiding the true nature and origins of the Others.

3: Did Ben Linus know about 815 before it crashed?

4: Was the runway on Hydra Island constructed with foreknowledge of the arrival of Ajira flight 316?

5: Have the core values of the Valenzetti equation been changed? This, supposedly was the core mission of the Dharma Initiative. Hurley's lottery numbers have been overtaken this year by 3s, 6s ,and 9s in prominence as background details to the action.

6: Where the frak are Rose and Bernard? Are they Adam and Eve?

7: The love quadrangle. Will there be any end to it, why should we care, and why did the producers see fit to make an already overcomplicated, not very interesting plotline, more complicated by putting Juliet and Sawyer together? (But I totally called it. Right here. )

8: What lies in the shadow of the statue? Who are these people, asking this question? We have seen 1 code question used before, by the Dharma Initiative. "What did one snowman say to the other?"(Smells like carrots!)

9: What about all the peripheral characters who seem too important not to explain? People like Libby, Claire's and Eko's psychic, Sun's father, Walt, Ji Yeon, Christian, Magnus Hanso... we need to know how they fit in.

Pretty soon, the story will reach the point where they need to stop laying out mysteries and start answering questions. 21 episodes remain in the whole of the series; that is really not many, considering how much story we've been promised by all these little details. Until next time...

Badasses don't die.

2009-04-08T02:11:00.002-04:00

Can I just tell you how excited I am that Zachary Quinto is playing Spock in the new Trek movie? The answer is very frakkin excited. The Toaster is psyched for this one! First he was Adam, the selfish, bratty foil for rookie agent Kim Bauer in the excellent 3rd season of 24; now he plays Gabriel Gray, aka Sylar, in NBC's (mostly) disappointing "Heroes."

In fact, Sylar is the only reason I have not given up on Heroes altogether. The rest of the show is crap, mostly. Sylar's story has always been the story of a bad man getting badder by the minute, except for the brief time this season when he found out that he didn't have to kill to take someone's powers. He usually just sliced off the top of his victim's head, fiddled around inside the brain, and presto: he had taken someone's superpower. This year he found out he could take someone's power by finding empathy somewhere in his dark heart for one whose power he covets. That lasted long enough for him to find true love, until the Hunger found him again and he killed her. More recently he took an apprentice and hit the road in search of his real father; he first found a diner. It was boarded up, abandoned. Sylar had a flashback to his childhood: His father had brought him to the diner in order to sell him for a little extra cash. Once the transaction concluded, his father got up and left. The little boy obviously didn't understand; he went running after his father. He got to the parking lot just in time to see his father kill his mother in the car and push the body out the passenger side door. The juke box was playing "The Chain," by Fleetwood Mac. It was a brilliant, chilling scene, alone worth the price of admission to an hour of my Monday night. I could go on, but I don't want to ruin it for you. Check Sylar out.

And the man who makes it happen is Zach Quinto; it's so easy to picture him as our favorite Vulcan. The studied, quiet intensity Nimoy brought to the character of Spock, the calm center, is the same thing that makes Quinto's Sylar so scary. And the eyebrows! They won't need to do much makeup for that one, I tell you. (Also, have you heard Heather Nova's cover of "We Can Work It Out?" It's wonderful.)

Anyway. Star Trek opens soon, with SHAUN OF THE DEAD as SCOTTY! JJ Abrams directs; you know him, the guy who created Lost, and Alias, who gave us Cloverfield, the best shaky-cam monster-destroys-New-York movie ever. Run, don't frakkin walk, to your internets and lock down a ticket for this flick, I tell you, it's gonna be the runaway hit of the summer. This one has the potential to be as widely popular as The Voyage Home was at Christmastime in '86. That is all.

At least now I know I'm not the only one...

