white with foam

Yes, I’m aware that “post mortem” is meaningless on the island. Nevertheless, sometimes during last night’s show I was wishing I could pause and rewind to appreciate the details. Like the name of the book in the cave, for example — you just know it’s gotta be significant. Also, my friend Sarah says they spotted a Dharma logo on one of the sharks swimming among the ruins of the sunken island. Why would those people spend their time and resources branding sharks?

Karyn got all excited when the titles were rolling because she knew she was going to see so-and-so again. Like Boone, or the annoying science teacher who blew himself up (Daniel Roebuck from “River’s Edge”). I joke with her about how she lives in a parallel universe where time is barely in front of us, and that’s how she knows what’s going to happen three seconds before it happens. Now I think I know her secret: she pays attention.

My question: what’s this loophole that Jacob’s talking about? Is it that the guardian spirits need a human to do their killing? All those humans on the island, and Ben is the first who’s down for the task? As Ben himself noted, there has to be more to the story than that. Or maybe the loophole has something to do with the existence of the anti-spirit dust that the temple people spread around frantically after hearing that Jacob was dead.

Another theory: when Juliet hits the bomb with a rock, maybe it shatters time into many disparate paths. That’s how they can still be on the island and the plane also lands safely in LA. It might also explain why the temple people were living in some kind of cheesy Indiana Jones stone age. (K. was excited to see Hiroyuki Sanada in the titles, too).

Last season helped me get used to the idea of dimensional and temporal shifts; maybe now I have to get used to seeing parallel historical developments all happen at once, on the same island. Whoa. But it doesn’t explain why Jack seemed to know who everybody was, but none of them seemed to recognize him.

Tags:   Lost2 Comments

On her 149th birthday, Kansas returns the easiest guilty verdict ever. The jury deliberated for 37 minutes, probably including potty breaks, in the case against the man who assassinated Dr. George Tiller last summer, a grim, sad present that must not be returned.

It ain’t like the old days. Kansas’ 26th year saw the birth of one of her most tragic folk heroes: Roscoe Conkling “Fatty” Arbuckle. Even today, Arbuckle is less well known for his lithe, graceful physical comedy than for the accusations of murder brought against him by the friend of train-wreck flapper Virginia Rappe and compounded in order to sell newspapers by William Randolph Hearst.

To say a good man got shafted is like saying Krakatoa was a volcano. From the get-go, Arbuckle’s talents, his comic timing and mellifluous singing voice, his very presence was a challenge to entrenched assumptions about poor fat dudes from Kansas. He was, in a way, the Colbert of his days, fully aware of his craft yet so thoroughly convincing that people believed the actor and the role were the same. When he died — two weeks after the Kansas City Massacre, and roughly two months older than I am right now — great clouds of dust had begun to fall on his home town of Smith Center, and his second act had just begun.

This is my random way of saying happy birthday, you crazy bitch. You don’t look a day over 125.

Washington Phillips: Mother’s Last Word to Her Son

UPDATE: During the “lost years” of 1928 and 1929, Arbuckle owned a restaurant in Culver City called the Plantation Café. Click here for a .pdf of its menu (424k), which includes such delicacies as Celery Victor with Anchovies. Thanks to Craig Kirkpatrick of Prairie Village, grandson of Elsie, to whom Hat’s waiter gladly stamped and sent the menu, which will make sense when you follow the link.

Tags:   Fatty Arbuckle · George Tiller · Scott RoederNo Comments.

After the earthquake in Haiti, I found myself working a mental exercise, born of the nagging feeling that the sympathy of someone a continent away was somehow offensively insufficient. Play along at home, if you like. There’s only one rule: name a good thing that’s associated with the country of Haiti. Setting the temporal parameters and defining the word ‘good’ are entirely up to you.

The correct answer is this: they outfoxed the Spanish and then the French, and formed a working society based on (American) Revolutionary principles, a society which endured harsher growing pains than our own young country did at roughly the same time. They suffered invasions, coups, dictatorships and lawlessness like no one else. They grew a truly multiracial society, and helped to give New Orleans its unique character.

Now, I know that suffering is not a virtue. But the Haitians’ brand of suffering is endemic, and I can’t help but wonder if the fresh memories of recent horrors are keeping chaos and anarchy in check as much as, say, family ties or religious faith. That’s why I totally support Rebecca Solnit’s view that we should look askance at stories of looting, particularly as we somehow choke down such humongous misery and our attention begins to drift elsewhere. No big deal, maybe, but it does shape opinion, and individual and collective actions stem from that. The least we could do is tell the story well.

And when you go on holiday in the Caribbean
And when you have sex without a condom
And participate intelligently in the blockade of Cuba
Think about Haiti, pray for Haiti
O Haiti é aqui, o Haiti não é aqui.

Caetano Veloso & Gilberto Gil: Haiti

Tags:   HaitiNo Comments.

…[d]on’t pity the dead. They have time on their mouldering hands, and all they do is think of ways to vex us. They watch we living go about our dirty business—lying and cheating; penis-pumping; pirating pop music—and smile, amused, cool, indifferent, they’re like high-functioning heroin addicts, or cats. You want to get their attention, make them notice, shine a laser pointer on the ground and watch them scramble out of their graves. But that wouldn’t work, because nothing, no matter how you try, gets the dead’s goat. They’re the natives. We’re the tourists.

From “Just Like Heaven” by Paul Ford. Take three minutes to go and read the whole thing; it’s embiggening.

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Paul Campos, um, dresses down policy-making cowards in this awesome article from the Wall Street Journal. Not to steal his thunder, but the last paragraph is a big, big payoff in the denomination of common sense:

“Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave. Continuing to play Terrorball, on the other hand, guarantees that the terrorists will always win, since it places the bar for what counts as success for them practically on the ground.”

Thanks to Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings for pointing this out.

Tags: 2 Comments