Big crowd at Union Station waiting for a delayed MARC Penn Line train. It arrived as I snapped this, and the mass of humanity cascaded out and disappeared through the gates in the span of 30 seconds.
LOST 3.13: The Magic Box of Brokeback Island
Before we launch into my thoughts on LOST 3.13: The Man From Tallahassee, a couple of popular retro-TV themes to consider:
Star Trek: Shore Leave In which the crew of the Enterprise spends shore leave on a planet where their thoughts and fantasies are brought to real, deadly life, thanks to ancient technology guarded by an alien named “The Caretaker.” |
Welcome to Fantasy Island! In which |
Back in the DHARMA Ba Gua entry, I theorized about the Island’s seeming wish-fullfillment aspect, and now we have confirmation of this in last night’s episode, with Ben speaking of the Island as having a “Magic Box” that can manifest the thoughts and desires of its inhabitants. (Whether the Magic Box works for all the inhabitants, or only those “special ones” like Jack and Locke and Walt, or at varying degrees at times for different inhabitants, is only hinted at.)
A few other character notes:
Ben
I wonder if Ben, being a longtime island native, might share in the precognitive powers recently acquired by Desmond in the Hatch Anomaly. This might explain his abilities as a leader and master manipulator, and also why he immediately knew to look up just before Oceanic 815 broke up overhead in the third season opener. Also, he doesn’t blink. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ben blink.
Locke
Locke’s motives are becoming clearer now, though there’s still an overwhelming tone of irrationality in them. He believes himself an agent of the Island, definitely wants to stay there and cut it off from the rest of the world, and is a real booster for anarcho-primitivism — possibly owing to his time spent with the Marijuana Farmers’ Collective. Ben perceptively identifies father issues as a source of these motives, which foreshadows the reveal of the “Man From Tallahassee” — Cooper, Locke’s kidneynapping con dad. Whether the Island’s Magic Box somehow twisted fate to get Cooper there by natural means, or teleported him straight to The Barracks from Tallahassee, or it’s just the Black Smoke manifesting as a ghost from Locke’s tortured past, has yet to be explained. Tallahassee, of course, is where Kate was planning to escape to after she killed her first Dad.
Jack and Kate
Oh, the irony and drama! “Oh Kate, you loved Sawyer! So I gave up hope on you and made a deal with the Others to get me home, from where I could mount a rescue mission, because I hadn’t really given up hope on you, but in any case I have a ride home with Juliet, and don’t you feel crappy that you just broke up with Sawyer only to find me playing football with Mr. Friendly!” And once again, Kate messes up everything. Also, the Jackface entry needs updating.
More stuff from DarkUFO, Kristin at E!Online, Nik at Nite, TVSquad, Televisionary, Lost and Gone Forever, Mostly Muppet, and Completely Lost wins the best blog post title of the week: You Sunk My Battleship. Laff laff laff laff laff.
MSRBOT at 209.249.11.4
Would someone at Microsoft please explain why something from IP 209.249.11.4 is crawling this site extensively and using up huge quantities of bandwidth while passing a clearly faked “blogger.com” referrer field in the headers?
This is behavior I usually associate with malicious spam and scraper bots, and indeed in the past I have had to block an IP from which a bot with user-agent “MSRBOT” for being over-aggressive. I had thought at first that it was a script kiddie using an authentic-sounding name to mask his malware, so imagine my dismay to find that MSRBOT is not only coming from an official “Microsoft Research” server this time, but is also rather ill-mannered, going through a different file every 3 minutes and deceptively leaving in its wake a referrer spoofing a competitor’s URL. (At least they’re giving that 3 minute pause rather than going all out without a delay, but still, it makes a mess of my referrer log stream and is not the least bit ethical.)
Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Microsoft server in question has been cracked by a malware/botnet operator, which wouldn’t surprise me all that much. Blocked and blacklisted.
DomainTools has noticed it too. Also see the official MSRBOT FAQ, which makes no mention of the referrer URL spoofing.
No Cubes?
Amy got me this Arlington pen in the course of her work for the county. It’s a nice pen, with a wavy pocket clip and a rubber grip, and the name of the county and state on it, but we were wondering about that weird logo. What does it mean? No cubes? No squares? No Time Cubes? No cubing? Think outside the box?
(Arlington County Pen – No Cubes! uploaded by brownpau.)
