LOST - He's Our You

What I Liked

--An old school Lost episode. The scenes of Sayid's island experience being intercut with scenes from his recent past. The time travel stuff was fun, but it was nice they got back to basics in this episode.

--Oldham. The Dharma Initiative's Sayid, the go-to guy to get information by any means necessary. Lost continues to introduce new and interesting characters who instantly mesh well with the other characters and contributes a lot to the story.

--Sayid telling the truth about why he's on the island. An obvious scene where the members of Dharma think he's nuts even though he's telling the truth about time travel, but still well done.

--FUCKING SAYID SHOOTING 12 YEAR OLD BENJAMIN LINUS OH MY GOD. Of course, Ben can't really be dead, but HOLY FUCK, THAT KID GOT FUCKING SHOT!!!

--The relationship between Ben and Sayid. What's fascinating is Sayid clearly despises Ben, not really because Ben is evil, but because he is capable of evil. What was great about the final scene was it also put Ben's words from the beginning of the episode, that Sayid actually enjoys murder and torture, into new perspective. Ben understands Sayid, knows who he is, and used him as a weapon against Charles Widmore. Sayid realizes this as they are escaping, and goes with his nature to kill a 12 year old kid. He became Ben's weapon at the end of the episode to prevent Ben from using him as a weapon in the future. Wow.

--Tying loose ends. So when Jack operated on Ben in Season 3, was he actually taking a bullet out of his spine instead of cancer?

What I Didn't Like

--If Sayid actually did kill Ben, and they go into this alternate reality storyline where the future continually gets rewritten? It would be a more interesting avenue to go down rather than the same "The Island has healing powers" and "So-and-so has been chosen by the Island because he/she is special". But it's the same thing that sank Heroes in its later seasons, and could mean every single moment of the past 4 seasons was a big nothing.

--Sayid getting fooled by the hooker. Not terrible, but a little disappointing considering the mystery surrounding how Sayid got captured. There has to be more to it.

Sickdays

I've always enjoyed being sick. It's one of the only times when everyone I deal with is completely nice and considerate. I think it's because they are afraid I'll breathe and give them my disease.

When I'm sick, I like to lie down and pretend there's a war going on inside my body between the white blood cells and the flu virus. The white blood cells are a committed, battle ready army, but the virus uses guerrilla tactics to attack the sinus, throat, and head. Sneezing, coughing, and headaches are signs of the battles being waged. I try to hold out, but eventually, I have to start deploying Advil and NyQuill bombs to eliminate the threat.

After watching a few hours of Saved by the Bell, Family Matters, and old Jordan and Bird highlights on ESPN Classic, I feel like I'm 10 years old again, staying home from school. If I close my eyes and dream hard enough, I can picture myself throwing warm water on the thermometer, hoping it'll reach at least 99 degrees so I can avoid serving detention for just one more day.

I miss those times. Even now, there are days when I'd rather be home sick than anywhere else healthy.

Lost - Namaste

What I liked:

--Sawyer's smackdown of Jack. He's 100% right by saying Jack being in charge lead to confusion and many deaths on the island in roughly three months. With Sawyer/LaFleur in charge, the island was at peace for three years. James/Sawyer/LaFleur has been the MVP of this season, shown the most growth as a character. He's less angry and sarcastic, and more of a thinker and a leader. It's a shame we already know the whole Dharma Initiative saga ends badly. And I'm sure it's all Jack's fault.

--Sun staying in 2007 and Sayid being captured as one of the hostiles. We're starting to understand why Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sawyer were specifically named by Ben and the Others way back in season 2 when Michael sold them out to save Walt. What about Jin though?

--Kate vs. Juliette. I'm not into the whole love rectangle, but I really enjoyed Juliette's cold blooded rescue of Kate from the grilling the Dharma Initiative recruiter was about to give her. Also, their staredown scene featured the first shocker of March Madness: Elizabeth Mitchell looking about 5x hotter than Evangeline Lilly. A 11th seed over 6th seed style upset.

--Christian Shepard's wall of pictures. It's been done before and its semi-cheesy, but I always like the whole "One scene has a character looks at a picture from the past...then SMASH CUT...next scene is when the photo was being taken."

--Young Ben. It's going to be awesome to see his role in the downfall of Dharma Initiative, and how his interactions with everyone shape what we already know happened/is going to happen in 2004-2007.

--March Madness On-Demand. This has nothing to do with Lost, but like everyone else, my afternoon at work was shot because I was watching the Tournament. And this year, the experience of watching online is a million times better. Last season, CBS Sports had a setup where users logging in had to enter a waiting list before entering the video player. The video was decent and the waiting list moved fairly quickly. But eventually, usually if you tried to switch between games, the browser would crash or the player would stop working, so you had to re-enter the waiting list. I must have entered and exited the waiting list at least 20 times throughout the afternoon.