2009-04-02T23:27:00.002-04:00

with a giant hole in my heart where Friday night used to be...

definitely not funny

2009-03-30T02:07:00.000-04:00

building walls to keep the poor people in

Walter

2009-03-24T02:04:00.004-04:00

Walter is not his real name, Walter is the name we use for him. It started when Lady Toaster wanted to tell her friend on the phone about him. The walls are very thin in the house, any conversation can be overheard. When you are telling your friend how disappointed you were to find out that your new roommate is a raging, unapologetic alcoholic, you generally don't want said roommate to know you are talking about him. But you can't talk to him; he avoids us like the plague. He spends a lot of time out of the house, and we generally only see him between 2am and 9am. I'm up when he comes home drunk at 2 or 3, I hear him banging around in the kitchen, where I don't know how he hasn't sliced his hand open for a vegetable. The really special nights are when he puts water for noodles on the burner and passes out. I don't remember how many times I went to the kitchen for some Pop-Tarts and found the stove on, burning an empty pot, and Walter passed out on the couch, the kitchen chair, or, on the extra-special nights, on the toilet.

One night he left a disgusting mess, didn't clean it up until the next morning. He didn't wash the pots he used, just got rid of all the noodles and veggies and pizza he left out. That night, I stacked up the pots and pans on the stove and did the rest of the dishes, mine and hers. He came home, left a nasty note about how many of our dishes he washes and how amazing it is that we couldn't help him out, and stormed out. When I got him on the phone, I confronted him about his drinking, told him that the unsafe behavior was not acceptable and that he needed to be more considerate of us. He apologized and agreed, then he got drunk. Then he came home, put water on to boil, and went to bed. Lucky I fancy a late-night snack every now and again; I turned it off before it could burn down the house. Next day, I get him on the phone again, and I yell. Talking didn't work, so I rubbed his nose in it. He muttered something about not cooking after 11. (Alcoholics make rules for themselves; it's a way to maintain an illusion of control.) He promised it wouldn't happen again.

Next day I get a text from him: Call me, I have important news. I called him, he told me he got laid off and has to move out. Curious coincidence, no? The only conversation we've had since then is about what he needs to do to get his deposit back, when he's going to pay the house bills, you know, business. He continues to drink and act inconsiderately. A few days ago, he was passed out in the sitting room when Lady Toaster got up to have breakfast and watch the morning news. He got up, went to the bathroom, which, if you haven't seen my house, is right next to the TV room, and just started whizzing without even closing the door.

I know he is in distress, that he needs help, that he has a disease, but: he has a lot of friends, he has a mom and dad who bring him food every week, and we are just the roommates he won't even show the most basic respect. If he had ever shown the faintest glimmer of understanding that that we exist, if he hadn't acted like a dick from Day 1, maybe I would be a little more sympathetic.

But here's the thing: he continues to get up and leave at 10 to 9 every day, and every time I've asked him for the money he owes, it's always Wednesday when the check will clear. I am 95% sure that he lied about getting laid off, and concocted the story as a way to get out of a tough situation without taking any responsibility for his actions, or god forbid, changing his behavior. And now the week until he moves out seems like a very long week indeed. I have no idea how unstable he is, or if he is waiting until the last day to give me a piece of his mind, or if he will turn his self-loathing into anger at Lady Toaster or Toaster-Cat. I am taking the 31st and 1st off from work so I can be there when he is moving out, and he can put his key directly into my hand. I'm also thinking about asking the landlord to change the locks.

But here's the thing: the 1st is a Wednesday, and that's his payday, his band practice-open mic night, and the night, historically, when he gets the most twisted. I wonder if he will forget, on the Wednesday night, that he doesn't live here anymore. I'll make sure I stay up pretty late that night, and I'm not above punching him in the face, thereby knocking him out, and dragging his drunk ass outside and calling the cops. I hope that doesn't happen, but I will definitely rise to the challenge if it does.

New roommate is a good guy; he is also a musician, but he is a BSG fan, and he works for Harmonix, the creators of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. (I've already asked about the Beatles game; he's not telling.) His girlfriend works with me, and she is also a delight. Can't wait 'til April 1...

Addendum: I just went to the kitchen, it's nearly 3am, and found him asleep in the kitchen, stove on, burning an empty pot. Grrrrrr.....

