LOST Third Season is Coming

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Those of you who haven’t been following LOST too closely, but want in on the upcoming third season, tonight is your lucky night: ABC is showing the requisite recap clip show to help newcomers (and overly rabid fans) get their LOST fill before the new season premiere next week.

It’s been four months since the 2nd season finale, but the story has not been sitting idle. ABC’s marketing and multimedia departments have been dangling easter egg carrots before internet-savvy fans hungry for more of the Dharma/Hanso conspiracy aspects of the plot, in the form of an “alternate reality game” called “The Lost Experience,” a fairly successful viral marketing gimmick which got fans to buy books, view websites with subtle and not-so-subtle product tie-ins, and develop further buzz about the TV show. With this game, ABC has built a community of insiders interacting with the show at a higher tier of involvement, with a degree of investment in the show which keeps them watching, constantly on the lookout for new clues to dig up online.

Having something resembling a life, I didn’t get into The Lost Experience any, but thank goodness for sites like Tail Section and Lostpedia, who gladly share the wealth. Apparently one of LOST’s greatest mysteries, the Numbers, was revealed as The Valenzetti Equation, a series of values representing factors in the ultimate doom of humankind — factors which the DHARMA Initiative is attempting to change by any means possible to avert disaster, even at the expense of the lives of a good fraction of the human population. That still doesn’t explain how those numbers won the lottery for Hurley, and gave him such bad luck, though. Will this plot point still garner any mention during the show at all, I wonder, or will it be left to the game-playing fans to lord this insider info over casual viewers, while the TV show just focuses on the human drama?

And those of you who, like me, have been watching out for LOST spoilers, be warned: the producers have been putting out “foilers,” preemptive red herrings meant to confuse and confound. So maybe Jack won’t be getting that “Other” love interest?

Oh, with regards to my prior theory, held by some others, that the black smoke security system is a nanobot cloud, looks like that rumor was debunked by LOST producer Damon Lindelof at Comicon. My new theory is that it is secondhand smoke from cigars lit by Alvar Hanso.

It also pleases me to no end that one of the new characters being introduced next season will be named Paulo, to be played by Rodrigo Santoro, an actor almost as hot as I am.

More links:

On Running and Pockets

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All winter I slacked off my running because it was too cold. Through the spring I kept saying I would start running regularly again after it got just a bit warmer. For summer I was reluctant to go running because it was too hot. Finally it’s not too hot and it isn’t freezing cold and I have no reason to procrastinate on getting back to my exercise and availing of my proximity to the National Mall, so last week I started running again: about 5 miles to start, three times a week.

So I was about to go out for my first re-run last Wednesday when I paused in front of my pocketable items. Habit when I leave home is to stuff my pockets with the standard cellphone and wallet and Palm and handkerchief and keys and sometimes camera, and my reflex was to put all that in my shorts. Impractical, of course: you can’t have all that jangling while you’re jogging. All I really needed was my keys, iPod, and a bottle of water. And yet, my mind rebelled against this minimalist cargo: What if someone calls? What if you need cash to get a Metro card to go back if you’re too tired? What if you see something Flickr-worthy and need to take a photo of it? For a moment I thought of Christ’s instructions when he sent out the apostles: “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics.” I really was loving the world at that moment, I guess. But I would only be out for 45 minutes to an hour: calls could wait, there was really nothing to spend money on, if I got tired I could pause on a bench and walk the rest of the way, and some days you just don’t need to snap photos of everything.

It felt good to let go of the pocketables and run with my mind off worldly things. (Of course, I was kicking myself in the rear on Saturday for not bringing a small camera when I got to Lincoln Memorial and saw a red fox sitting in the grass nearby — a rare site in those crowded areas in the middle of the day. It eventually snuck off in the direction of a fenced-off construction area. Maybe I’ll find a decent small camera which won’t knock around my pockets when I next go running the scenic route.)

Mayon Eruption Update: Over?

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Props to JarodM for the photos.

PHIVOLCS 9/23/2006 Mayon update reports weakening seismic activity and decreased lava flow. The Alert Level has been dropped to 3, refugees have been allowed to return to their homes near the volcano, and Mayon generally seems to be calming down. It’s probably a good thing that the eruption consisted mainly of a steady flow lava punctuated only occasionally by relatively weak ash explosions: it most likely means the pressure of magma was relieved slowly, rather than allowed to build up into a major explosive eruption which could have caused much more damage and death.

Oh, and that whole “full moon” thing never materialized.

Update: I may have spoken too soon; Mayon has suddenly sprung back to life with new tremors and an ash explosion. Alert Level 3 remains, which means a continued high level of unrest.

Interested volcano watchers can keep an eye on the PHIVOLCS “latest activity” log, which shows releases for significant volcanic events.

Sunset Down the Road (Again)

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Fall is just around the corner, and as always around this time of year, the ecliptic is aligned such that for a few days, the sunset shines right down DC’s downtown street grid, just so.

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I took this photo of the start-of-Fall sunset back in September 2004, too.

