Just got my initial order(s) from teefury and now I have to figure out when I’ll wear them.

Also testing out the new WordPress app for iPhone.

And additionally placing my first iPhone pics that used the flash.

Nothing Flickr-worthy but I’m betting I fit somewhere between the Family Guy target audience (Hulk + Kool-aid Man tee) and a stoner (Big Lebowski tee) or am I being redundant?

Happy Tuesday!

I’ve been loath to mention the most recent #1 ranking for the University of Georgia, since the last time UGA was ranked #1 things didn’t work out so well:

The last time UGA was ranked #1 in anything, it ended in infamy as well.

I digress.

The current #1 on everyone’s mind is this Princeton Review list of the Top Party Schools.

My response: smirky-shrug
UGA’s response:

“We’d rather focus on the Green Honor Roll listing as a top environmentally conscious campus, or the top 50 ‘Best Values’ listing,” Georgia rep Tom Jackson said in a press release this week. “It has no effect on who is accepted or who enrolls.”

To whit, some other rankings:

#7 – “best value” among public colleges
#8 – Business schools – “Greatest opportunities for women.”

While I was known to indulge/imbibe during my youth, I don’t think my partying was excessive in any way (at least not a regular basis), but in Athens, there are always parties to be found. What do you expect from a large state school with a downtown inches from campus and a thriving music scene? Benedictine Monks, perhaps?

Of course the best response came in the form of Mike Luckovitch’s cartoon from earlier this week, announcing Uga’s name change to “Chuga”. Classic.

There’s also been a lot of chatter, especially on the college football blogs, about a UGA Orientation video that features a version of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” re-imagined as “Party in the UGA”.

Coincidence? (In both timing and subject matter)
Evil plot?
Questionable singing?

You decide:

Since I’ve used up my quota of colons and dashes, I’ll end by saying that I was once an Orientation Leader way back during the Olympic Summer of 1996. Had YouTube been around back then you could all see our homage to “Mission: Impossible” (it was a hit that Summer) along with an oft-repeated and really obvious dick joke I used to make about the University of South Carolina mascot.

Gamecocks.
Cocks.
Funny.

So, yeah, UGA is the #1 party school for 2010 and I think we/they earned it. And yes, OLs make fools of themselves for incoming Freshmen.

I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat if I still had the stamina and the liver. ;-)

Go Dawgs!

So here it is.

Finally.

The End.

I’ve been putting off writing this post at least in part because it signifies not only the end of the series, but a significant portion of my blogging activities.

For the better part of the last 5 years (I didn’t start blogging about individual episodes until the Premiere of Season 2) I’ve taken my Thursday (or, as it ended, Tuesday) nights collecting my off-the-cuff results and putting them out there for the world to see, share & comment upon.

It’s been very gratifying and enjoyable, but at times it was also a lot of work.

More often than not, I’d have a long list of comments and theories waiting in my inbox the morning after.

I became an addict of Lostpedia, Dark UFO, FYL, Doc Jensen, the official Lost podcast and several of their alternate reality games.

I got LOST and I loved every minute of it.

Now some folks are using the LOST metaphor to completely justify the series finale, The End. I’m not going to be quite so gung ho, but I did enjoy it very much. It was a fitting EMOTIONAL ending if perhaps not the most INTELLECTUAL ending that many folks anticipated.

First, I’ll dispense with my minor quibbles:

• Purgatory

Using Season 6′s Flash Sideways storyline as a weigh station for our Losties as they moved between their (mostly) Island-based lives and the afterlife was brilliant in one sense. It provided a nice cover/thumbed-nose to all the haters who speculated that the Island itself was Purgatory.

Well played, Darlton!

But exactly what relationship did that reality have to the overall story arc of our Losties?

Some have theorized that each character gave themselves the kind of “life” in the Flash Sideways that they thought they deserved.

Others (myself included) thought it was another parallel universe/reality/timeline that would eventually merge with the Island storyline.

Darlton had always said that this wasn’t an alternate/alternative to the Island, but something equally “real”. If that’s the case, if the exposition there served to greater explain our characters, I’m still going to need some time to unravel all the little bits we learned about everyone.

I’m actually undecided about whether or not we can learn anything new about each character from this Flash Sideways if, ultimately, it was only a rest stop between Life and Death.

Like I said, a quibble.

• Eko, Michael, Walt

I understand the realities of making a television, I honestly do, but I really wish we’d gotten more closure on the fates of some of the first two season’s BEST characters.

I could care less about these questions:

What was Walt’s power?
Why did Smoky kill Eko?
Why is Michael stuck on the island as a whisper?

But I would’ve liked to have known just a little more about those connected to them: Yemi, Vincent the Dog (who looks to have lived out his life with Rose & Bernard [though he wasn't in the church] & Susan.

Again, minor nitpicks, but I wanted some of the closure for those outside of the church group.