Man On Wire

2009-03-23T01:15:00.002-04:00

Wow. This is a great telling of a great story. French dude Phillipe spent 45 minutes on a wire strung up between the World Trade Center. (Yes, THAT World Trade Center.) The film is a story told by its principals: the Man himself, his girlfriend at the time, the 4 or 5 guys who helped him pull it off. It's easy to see that people would over-dramatize events from their pasts, but it's pretty hard to over-dramatize walking on a wire 110 stories above the Big Apple; I get dizzy just thinking about it. Must have been pretty amazing to just be there, see him cross the wire, taunting the cops on the other side.

The best thing about Man On Wire is what is left out: there is no mention of anything that may have happened at the World Trade Center after 1974. I imagine that if I were old enough to have been there in '74 and remember it fondly, it may be bittersweet, but I'm just hearing of it now, and there are no towers where they were, so it just feels like a triumphant moment, an instance of joy, nostalgia for a safer time I never knew.

Thoughts on the End Of The Story

2009-03-21T02:55:00.001-04:00

COLETTA FACTOR: BSG CURRENT

{{stunned silence}}

For my loyal readers, a gift:

2009-03-14T04:38:00.000-04:00

This is not the awesome post...

2009-03-07T02:09:00.002-05:00

August 8, 1974: Nixon resigns
September 22, 2004: Oceanic Flight 815 disappears enroute to Los Angeles
November 22, 1963: JFk is killed in Dallas
June 11, 2001: Timothy McVeigh is executed
December 25, 1983: little Frakkin Toaster gets an Ewok coloring book for Xmas
July 2, 1937: Amelia Earhart disappears
July 2, 1979: Charlotte Staples Lewis is born. (This is significant for 2 reasons. The first is the obvious tip of the hat to Earhart, but it also means that the little redhead girl Daniel saw was not in fact Charlotte.
October 28, 1984: suspected shutdown date
Decmber 19, 1992: The Purge
September 23, 2004: Monster eats the pilot
Here endeth the lesson.

2009-02-24T01:48:00.000-05:00

let's play 'funny not funny'!

2009-02-20T19:48:00.001-05:00

Nerd-in-chief

all of this has happened before...

2009-02-16T01:04:00.003-05:00

Thinking about changing the name of the blog. Second Exodus is a good name, meaningful to me. Humanity freed itself from its oppressors and got Back On The Road. This is my second blog. The first was not so good. Don't use Blogstream. It's still there, but I won't link you to it 'cause anything good over there has been reprinted here. I probably would not have started this blog if it weren't for a certain pixie. Not the second time I've been in love, but the second time someone's been in love with me. Words cannot explain how awesome the last year with her has been, despite growing anxiety about my work situation and my education situation.

Anyway, a new name for the blog. Right. I have some ideas. I want to put it to a vote. I want you to vote. If I put up a poll, would you vote for a new title? It would be a shame if you really liked "I love M&Ms" as the new title, then "I love M&Ms" lost by one vote. Because you didn't vote. Just like Bush in '04. Suggestions:

I Love M&Ms
Baltar Is My Homeboy
Allergic to Formalydehyde
Rosebud
Frakkin' Muggles!!
New Otherton
Cliff Clavin Is My Homie
Nighthawks at the Diner
Greedo Shoots First
Frak Gravity!
Bite My Shiny Metal A$$
Manny Being Manny

These are just rough ideas. I may post a poll soon. Watch for it. Keep your feet on the ground, but keep reachin' for the stars.