LOST 3.10-3.12: Dharma Van, Football, Star Wars
Spoilers ahead. Close your eyes!
Previously on LOST, Hurley found a Vee Dub in the woods, got it running with help from Charlie, Sawyer, and Jin, then drove it off frame with a swell of music. The next episode, he’s playing table tennis with Sawyer and doesn’t even mention the van. What happened to it? Did it run out of gas? Did he park it by the beach? Did he unpimp ze auto?
And did you notice that Hurley’s latest “Dad and the Carburetor” flashback made a big deal out of the “You make your own luck” platitude, with a subtle de-emphasis on the Cursed Numbers? I get the impression the writers are backing off from the whole “The Numbers are Bad” subplot, which has been blown all out of proportion ever since that first season Hurley episode about the lottery.
Sayid, Kate, Rousseau, and Locke (listed in order of perceived sanity) go off to rescue Jack from the Island Suburb of Otherville Barracks, blowing up the Flame communications station and getting Mikhail to go all West Side Old School on Ms. Klugh in the process. (First you have Michael and Walt leaving, then Eko getting killed by Stompy, then this. LOST island really doesn’t like black people, does it? Bernard better keep an eye on Rose.) Then you have the sonic pulse fence killing Mikhail, and Jack playing football. Football!
Oh, and of course if LOST were Star Wars, you would have Jack as Luke, Claire as Leia, and Christian Shepard as Darth Vader. I guess that makes Charlie … Han Solo? Which means Ethan is Greedo, because we all know who shoots first.
Tonight’s episode: Locke blows up a submarine with Ben’s blessing. Possible super mega ultra major spoilers here. Could be right, could be wrong, but at least the show seems to be recovering from its slow slump. I hear Cousin Oliver Paulo is going to get shot in the head, which I don’t mind at all, since that ensures my continued search results supremacy over him and a whole bunch of other Paulos.
Afternoon Walk
It was nice enough out for a walk down to SW DC this afternoon, and I took these snaps as I went along. (I decided to let them gather in my Flickr photostream rather than post them to here one by one, just to keep from flooding my weblog with single mobile updates.) Upper left: sunlight streaming through the trees onto the green grass of the National Mall between 3rd and 4th St. Upper right: Washington Monument and bright descending sun. Lower left: Graffiti on a sign, calling to free Palestine and Oaxaca. Lower right: Titanic Memorial, Southwest Waterfront.
Metro.jpg
Hopster.jpg
The bunny’s shirt says ‘Happy Hopster,’ and if you press its on/off paw it jumps around with springy noises while singing a song.
(Hopster.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
A Request to Flickr
Hey, Flickr! I went and merged my Flickr login with my Yahoo account. It was seamless and hitch-free, even after closing my browser and reopening it to make sure the Flickr cookie was persistent between sessions. There. I’m happy. Okay? Are you happy? Good. I did it for you. Now you have to do something for me.
One of your sibling Yahoo “2.0” acquisitions, del.icio.us, has a daily blog posting feature, part of which is a cat_id field so I can assign a category to entries that del.icio.us remotely posts to Movable Type. Flickr lacks this, has lacked it for some time, and needs to get on it ASAP. I’m very tired of having to open up MT when I get home from a day of posting mobile entries via MMS, just so I can set the category of the day’s mail-to-weblog posts to “mobile” manually.
I merged for you, Flickr! Will you cat_id for me?
FBCDC+205
Sunday was the 205th Anniversary of my church, FBCDC. To spruce up the website’s front page last week, I asked Mary, the current acting church secretary, if she could spare a few historic church photos from the archives, and she sent me these lovely pictures, some dating back to the first days of the church in the early 1800s, when it was just four ministers and six laypersons gathering in the old Treasury Building, and later the current location — but the old building — at 16th and O NW.
I was also in charge of the Gospel reading for the day — the Parable of the Prodigal Son, from Luke, which I gave my most bombastic effort. (Not for nothing, after all, was I bronze medalist in interpretive reading back in Ateneo Grade School.) If your browser or media player can handle WMA audio, you can listen to me read from the pulpit, and hear the choir sing Bruckner’s “Locus Iste,” sound files courtesy Pastor Jim. (Note that I am also singing in the choir, so whenever I read the Gospel, it means that after singing I must spring to the pulpit immediately from the chancel while the echoes of the gradual are still fading. It’s fun.)
(Also see FBCDC+204, my entry from last year’s anniversary.)