DCist and Pentagon Hot Dog Stands

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Some of you may be stumbling in via a hat tip from DCist, in the story about the Pentagon hot dog stand. The link isn’t here yet, as I posted it to my del.icio.us link stream with a for:dcist tag, which is how they saw it. (Late tonight, my del.icio.us links for the day will be picked up by magical internet fairies who will carry them one by one to brownpau.com to be posted to my weblog. If you use del.icio.us and want this to happen, refer to my entry on del.icio.us daily blog posting.)

Me, I picked up the story from FP Passport, who in turn got it via the Pentagon media listserv.

CCM on FM in the Philippines

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Jim asked me to pass this along: The Edge Radio, now on FM in the Philippines.

I’m not much of a CCM guy, but for those of you in the Philippines who are, The Edge, a ministry of UCB-IFA, has stations in Manila (91.5), Davao (104.3), Lucena (90.3), Ilocos Sur (90.5), and Zamboanga (98.1). It’s nice to see evangelical Christian radio broadcasting in the Philippines taking hold of the mainstream in this manner, especially given the heavily Catholic context; but then, Filipino religious practice has always leaned toward the charismatic, so it should come as no surprise that CCM of the “non-hard-sell” variety should appeal even to Filipino Catholics. (By the way, my ex’s own station, 98.7 DZFE, under the FEBC banner, continues to struggle onward.)

At some point in the future, I really should tell you about growing up with RJ 100.3, back when they were still a 1950s oldies station. “Gising na, RJ na!”

Recent Reading: Memoirs of a Geisha

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I first got interested in the book after seeing the movie. As with so many other cinematizations, the book was better. (Plus I didn’t get annoyed at the sound of Chinese actors trying to speak Japanese-accented English.) It’s an easy read, with the geisha Sayuri’s first person account told in simple, plain language, heavily peppered with evocative — though sometimes awkward — metaphors. I was something of a samurai-obsessed feudal-era Japanophile in my youth, so aspects of the story were tempered with a bit of familiarity, but the geisha’s world revealed in Memoirs — the intricate web of female competition, the subtle dance between eroticism and entertainment, the ingrained superstition of reliance on fortune-telling almanacs — was nonetheless totally exotic, especially contrasted with the abrupt cultural changes brought on by World War II and increasing Westernization.

From a twenty-first century American perspective, one could not help but feel saddened at the prospect of a life very much like slavery, in which the best material goal one could hope for was to be mistress to a danna. However, the book suffers from something of an unbalanced focus on these details of a geisha’s life, with much made of mizuage and danna and the geisha’s role as ornamental conversation piece and wine server to the rich and powerful — but at the expense of telling of the real meat of the geisha’s existence: the performing arts. There is mention of dancing and theater and shamisen, but from the way the narrative flows, one would think these were mere background to the semi-erotic relational aspects of Sayuri’s life. I would have appreciated much more some cultural treatise on the arts in the context of early 20th Century Japan. But that was not the author’s intent.

An important note on Memoirs: the author, Arthur Golden, was sued by his primary interviewee, the famous Kyoto geisha Mineko Iwasaki, for breach of contract and defamation of character. Iwasaki claims that Golden promised her anonymity, and that the Mizuage part of the story was completely false, along with other implications of high-class prostitution. The two settled out of court in 2002 for an undisclosed sum, and Iwasaki published her own book about the life of a geisha, appropriately named Geisha, a Life. The book is meant to be autobiographical, and lacks the more lurid fantasy/fairytale aspects of Memoirs, but is at least closer to the truth about the life of geisha in Kyoto — at least as Iwasaki wishes it told.

Further Reading/Viewing:

Spinach (and E. Coli?) in the Trash

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(Update: Latest FDA release now warns against all fresh spinach, not just bagged.)

Thanks, US Food Industry!

Spinach ties with broccoli for my most favoritest vegetable, but I had to throw out this unopened bag the very next day after buying it at Whole Foods, due to the whole E. coli scare.

Thanks a lot, Natural Selection Foods! They’re the people behind Earthbound Farm, and suppliers of leafy greens to a whole spectrum of bagged vegetable lines which wouldn’t otherwise admit the connection, except now to distance their brands from association with the infection. Sample press releases to that effect, for example, from Dole, Whole Foods, and Ready Pac. (The latter being the brand I’ve thrown out, even though they claim another product uses EBFarm spinach and not this one.) More on the E. Coli scare from Time Magazine’s Alica Park: How Ready-to-Eat Spinach Is Only Part of the E. Coli Problem.

These outbreaks, warns Doyle, are an inevitable by-product of the way that many fruit and vegetable manufacturers have streamlined their production — and cut costs — by doing some of the processing of their ready-to-eat produce right in the fields, and not in the more controlled atmosphere of a factory. He sees it as a dangerous practice that could contribute to contamination.

So, many thanks to the US factory farming food industry for this. In your quest for the holy “faster cheaper more more more” culture of modern consumerism, you’ve managed to risk getting manure germs in my salad. On the bright side, so far my spinach has remained free of frog.

Help Pyro Meet Batista

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Hey Batista, if you’re reading this, want to make a suffering fan happy?

Meet Pyro, a 23 year old kid in the Philippines with cancer, courage, and just one wish: to meet Batista, the Filipino-Greek WWE wrestler, who comes from around the DC area. I’m not a wrestling kind of guy myself, but hey, if anyone knows how to get in touch with him, this could be an endeavor worthy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. (Via Cathcath.)