..and all of this will happen again

2009-02-15T23:45:00.008-05:00

Coletta Factor: BSG-CURRENT

We started with Earth, a huge disappointment for all. No home was to be found there, just some old Cylon bones, a long-dead doppelganger of Kara Thrace, and the stirring of a few trace memories for Tory, Anders, Tyrol, and Tigh. Actually, one of those memories was pretty huge, for us, anyway. The 5th cylon was revealed to be none other than Ellen Tigh, whom Saul had poisoned on that rock New Caprica, her punishment for passing intelligence on the resistance to the Cylon occupiers. The rich irony of a Human resistance led by Cylons unaware of their true nature does not go unnoticed by this writer, and now we find out that there is a reason Saul lost his eye, but was not killed, a reason Anders and his band of Pyramid players were not slaughtered on that burned-out rock Caprica. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After Earth, a great unease settled over the fleet. The people lost faith in the Old Man and the Schoolteacher, who had rolled the hard 6 over and over to lead the people to an abandoned shell of a nuked-out world, who had allied themselves with a splinter faction of the very enemy who had destroyed their homes and pursued them across the skies relentlessly. Felix Gaeta, a company man if there ever was, joined forces with Tom Zarek, the "freedom fighter" who always seemed to be on the wrong side, to stage a coup d'etat. They took over quite bloodlessly, and may have had a legitimate case to make to the fleet, but Zarek slaughtered the Quorum of 12, the representatives of the people, when they began to show some discomfort with the new power structure. This one act was the nail in the coffin for Felix and Zarek. Of course the Old Man, with some help from Lee and Kara, regained control of Galactica. Gaius Baltar, in a Christ-like act, ministered to the would-be revolutionary: "I know who you are, Felix. I know who you are." Cut to Felix and Zarek in front of a firing squad. Here endeth the lesson.

Now we find that Ellen resurrected 18 months ago and has been held captive by Brother Cavil, who was the 1st of the "skin jobs" created by the 5 after they fled the holocaust on Earth. Sam Anders, who took a bullet in the brain during the coup attempt, remembers everything. It's not all clear at the moment, but as near as I can figure it, the backstory goes something like this: The first Humans lived on Kobol, as 12 tribes. They created the Cylons, who may or may not have been "skin jobs." There was a war, and the Cylons took off for Earth, possibly following clues left by yet an earlier generation of Humans or Cylons. (Remember, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. We've yet to really see the full implications of the cyclical nature of the story.) The Humans on Kobol founded the 12 colonies we saw destroyed at the beginning, but not before they found and destroyed the Cylon colony Earth. The Final 5 saw it coming, and made plans to escape. They knew that Humanity had been creating artificial life again, and wanted to warn them of the disastrous consequences. By the time they reached the colonies, the Humans were already at war with the Centurions. The 5 convinced the Centurions to abandon their war. In exchange, they would help the Centurions to create humanoid Cylons, as the Centurions had been trying to do. Well, it worked. It worked so well that even the Cylon ships became at least partly organic after a while. They created 8 "skin jobs," a surprising number, because that means there is another, yet to be revealed. Kara fears it is herself. At least one of the skin jobs resented their creators. Cavil, whom we learned was given the name John, hated the 5 for giving him such a limited body. "I DON'T WANT TO BE HUMAN! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to--I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to--I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! " John hated his creators so much that he implanted them with false memories, sent them to live among Humans, then ordered the slaughter of all of Humanity. The 5 survived, and when the 1st exodus began, he took great delight in inflicting bodily pain on them.

Now that all 5 are revealed, and the Cylons' resurrection abilities have been destroyed, John wants nothing more than to extract from his creators the secret of eternal life, then to snuff out their lives, and all of Humanity with them. Where do we go from here? All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. Will we see another holocaust? Will the Cylon homeworld be destroyed? The Old Man seems to have given up his lifelong enmity for his lifelong enemies, but will he be forced to act when the threat becomes imminent? The Schoolteacher will not wait for the smoking gun that may come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Is Kara the 8th model? If not, why not, and what is she? Where is the line between Human and Cylon? If it is indistiguishable from Human life, must we not treat it as Human life?

Postscript: More Baltar, please! I know he is an integral part of this puzzle, but he seems to have been sidetracked. Also, a request for my colleague Dr. Pliskin: tell me a bit about the Christ-like aspect of Gaius, please. That one's right up your alley.

For the last time, people...