We can discuss Ben not entering the church, but I think that’s just an indication that he wasn’t ready (or someone he was waiting on) to move on.

And I realize that Eko’s exclusion was contractual in nature: they didn’t want to pay him a king’s ransom.

• ABC’s added confusion

I also understand that promo departments have to drive viewership, but I think part of the blame for fan confusion/backlash about the ending stems from the heavily promoted axiom of “answers” as opposed to “closure” or “goodbye” that would have been more in keeping with the timbre of the finale episode and, ultimately, the series overall.

Phew. What a wreck of a run-on sentence.

Also, they truly fucked up airing the beach view of the plane crash post episode/over the credits.

Many mistook this to mean that the Island was not real (contradicting Christian Shephard) and thought everyone died in the initial crash. Not so.

Others thought this meant Ajira 316 crashed a second time. Also not true.

ABC had to issue a press release explaining themselves, but they really did marr the ending and mess with the perceptions of the fans, many of whom were looking for some kind of Deus Ex Machina to tie up everything. [Sidebar: the mere fact that episode 19 of Season 1 is named Deus Ex Machina should have tipped you off that maybe they were going to toy with questions & answers a wee bit]

I think what we got was much more satisfying, gratifying and respectful than Desmond’s Electromagnetism, Faraday’s “Constant” or Mother’s “Light” explanation could ever have been.

That said, I still want to know where Christian’s body was after the 815 crash. ;-)

For those that want closure/exposition/explanation, let me direct you to 2 minutes, 50 seconds of awesome, narrated by nerimon, who closes thusly:

“For me, Lost is a show that isn’t about the story, it’s about how the story is told.”

Amen, brutha.

We had flashbacks, flash forwards, flash sideways, time travel and all things Desmond. We got to see the survivors and their antagonists/protagonists through a huge number of lenses and told to divine (pun intended) our own truth about their natures and ultimate destiny for ourselves.

Brilliant!

On the flipside, there are unanswered questions, which I’m happy to discuss, if that’s the kind of thing you’re in to.

My own take?

I’ll just put out a couple of though-starters:

• Jacob::Old Testament God; Smokey::Satan; Hurley::Jesus Christ/New Testament God

YMMV, and I know there’s enough religion going around on LOST to start our own denomination, but that’s my reading on things.

Add in Adam & Eve in the cave (actually Mother & Smoky) and maybe the island is some kind of Garden of Eden, minus original sin.

I don’t know. Makes my head hurt.

Maybe the Island is just a MacGuffin after all, and I’m OK with that.

I even thought Mother’s “Light” explanation of things was a bit too squishy for me. Better to leave those Midi-chlorians undefined, IMHO.

• The symmetry/asymmetry of Lost’s storytelling

The first decade of the 21st century gave us both 24 & Lost, two shows that played with the rules/mores or TV storytelling like no other shows had done before.

While it infuriated new viewers, frustrated current viewers and sometimes confused the Hell out of both camps, the circular, flashing, interwoven storylines are what made LOST great.

I looked forward every week to reading blogs for Easter Eggs, book & music references and the subtle, hidden connections between each and every character.

If Jack’s “Live Together, Die Alone” statement was a rallying cry for the Losties, the finale showed us that each one had to “die alone” so they could eventually “live (forever) together”.

I’d still like to know what happened to Hurley, Ben, Desmond & Penelope after Jack closed his eyes, but that’s a different story.

Did Sawyer really reform after Ajira 316?
Did Kate go back to a life of crime (or was she captured) [she survived TWO plane crashes!!!]?
Did Lapidus get a hero’s welcome?
Did they start their own “Ajira 6″ backstory to explain everything?

As you can see, my questions aren’t about Dharma (science) or Others (faith) since, to me, those groups were just stand-ins (at times) for various sides to the Island argument.

Jacob v. Smokey
Locke v. Jack
Ben v. Widmore

All of them explorations of what we saw back in Man of Science, Man of Faith back in Season 2.

In the end, I got as LOST as the characters, and LOST *in* the characters, as I ever wanted to be.

No explanation of time travel or the numbers or the light or the hatches would ever be as satisfying as the thought that what mattered, to those people, was spending eternity together based on a few hundred days together (plus three years) on an Island.

MacGuffin or not, I’m happy that plane crashed and even more happy that the story was told (and eventually ended) with us winding our way back and forth over times and stories to a place where we’d all have to sit back and reflect on what happened.

I’ll leave you quoting the inimitable Bud Cadell:

Sorry friends, but the writers didn’t ‘waste’ your time, that community you’re griping to is what they offerred you.

All of this here (and maybe even the show itself) was just my two cents. Agree or disagree, like or dislike, I’ve enjoyed the journey and your company on it.

If you ever lurked or commented or linked, please stop by in the comments and say hello and/or goodbye.

I’ll see you in another life, brutha.

