how now brownpau
(IMG_6430.JPG, uploaded by brownpau.)
(Little known fact: the “BP” in “airBP” stands for “Brown Pau.”)
See photos from the trip in the Orlando 2006 photoset. Travel log coming soon, with a bonus air travel whine about Airtran Airways and luggage. Right now I’m going to show my brother around DC.
Spoilers follow. Also note that my Hanso Foundation entry is rather popular thanks to the increased advertising and new website. Update: Also see DCeiver’s Pompatus of LOST 2.20.
Having known in advance about rumors of casting changes and their implications for certain aspects of the plot of “Two for the Road,” the sex and guns were not entirely unexpected, but still quite shocking when they did culminate. It’s slightly annoying to know that real world cast issues dictate the story: DUI charges and personal friction mean that Michael shoots Ana Lucia and Libby, and (if the spoiler rumors are true) an aging child actor means that Hanso/Dharma science will accelerate Walt’s aging.
Update: See LOST Television Bloodbath 2006 for more on that.
But it’s at least good to know that Ana Lucia made her peace and resolved her gun issues. And did not have sex with Jack’s dad, which would have been just gross.
Michael obviously didn’t mean to shoot Libby. I guess the lesson here is — don’t fall in love on the island, or the girl dies. It happened to Shannon, it happened to Libby, it happened to Ana Lucia (if you can call the mad gun rut with Sawyer “love”), so I guess Kate is next. Good thing Charlie and Claire broke up, thus sparing Clare.
On the other hand, Libby might not be dead. They wouldn’t do that huge “HEY LOOK LIBBY WAS IN THE PSYCH WARD WITH HURLEY” revelation, then just let her die, would they? And she was carrying those blankets, possibly with something behind them. I have a feeling she’ll still be alive next episode — at least long enough to tell the Hatchlings about Michael and maybe tell Hurley her mental secret.
A few hanging questions: Michael shot himself in the arm to make it look like Other Henry Gale shot him and the women, but did he then shoot Other Henry Gale, or free him, or just leave him tied up? Is Michael an Other now? And was Other Henry Gale really coming to get Good John Locke, or was he just sowing seeds of doubt, exercising his penchant for Locke-manipulation?
Okay, I’m off to Orlando for a few days to enjoy the theme parks. Internet access will be intermittent, and comments and trackback will be off until I return. I might get online, or I might post a few photos from my phone, or I might not, so if I don’t, you can enjoy these photos of Pandora holding the fort for me till I return.
A Blog Apart, community cultural commentary contributed from a Christian context, courtesy of Jason and Jeremy and their associates, with a WordPress theme designed by me. How do you like it?
(That design, by the way, was a second attempt, because my first design looked rather conventional, very standard “boxes and lines,” without much connection between design and site content. The theme looked like just about every other Kubrick spinoff out in the WordPressosphere. Sometimes you need to push forward with a full CSS-and-images mockup that you can totally reject when it’s done, just to get the bad design out of your system. It was only after that when I realized I could use a crowd of asterisks and a separate asterisk to symbolize the idea of something being “set apart,” and everything else followed from there.)
Heh, if you thought my deodorant reminiscences were TMI, you should check out Kutitots’ thoughts on constipation.
It’s one of the fun things about Filipino culture (and East Asian culture in general, I guess, with the possible exception of Japan) — our conversational frankness about the grossly biological facts of life. I remember newspaper columnist Hilarion Henares writing a full column a long time ago about the texture differences between Filipino and American toilet paper and how to wash one’s, er, nether regions.
So a lot of us can talk about urine and feces and periods and toilets. It’s not a loud, boisterous, brazen thing, and not something you should be constantly steering conversation towards, but it’s something the common Pinoy or Pinay is able to discuss offhand without too much embarassment. (Sex is another matter, though, since the Philippines is still a largely conservative Catholic culture. Hushed whispers.)
Walking around the National Mall a few hours after the Darfur Rally was over. The Mall was almost empty, except for the cleanup crews disassembling the stage and loading the parts onto trucks. A few leftover activists wandered around the Mall, still carrying signs, holding little huddled conversations. The garbage receptacles were stacked to overflowing, of course.
Busy busy weekend, and it’s going to be a busy May. Had an apartment yard sale yesterday (finally sold that comforter and phone), then there’s church and choir practice today, then the Darfur Rally, then a concert at the NGA, and just now Mom texted me to go to Best Buy and get her a new digital camera. (Update: Mom’s going to buy the camera herself, and I skipped the rally and classical music, but now I’m helping a neighbor move to a new apartment. Still busy.)
For most of the first week of May, I’m going to Orlando, where my family has already begun to gather for a convention my father is attending. I haven’t been to Disney World for over a decade, so I’m really looking forward to giving Mission: Space a try. After that, I fly back to DC with my younger brother in tow, and he stays over with me for a week. At some point in the month, there’s jury duty, N.T. Wright, work, and I push my freelancing forward full ahead. And most importantly, Amy‘s graduation is coming up, when she finally gets her MFA.
I’m going to breathe a sigh of relief when May’s over.
He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. – Isaiah 40:29-31
Some photos from the walk home along the National Mall while the slanted rays of a Friday sunset tinted the monuments and buildings amber:
Thumbtack Press liked my San Francisco photos, especially since I release them under a CC license. I’m happy to oblige.
(The weird part is that I found this link, not from my regular scans of Technorati or Google Blog Search, but via a completely random stumble upon KBCafe, which at first glance I thought was a spammy bot-copied content republisher, based on the ad clutter. It took a closer look for me to decide it was legit — and hey, they picked up a link my regular inbound-link haunts didn’t. Update: Never mind; KBCafe is just republishing search results from IceRocket and splattering contextual and affiliate ads all over that.)
As you may surmise from Backup Brownpau and my Blogger profile, I’ve recently done a big Blogger cleanup, pruning out dormant weblogs and repurposing the single active one into a downtime fallback. Whereas my Blogspot space has served several roles in the past, I found over time that each of those roles was best filled by this site itself: mobile weblog and self-sightings, for example.
I’ve also found Blogger insufficient for the needs of White House Fence Jumpers, and am retooling that site on its own domain with its own database.
I’m not giving up on Blogger, though. It’s still the best externally hosted weblog solution there is, and is still great for immediate and usable out-of-the-box functionality. I will be using it for the “news” sections of other sites coming up — with a very stripped-down template and no comments.
Updates on all that soon.