2009-02-05T04:22:00.002-05:00

Coletta Factor: Lost-current

Not everyone needs a frakkin' constant. Those of you that sit there and wonder who or what is each character's constant, and try to imagine the story in which each person is seeking the same thing, over and over, you are missing the point. Never mind the nuances in the various forms of time travel we've seen, or the difference in types of afflictions we've seen, it just wouldn't work dramatically. If you want simplicity and a direct, one-to-one correlation between past and future, go watch ER or CSI.

Also, stop talking about whether Kate should be with Jack or Sawyer. Is that the most interesting aspect of Lost for you? If that's all you're worried about, why don't you watch Flavor of Love or Desperate Housewives? Besides, it's obvious that she belongs with Sawyer.

Ok, enough ranting. Widmore is an Other, so is Ms. Hawking. It is unconfirmed, but suspected by this blogger, that Daniel Faraday and Penny Widmore are brother and sister, a la Luke and Leia. There was an H-Bomb on the island 50 years ago, and I believe it ended up buried under one of the Dharma Hatches. The Others have a lawyer. Claire's mother is still in the dark, but she got a fat settlement from Oceanic. We finally saw Ajira Airlines, or at least one of their water bottles. Ajira has been a viral website now for several weeks. My guess is that the O6 will return to the Island via an Ajira flight. Maybe it crashed (will crash?) in the water, and they rowed back? Who was shooting at our people on the outrigger, and is it my imagination, or are Sawyer and Juliet getting hot for each other? This is the 2nd time Jin has turned up alive when we thought him dead, but the real irony is that Sun will probably still try to avenge her husband's death upon Ben, or more likely Jack.

Anyway, there's more, always more, but, well, I'm sleepy 'cause I played too much Xbox...

You just won a boatload of gold medals; what are you gonna do now??

2009-02-03T04:26:00.000-05:00

RIP Ricardo Montalban

2009-01-21T02:45:00.000-05:00

Earth, January 2009, or Coletta Factor: new BSG, or why didn't anyone throw shoes 5 years ago when it mattered?

2009-01-20T23:30:00.004-05:00

On Earth, in this month of January 2009, Dualla found the end of her journey; she found a last perfect night with Apollo, then Felix Gaeta found her brains on the wall. Kara Thrace found her long-dead doppelganger, the burning of which upon a funeral pyre did precious little to mitigate the existential maelstrom into which she was thrown. The Chief found a shadow, the Pyramid star found a fragment of his guitar, Saul found a memory of Ellen, and Gaius Baltar found seeming proof that we, here and now, are Cylons, destined to die and be found in the distant future by the 12 lost tribes of Humanity. The Old Man and the Schoolteacher, each on their own, looked backwards at their journeys and found nothing but emptiness.

On Earth, on this 20th day of January 2009, the washed-up cowboy rode off into the sunset. Everyone was happy to see him go, no tears were shed except those of happiness for the closing of the darkest chapter of history in most of our lifetimes, and the beginning of a new era of wisdom, forethought, integrity, and true compassion. You could not see the crowd on the mall in the shot of Bush's helicopter leaving Washington, but I like to think that if we could have seen it, we would have seen 2 million people throwing shoes at the deposed decider. Thanks for Katrina, Iraq, 9/11, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretapping, the Patriot Act, Dick frakkin' Cheney, "freedom fries," the global gag rule, the new Depression, the legions of fanatical enemies of America that you created by meeting the ravings of a megalomaniacal murderer with more of the same.

I had the strangest dream...

2009-01-19T01:47:00.002-05:00

In my dream, there were these guys, 3 or 4 of them, not really identical, but they all fit the same general description: thin, bearded, baseball caps, bad acne, like really bad acne, you know, the kind of acne where you wonder whether it's actually the Bubonic plague. It was Christmastime, I had left my house carrying 5 or 6 Star Trek action figures still in the packaging, (yes, I collect them.) My friend Nate was there, and me, and these 3 or 4 guys. They all had that withdrawn, awkward look that people get when they get dragged along to a dealer's house. You know, they don't really want to be there, but they want to get some greens, so they go along anyway. There were no greens in the dream. In fact, there are currently no greens in my house in real life. Damn recession!! Anyway, in my dream, in the room we were in, someone had turned on a police scanner. I got really nervous because these guys were just sitting there all awkward and picking at their acne. I realized I didn't really have to be there, so I decided to go. I looked for a bag to put my toys into, and Nate said that there was one right on my lap, and so there was. I wondered why I had taken the toys with me, wondered in fact why I had left the house in the first place. I packed up my toys and left.