:-)

Tonight’s episode was easily one of my favorite episodes of this season, if not the series, for the character development of one James Ford AKA Sawyer.

Commencing to blogging!

First, let me do a little bit of non-”numbers” math:

3.

That’s the number of Sawyer-related sex scenes we had tonight.

1. The first was with the double-crossed con woman (A re-con, if you will) in the Flash Sideways
2. The second was with Charlotte
3. The third was the found piece of Kate’s wardrobe from the Hydra station where Sawyer & Kate had relations

Ok. On to more serious topics.

What I saw:

• Watership Down

We’ve seen it before, also on Sawyer’s reading list.

• 245

Sawyer’s apartment number.
NOT one of the numbers.
See above.

What I think:

I think that the title of the episode is brilliant.

Perfect.
Concise.
Circular.

I absolutely love (what is it with all the superlatives tonight, anyhow?) that Sawyer is remembering his con-man roots on the island while putting a more law-abiding spin on them in the Flash Sideways.

Bonus points for his double-crossed lover being the one calling him nicknames (“Jimmy”, “Dimples”) while he plays it straight.

All the great back-and-forth between James & Miles as cops was just the culmination of the 3-year (island time) storyline of those two characters as Security forces for The Others. Fun stuff. I’d watch a cop show spin-off with those two in a Flash sideways universe. Totally.

And the best bit is the re-con.

Sawyer playing both sides on the island but always remaining loyal to his end goal: leaving the island. Sure that’s a change from the recent past but now that Juliet is dead, it’s the logical next step. And I thought he seemed really sick of Kate at the beginning of the episode, but that turned out to be another example of his poker face.

James working tirelessly to catch Sawyer/Anthony Cooper is (maybe?) more evidence of a changed man. A single, solitary mission to find the man who ruined/changed his life forever, but doing so as a Cop, not a Crook. Is that really a change from his Plane Crash self or is it more evidence that people can’t change?

I don’t really know, but I’m inclined to think that it points out a universal truth of the show: people cannot change their fates (the things that happen TO them) but they can change how they respond; the choices they make. The choices themselves don’t seem to change that much, but it’s the journey, not the destination. ;-)

In both cases, Sawyer leans on an old friend. Miles in the Flash Sideways (only to be hit by a fleeing Kate) and Kate on the island.

The only constant (yes, I used Faraday’s metaphor) seems to be Kate.

She never changes.

She’s a broken record.
A raw nerve.
A reactionary animal with no forethought or insight into her own responses.

She’s all immediate action and woe over what has happened to her. Blech!

But tonight’s Sawyer story really spoke to me. It showed something more than the other Flash Sideways stories (in my opinion). It showed me that these characters, even when they’re pursuing the EXACT same goal (revenge, in this case), can CHANGE. Their fates might not be different at all (that is the things that happen to them, the circumstances and situations) but their CHOICES can be completely 180 degrees different.

Ok, enough on that.

I want to throw out one last, weird thought.

During Not Locke’s discussion with Kate, he mentions having a crazy mother and having to come to terms with his Mommy issues. First, most of the characters (aside from Kate) have Daddy issues (Kate has Mommy issues/*is* creating a Mommy issue for Aaron). Second, the mention of Mothers made me think of the following literary reference:

Jacob == Beowulf
Not Locke == Grendel
Not Locke’s Mom == Grendel’s Mom

I don’t know where I’m going with that allusion, but there you have it.

Oh, let me mention one other small thing. Miles mentioned his Dad works at a museum and that’s how he hooked James up with Charlotte. If Miles’ Dad in the Flash Sideways is Dr. Halliwax, then just what kind of museum is that?

I’m tired now.
Lost blogging ain’t what it used to be.
Comment away!

Until next week!

I have, for whatever reason, a certain amount of fan cred for the TV show Gilmore Girls (late of The WB & The CW) because I took a Google search term – Rory Gilmore Sex Boat – and made it my own. Four and a half years later and I’m still number one, which sends me traffic, comments and like-minded viewers whenever someone catches a re-run or watches the DVD.

So the other day when I was writing another blog post I noticed comments in the queue around the aforementioned query and the name of the Stars Hollow Troubadour, Grant [Grant-Lee Phillips], popped into my head.

Lo and behold an equally enterprising fan has compiled ALL(?) of his appearances on the show into one, easy-to-enjoy video:

Thinking about Gilmore Girls led me to the upcoming NBC show Parenthood, based on the film of the same title. Lauren Graham (Lorelai Gilmore) is one of the stars, so I’ll likely be checking it out.

But my current favorite “family comedy” is ABC’s new sitcom Modern Family. If you have kids, I highly recommend checking it out. Funny stuff.

Also, if you’ve seen the show, you’ll get a kick out of the fact that my brother-in-law and his wife & kids gave our family (Me, Jenn & both kids) “comb sheaths” as gag Christmas gifts. I’ll post a picture soon. Priceless.

Until next time, Happy Friday!