This year, they added a video quality button so you can turn the quality of video up and down depending on how good your connection is. And there's no waiting list whatsoever. My internet connection at work sucks, but I was able to stream the Tourney on "Better" quality without any issues for the entire afternoon. Switching between games was flawless. They even added an incredible feature where you could look at a transparent bracket while watching the game.

Kudos to CBS Sports for ponying up the cash to increase the bandwidth on their video player for this special day. I even clicked on all the banner ads surrounding the player and site just to show my appreciation. I would be incredibly saddened if they go out of business later because of necessary expenses like this.

What I didn't like:

--Sun punching out Ben right after she says that she trusted him, then telling Frank she lied. Lame.

--No mention of what happened to Daniel Faraday. Where did he go? And what happened to Rose and Bernard? I demand answers.

The Madness of March

Despite the cratering economy, many sites are offering $100 million to bracketologists around the internet if they get every single NCAA tournament game right. They might as well offer a trip to Mars where you can hang out with Dr. Manhattan and his blue penis. No one has ever gotten any game right. Many feel proud if they get the entire opening round correct. And they should. The NCAA Tournament is the hardest sporting event to predict.

That said, all my choices are going to be correct this year. I'm going to win $100 million dollars. And the first thing I'm going to buy is a panther.

ROUND OF 32
Midwest
Louisville, Sienna, Arizona, Wake Forest, West Virginia, Kansas, Boston College, Michigan State

West
UConn, BYU, Purdue, Washington, Utah State, Missouri, Maryland, Memphis

East
Pittsburgh, Oklahoma State, Florida State, Xavier, UCLA, Villanova, Texas Duke

South
UNC, Butler, Western Kentucky, Gonzaga, Arizona State, Syracuse, Clemson, Oklahoma

SWEET SIXTEEN
Louisville, Wake Forest, Kansas, Michigan State, UConn, Purdue, Utah State, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Xavier, Villanova, Duke, UNC, Gonzaga, Syracuse, Oklahoma

ELITE EIGHT
Louisville, Kansas, Purdue, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Villanova, Gonzaga, Syracuse

FINAL FOUR
Louisville, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Syracuse

NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP
Pittsburgh vs. Memphis

NCAA CHAMPION
Pittsburgh

Twittering

The internet is amazing. Not because you have all the news and information in the world right at your fingertips, or because you can buy any product you can imagine with just one click, but because the creators of some of the most popular applications or sites decided to name their companies the silliest names imaginable. "Yahoo" and "Google" are the two biggest search engines on the internet. They are also the two most ridiculous names of any company worth over a billion dollars.

What impresses me the most is these brands have become so ubiquitous, it's normal to use them as verbs. No one says "I looked it up on google" or "I was updating my blog" It's "I googled so-and-so" and "I was blogging" Not only that, it's become inevitable and expected to turn proper nouns into verbs. Twittering just became a new phenomenon in the past few months. No one bats an eyelash. It's the latest and greatest internet invention, and it might be the funniest name of all. The trick is all these words are a lot of fun to say.

My theory is the dirtier sounding the brand, the more successful the company is. It's why MySpace worked and Friendster didn't. It's why Ask.com will never be nothing more than a second-tier search engine. It's why the richest corporation in the world is named Microsoft, which means "Extremely Small Not Hard"

Imagine if I traveled back in time to the 1950s, and I said "I was watching the State of the Union last night, and I realized I forgot the First Lady's name. I discovered she's called "Mamie" after I googled her. Plus, I found her Twitter and now I follow it religiously." President Eisenhower would personally drive down to my house and smack me in the face. He would take his World War II trained fists of vengence and punch me repeatedly.

I would combat the aggression by asking the President about his blog. This would confuse the hell out of him. He would go back to the White House and tell Mamie that he might have some sort of disease. Vice-President Nixon would have to invoke the 25th amendment so Eisenhower would have his youtubes checked out. The doctor may have to poke him on his Facebook.

Jobs

I work at a small/medium sized advertising agency in New York, where every day is like slowly experiencing death. We devise campaigns, put together powerpoint presentations, slave over the details, worry about the execution. In the end, I'm not sure how much of an impact is made. One of my old bosses used to say "Relax, it's not curing cancer", but somehow, every single moment feels like living and dying. Deadlines need to be met, goals have to be reached, explanations need to be given for success or failure. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Whenever things get tough at work, I think about people who are under more pressure than I do. Soldiers, or a doctors, or even nurses like my mom. Those jobs are the most pressure packed and exhausting I can imagine. I can't imagine how I would react if I was caught in a battle zone, pinned down by sniper fire. My only frame of reference for being dropped into war is Call of Duty 4. If war was anything like the game, I would hear two shots as soon as a enter the field, and everything would turn gray before fading to black. In a the game, I would be taken back to the last checkpoint, but obviously, that doesn't happen in real life. There are no continues or checkpoints or extra lives. I would tie the analogy together, but I'm not qualified. I should have chosen to write about beer instead of war.