Next part of the dream, I was in my house. This is my dream house, the one I dream about all the time. It looks nothing like where I actually live. There are 3 floors in my dream house: the sunny attic, the maze-like, many-roomed living space, and the empty, solitary rooms in the basement. I was on the middle floor, and this time, I lived there with my mother and my girlfriend, both of whom were my actual mother and girlfriend, respectively. I was in the room I shared with my girlfriend, and decided to take a walk around the house, maybe hit up the kitchen. As I got there, I realized that I never use it because it is all cluttered with junk. 2 kitchen tables stacked on top of each other, with a giant bag of saltines perched on top of those; I grabbed a handful and continued to wander. I suddenly became aware of a group of girls in my house, 3 or 4 of them, about college age. I think they were my mother's friends. I saw one of them turn a corner into another room and thought it was my girlfriend; same style of dress, hair, etc. I called to her, and when she turned around, I saw she was a stranger. The group of girls continued on and I went a different way. I ran into my girlfriend and we walked around all the rooms, most of them filled with unused furniture, dusty, hardly lived in. I started to think of all the ways we could make the whole house habitable, instead of just the room or 2 we use now.

Then I woke up. What the frak??

Interviewing Joe Life

2009-01-08T05:43:00.002-05:00

What's been happening??

2009-01-07T20:45:00.002-05:00

So I've been working tonight on a video I shot yesterday at the corner of Kilmarnock and Peterborough, formerly home to Thornton's Fenway Grille, which burned down early Tuesday morning, taking 6 other restaurants with it. Thornton's was a hangout for me and my friends when I lived at 109 Peterborough back in '94 and '95. The highlight of the video is a short interview with Joe Life, a permananently coke-and-booze-addled neighborhood resident who used to come by our place and trade his artwork for some greens. I wish I still had some of that art. The only place I know where you could find it is in the liner notes of a CD by (formerly local) heavy metal band Poets n Madmen. The video is giving me headaches because I shot it in a hurry and can't seemto find the right way to edit it together. Maybe I'll just post the Joe Life interview now and work on the whole thing later.

Also, my hands are acting up again, but this time I have an appointment with a dermatologist and I fully intend to get some documentation squarely placing the blame for my condition on the toxic chemical used in my place of employment as "sanitizer." I wonder how much of my job I can do once it is determined officially that I can absolutely not touch the stuff; we use it all the time for everything. Will they have to provide me with an alternative, limit my duties, or just pay me not to come in? We'll see.

Ok, the schedule. 24 starts Sunday, BSG Friday, Bush's last day the following Tuesday, then Lost returns, 2 weeks from tonight. Watch this space...

let's play 'funny not funny'!

2008-12-28T13:07:00.000-05:00

funny not funny

Neglect

2008-12-26T12:00:00.002-05:00

I know I haven't been writing much lately. I won't bore you with excuses. I have a feeling that will change sometime soon. The stories that inspire this blog are coming back with new chapters. Soon we will find out if the O6 will get back, and how Jeremy Bentham died; we'll find out the identity of the 5th Cylon and what happened to Earth. Jack is coming back, and so is (Coletta Factor: promo for new 24) Tony Almeida! 24 will feature none other than Tony Todd, who, aside from numerous awesomely memorable roles on Star Trek, will forever be remembered as that bayou-born slasher from the beyond, Candyman. Barack Obama will be inaugurated, and the inevitable conflict begins: the progressives who feel they are owed the world because of the Bush years will resist all of Obama's moves toward the center.

