Month: December 2008

The Man Behind The Curtain

(67/82) Except for the first couple of minutes where we witness a mother dying in childbirth, this episode takes place entirely on island. In flashbacks we meet a young Ben in his early days as a member of the Dharma Initiative. As with nearly all our main characters, Ben has daddy issues, so much so that he arranges to be the one to actually kill him when the original inhabitants of the island rise up and purge Dharma from their home. In current island time Ben takes Locke to an old cabin in the woods that is home to the only person that Ben answers to, the mysterious Jacob. At first Locke can’t see anyone, but he hears him and then gets a flash of a person in the previously silent and empty chair.

Skynet Precursor?

The engineer in the cube across from me is working on something for the company’s web site that will allow customers to specially configure the valve they want. Right now you can buy stock valves from the site, but you have to know what you want, this new way will walk you through getting the right product for the right application. Internally this thing is referred to as the configurator, I’m sure marketing will coin some fancier term for it later. He is working with an outside vendor that is doing all the programing and they are not too prompt with their updates and corrections.

This morning I heard him discussing his woes dealing with the programmers and the configurator with another engineer in NJ, when I heard him say, “It never gives you the same answer twice.” Maybe this program has a mind of its own and it gives a different answer depending on its mood.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 78

The Brig

Number 66 of 82 is Locke-centric that involve short range flashbacks that don’t involve leaving the island. Ben tells Locke that to be really free he needs to kill his father, but he can’t. Fortunately, the Others have files on every 815 survivor and it just so happens that there is someone who has a motive to do the job for Locke. Turns out Lockes’s father is the very same man who conned Sawyer’s parents when he was a kid leading to their murder suicide.

NUMB3RS

In the continuing quest for another TV series to start watching, this weekend we auditioned NUMB3RS. Almost. I like most of the actors in the show, separately, but for some reason not together. Did they cast the the super smart mathematician first and then start thinking about who should play his father? One of the producers said I have the perfect person, remember the movie Independence Day? Didn’t Jeff Goldblum play a math genius? Get that guy who played his dad. Did he have a father in those dinosaur movies?

I found the cases, so far, interesting, but, and I know they only have 41 minutes to do it in, the investigative procedures seem to take giant leaps only in the right direction.

And for a show that deals with math and logic why, oh why, would they number the four shows on disc one of season one: 101, 103, 104 & 105?

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 77

86,000 Clumps Of Spanish Moss

It isn’t feeling like Christmas around here, the past 4 days it has been in the middle to upper 70’s which is about 15 degrees above normal. A front is passing through tonight which will bring cold weather, for a day, then it creeps back up so that by Christmas Day it will be back in the 70’s.

This morning when we got in the car to head off to the woods for a nice little hike, I looked down at the odometer and it was square on eighty-six thousand miles. Because we rode our bike on Friday it must have turned over to that mark as I pulled into the garage on Thursday after work.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 75

I Led You Here, Sir, For I Am Spartacus

While we were riding the tandem to work this morning I saw something or thought of something that I should blog about tonight. Of course I didn’t write it down. On the way home from work the same idea reoccurred, once again I didn’t write it down, so you won’t get to read about it.

It’s holiday time, so there are goodies around practically every corner at work and because I have no self control, I eat something each time I pass something. On Tuesday I started keeping track of all the handfuls of whatnot I consumed, retroactive to Monday, with the though of blogging about that today, but after writing it all down the totals weren’t nearly as spectacular sounding as I imagined, so I scratched that idea.

Even though they play the song That Thing You Do about 10 times in the 1-3/4 hours the movie runs, I still like watching it. And I did again tonight.

One of Ron White’s bits contains this quote: “…once you’ve seen one woman naked, you… wanna see the rest of ’em naked.” I’m not sure what he’d think of these women, or these…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 73

D.O.C.

The title of episode 65 (of 82) is an abbreviation for Date Of Conception and it centers around the pregnant Sun. Did she conceive the baby off island with her extramarital lover or did she conceive on island with the previously sterile husband Jin. Juliet on the spot sees another chance to help out and volunteers to do an ultrasound to find out just when Sun’s baby was conceived.

The off island flashback concerns Sun being blackmailed by a woman or she will reveal something that will cause Jin great shame. He has told Sun that his parents are dead, but she manages to track down his father, a poor fisherman from a remote village (pictured above, who looks like he has a hell of a dental plan) and will that might seem shameful, what the father reveals is even worse, his mother “had been with many men.” She of course pays off he blackmailer who it turns out is Jin’s mother.