For a doctor or a nurse at a hospital, there's just as much pressure. You always have to do a good job. You can't mess up, or else someone could die. There's no sugarcoating a patient dying under your watch. You can't say "Yeah, we accidentally replaced your wife's liver with a shoe. Sorry." Unfortunately, "Death" is part of the job description. Doctors and nurses can't save everyone, even the best ones who try their hardest day in and day out. If I woke up every morning knowing I had to save someone from entering cardiac arrest, I would be the one having a heart attack. I don't know how I would handle it. I certainly wouldn't be able to write something like this. My keyboard and mouse would short circuit from all the tears.

As my job has taught me, not everything has to be life and death to be difficult and trying. Last night, 24 men and their leaders were involved in one of the most grueling work situations of all time. Last night, these men performed at the highest levels for an extended period of time. Last night, these men were brought to the limits few can imagine.

The Universities of Syracuse and Connecticut played a six overtime college basketball game.

Two halves. Six overtimes. 70 minutes of basketball.

Last night's Big East Tournament semi-finals game lasted 3 hours and 46 minutes. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was 3 hours and 31 minutes. Titanic was 3 hours and 14 minutes. Syracuse vs. UConn was longer than all of them. The game was as long as Gone With The Wind, which also clocked in at astounding 226 minutes and featured the southern team losing at the end.

3 hours and 46 minutes.

College basketball isn't comparable to being on the front lines of war, or performing open heart surgery, but running up and down the court, playing hard, tough basketball for 70 minutes is brutal. It even had to be tough for anyone sitting on the bench, or the fans watching in the stands. The last minute of a close game is agonizing. Every single second of any overtime period is like having a heart attack. And in Syracuse-UConn, there were six of them.

Oh, and none of the kids playing got paid for it. 'Cuse point guard Jonny Flynn played 67 minutes, and all he got was a pat on the back and a cup of Gatorade.

I only saw part of the game, and even then I wasn't really paying attention. I had it on in the background while I played MLB '09: The Show. At 11:00 I flipped over to Comedy Central to see Jon Stewart smack down Jim Cramer. Then I read a book and went to bed.

Why didn't I stay up? Because I had work the next day.


“I’ve got no words,”
--Jim Boeheim, Syracuse Coach, corpse.

Insurance

I had to sit through a boring meeting about health care benefits the other day. It was a frank lecture about EPOs and PPOs and medical bank cards. I am not a doctor or a con artist, so I can't specify details about the discussion. All I know is unless I get hit by a bus, or get attacked by the cancer fairy, there's no way any type of medical insurance is worth what I'm paying.

The most startling moment of the meeting occured when the insurance guy took a shot at socialized medicine. He said something along the lines of "It will be cheaper than if you went with any other health care provider, like the federal government." I was the only person in the room who noticed the comment. I edged forward in my seat, eagerly awaiting for him to say "FUCK BARACK OBAMA! FUCK HIM RIGHT IN THE GODDAMN EAR!". Unfortunately, the moment never arised.

America is still in a weird transition phase, where they don't know how to approach a new president. It's even more pronounced this time, because America is dealing with the first African-American president. Critics are chomping at the bit to blame every single problem in the world on Obama, while his defenders continue to blame everything on George Bush. Cynics say that there's no way that he can change the swamp that is the United States Federal Government. Optimists believe that he's already on the way to being the greatest president ever. None of them are right, and none of them are wrong. It's hard to judge a president after only 7 or 8 weeks on the job.

What annoys me most about Obama coverage, complimentary or critical isn't about the talk about the stimulus package, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even his proposal for a college football playoff. It's how no one points out how his head is like the love child of an oval and a triangle. He's not only bi-racial, his head is bi-shapial. Unfortunately, it's in the constitution that Americans can't make fun of a President if 2/3rds of the country approves of the job he is doing. Which is why I'm counting the days until his approval rating drops below 50%, so I can point out how his head has the same shape of his ears. Plus his ears are gigantic, from certain angles he looks like he has three heads. Obama is not just the first black President of the United States, he's also the first Chimera elected to high office.

We live in troubling times. It is understandable why many are uneasy about ripping apart the President, even those who disagree with his policies, from the war to health care. After all, we are all connected. It is in everyone's best interest to hope this winged three headed half-white-half back man can lead us through.