Christmas? Oh, Christmas was awesome. Saw my family, my girlfriend's family, who absolutely loved me, natch, got some good christmas loot: a new journal, a book or two, a jigsaw puzzle based on the Valenzetti Equation. Had some awesome food, got a stocking full of candy.

Ok, next time: The real life Jeremy Bentham created a type of prison called the Panopticon, the purpose of which is to make all prisoners visible to an observer at all times, creating the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience. Read about it here.

The onion does it again!!

2008-12-25T21:03:00.001-05:00

Just in case you were wondering...

What's been happening??

2008-12-17T00:56:00.002-05:00

Well, I've been stressed out, frustrated, I hate my job. My hands are on fire again, and it's Xmas time. The governor of Illinois got busted for corruption, the economy continues its downward spiral, Bush got shoes thrown at him, ha ha. I'm trading my Wii for an Xbox 360, with a bunch of games. I'm getting older and balder, and I want to shave my head again. Speaking of which, OJ got sent up the river for a loooong time for being stupid. This space may be monitored by my employers. Caroline Kennedy may become a senator from New York. The siege of Mumbai lasted 3 days. Volume 3 of Heroes is over, Season 5 of Lost is due to start the day after Obama takes over, which may be too late for him to save us from a Great Depression. The guy who threw the shoes at Bush was beaten. He suffered a broken arm, broken ribs, and internal bleeding. Merry Christmas, everyone!!!

2008-12-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

What up Central Valley??

2008-12-11T21:43:00.003-05:00

post script: Hellride

2008-12-10T23:27:00.003-05:00

Hellride comes to you with Quentin Tarantino's name plastered on the box. I remember going to see Hostel 2; some old dude got up and stormed out about halfway through, muttering to himself, "Tarantino will put his name on anything." I disagreed with the old dude, and by the way, why would you go to Hostel 2, knowing full well what kind of film it is, then storm out in mock disgust? Anyway, Tarantino's imprimatur and the trailer for this film, this "Hellride," made me think it would be Grindhouse 1.5, an updating of an old exploitation genre, with cool characters and snappy dialogue. The only problem with this film is Larry Bishop. The fatal problem with this film is that Larry Bishop wrote, directed, and stars in Hellride.

Larry must have known that he couldn't keep up with Michael Madsen as the Gent, so he created for Madsen so one-sided and lame a character that Bishop's character, "Pistolero," looked even more the hero. Ditto Eric Balfour, David Carradine, et tu, Dennis Hopper? Vinnie Jones? Really? Everyone except Bishop is slumming in this film.

It's your basic 12 year old male fantasy: Loud motorcycles, girls, gun violence, knife fights, the good guys are always solidly one crucial step ahead of the bad guys. Bishop plays the "pres" of the gang, of course, an ugly, rather brutish guy who gets all the girls and kills all the bad guys. This film is one of the most self-aggrandizing, fantasy fulfillment, I'll-never-get-that-105-minutes-back, bullshit movies I have ever seen. It's not even funny-bad, it's just lame-bad.

Calling in sick

2008-12-09T09:32:00.002-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't come to work today. I have a Netflix, I mean stomachache.

I need a new game-droid!

2008-12-09T02:15:00.005-05:00

Sorry, Nintendo Wii, it's not you, it's me. I'm not 8 years old, and I sometimes want to play grown-up games, like Halo and GTA IV. I enjoyed Boom Blox and Super Mario Galaxy; Wii Sports was cool for a week or two. It's not all me, though. There are so few games that really take advantage of your motion sensing technology. I'm selling you to the first person that comes along, and when I have that 300 bucks in my hand and you're going home with a stranger, I'll be off to the store to get myself a brand new Xbox 360. I know it's hard for you to hear this, Wii, but I don't want to string you along. Better to just do it quick, like ripping off a band-aid. We had some good times, but they were too few and far between.

Get ready, upstairs neighbors!!!! Rock Band is coming to Toasterville!

Calling in sick

2008-12-08T10:02:00.002-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't come to work today. There has been a mass breakout at Azkaban, the Dementors are no longer under ministry control, and I am scared that I might be a target.

Calling in sick

2008-12-07T12:22:00.002-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't come to work today. My Kryptonian girlfriend won't let me leave.

Holy crap, am I excited about this!!!

2008-12-05T02:35:00.002-05:00

Calling in sick

2008-12-04T00:27:00.003-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't come to work today. You see, when I was a child, I had a fever. My hands felt just like two balloons, and now I've got that feeling once again. I can't explain, you would not understand. This is not how I am.

Calling in sick

2008-12-03T11:35:00.003-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't come to work today. My flying car crashed into a tree and my wand broke and now I'm burping up slugs.

40 minutes later...

2008-12-03T03:46:00.002-05:00

I heard a persistent, painful squeal, like EEEK! ToasterCat caught the mouse again. This time I saved the wee beastie. I chased the cat away a bit, picked up the mouse and brought him outside. ToasterCat might be mad, but she's had enough fun, and it's no fun trying to go to sleep while an animal is fighting for its life in your house.

Natural selection on display

2008-12-03T02:39:00.003-05:00

My kitty, called ToasterCat, caught a mouse tonight. I heard her meowing, which she does a fair amount, but never in the middle of the night. I poked my head out my bedroom door and she came trotting in with the wee beastie in her mouth. She put it down and let it think it would get away and then she pounced on it. I didn't want her to do it in my room, so I shooed her out, and she took the mouse with her. I'm not really into animal killing, but she deserves a little fun. She used to be 1 of 4 cats in the house, now she's the only one. I think she misses having friends to play and fight with. I tried after a few minutes to save the mouse. I caught it on a TIME magazine, (I didn't want to touch it,) but it fell off before I could bring it outside. After another few minutes, the mouse got away on its own, probably ran behind the stove or something.

It's Darwin, it's the order of things. That's why I don't get fussed about eating meat. Cats frak with mice, coyotes try to kill roadrunners, and people eat cheeseburgers.

Calling in sick

2008-12-02T04:34:00.003-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't...oh, wait, it's my day off. Never mind. I'll just be rocking out all day.

Calling in sick

2008-12-01T11:56:00.000-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't come to work today. It's just an invitation to the blues.

Calling in sick

2008-11-30T02:46:00.001-05:00

What? I'm working like a house-elf here!!

Calling in sick

2008-11-29T04:15:00.002-05:00

Sorry, boss, I can't come to work today. Someone found and destroyed all my horcruxes.

Calling in sick

2008-11-29T04:13:00.001-05:00

Sorry boss, I can't come to work today. My hot air balloon got stuck in a tree.

"Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?"

2008-11-27T00:46:00.003-05:00

The reports of what actually happened are, as you would expect, fragmented and indefinite, but it appears as though a group of armed jihadists arrived in Mumbai on a rubber dinghy last night, stormed the city and started shooting people. They made their way to a cafe, a cinema, and 2 luxury hotels, in the lobbies of which they threw grenades and rounded up people with US and UK passports. They attacked the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai's biggest train station, which is pictured above.

The pictures coming out of there are terrible. As of now, mid-morning in Mumbai, 1am here, in the words of an unnamed Indian official, "[T]he situation is still not under control." The police have killed some of the attackers, captured others, but it appears that some are still at large in the Oberoi Trident hotel. An unknown number of people, including some reporters with cell-phones or laptops, are trapped in their rooms.

This is a modern city, a tourist spot, a business center, the home of Bollywood. What if it happened here? This shit has got to stop. Humanity is capable of so much more, if only we could get rid of our Dick Cheney lizard brains. Read a foreign newspaper. Introduce yourself to someone of a different color. Talk to people you disagree with, and listen to them. Your god is no better than another's, and neither one wants you to kill for him.

Come on, people, smile on your brother. Everybody, get together and love one another. Right now.

let's play 'funny not funny'!

2008-11-27T00:29:00.001-05:00