815

Lack of new episodes to prattle on about has reduced us to that most desperate of blogger tactics, posting animated gifs.

Cool innit? Yerp. What's the general consensus about this smoke stuff, anyway? Poison cloud? Swarms of nano-bots? Noxious fumes from the french lady's unkempt bunker?

Nano-bots are awesome, but you'd think that if some genius was capable of developing something as badass as that, they could get them to do something besides flying around and uprooting foliage.

Going way back now, what's going on here?



Is that an early version of the smoke, before the producers fully nailed down the idea, or is it something else entirely? It looks like a turbo-charged magic-destructo-carpet to me, but I'm having a hard time fitting that into what we know so far of the narrative.

Here's hoping this three week hiatus is being used to fine-tune the special effects and animatronic talking faces and whatnot on the much-anticipated (and dare-I-say essential) "Vincent Is A Dog; One You Do Trust" episode we have all been so patiently waiting for.

Seriously, lets do this.

A "new" Hanso film has surfaced, you can check it out here. If you believe it, it seems to reveal the rest of the Dharma logos along with a bunch of cryptic scientific jargon about what the different projects do.

Despite some obvious mistakes (two station #5s,) if it's a fake, it's a good one.

I'm inclined to believe that at least some of these unverifiable internet clues are legitimate (or legitimate red herrings, at least.) The writers would have to be stupid--and they aren't--not to capitalize on the viral marketing bonanza of all this internet buzz; it's cheap, it's easy, it's effective, and it's not nearly as obnoxious as imbedding clues in "Invasion" or something, forcing us obsessives to watch that crap too.

Two and half weeks until "a very special LOST." Who's it gonna be?*

I say Claire. She's served her purpose played her part, and her death ought to be just the boost Charlie needs to hop back atop that white horse and make his galloping return to a Rock & Roll lifestyle**.

*Speculation only, no spoilers please...
**If dude isn't already working on a prog-rock-opera double-LP based upon his island experiences, he should be. That would truly be epic.

Let's be honest, Episode 5: ...And Found was a bit of a yawner. Props to Lindelof et al, though, for having the balls to stick to their "it's all about character" guns and give us an epsiode almost completely devoid of meaningful action or plot-development despite the fact that the next episode is three weeks away. (Quite the next-level cop-out, however, revealing new Dharma logos and whatnot via the interwebs).

I liked the Sun/Jin back-story (him being an ambitious country-boy cum frustrated populist-hero cum ruthless mobster is playing into all kinds of dope Rhygin/Pretty Boy Floyd archetypes,) but it didn't seem to reveal much of anything about any of our ongoing mysteries. Perhaps there is a Boston connection between Sun's uninterested Mr. Perfect and one of the female characters, and perhaps Jin's dickhead boss at the hotel has some nefarious Hanso Foundation/international weapons trade connections or something, but who knows?

We didn't learn much back on the island either. We knew Adebisi Mr. Echo was a badass, now we know he's a stand-up fellow as well. Ana Lucia... still tough, still a bitch. The only real new information was our brief glimpse of The Others, or The Others' muddy cankles to be more precise. This brief, obscured by shrubbery, view revealed a few interesting things...

• The Others kill folks dead. Yikes.
  
• The Others wear no shoes, leave no tracks, and appear to glide/shuffle on palm-fronds rather than just walking like the rest of us.
• Some of The Others appeared to glide/shuffle by twice, or perhaps there are twins or clones among them.
• Many if not all of The Others seem to be either pre-pubescent or in possession of an unlimited supply of Lady Bics.
• One of The Others had a teddy-bear (much like Desmond--remember Desmond?--with his stuffed bunny and Walt with his stuffed polar bear).

I'm seeing these folks as kind of "Children of the Corn" types but more similar to the desert-dwelling, water-preserving, worm-riding Fremen in DUNE; they are dangerous, they are masters of their physical environment, they are in control of a valuable secret, and they are fundamentally misunderstood.

From ABC's official (and officially lame compared to the abstract mindfuck going on over at bigspaceship1's guerilla spot) Mega Lotto Jackpot website comes the above bone, thrown to us snarling internet Lost dogs just as the show embarks on its 3-week scared-to-compete-with-the-World-Series vacation.

It's a new Dharma logo, but what exactly is it? "Properties" tells us it's a "catbird," but it looks more like a seahorse that met the business end of a sledge-hammer to me.

Further digging yields more bones and leads one here, where we can not only discover such grammatically questionable nonsense Fletch quotes as "the biggest clue of all is that a flute with no holes, is not a flute," we also get a clearer shot of the "Arrow" logo and yet another Dharma symbol...


What is that, a leg?

UPDATE: Mounting evidence points to the "catbird" logo (and the Mega Lotto site in general) being total horseshit, dunno about the "leg" though...

Here's hoping the writers once again--as they did with the whole Episode 1 and 2 bunker reveal--employ the narrative device of retelling, this time giving us Kate's shower scene from the perspectve of her slippery, sudsy, oh-so-lucky bar of soap.

Or Hell, maybe they ought just follow the homie Papertrail's desperatly frustrated plea sage advice and introduce a Ferrari for her to get half-naked and writhe around on, Tawny Kitaen style.

Just got back from a trip down to my dirty homeland of GA where I discovered that LOST enthusiasm crosses all sorts of geographic and cultural barriers. From the frazzled, travel-weary, redneck denizens of the Nascar-themed Miller Lite Victory Lap airport bar to the laid-back CDr-pushing fellows at Supersounds, everybody's talking Locke and Dharma and Ana Lucia and Adebisi and y'all cluckity-cluck-cluck, y'hear.

Even the frumpily dressed indie-rock chicks in Athens were fired up about the others and whatnot, even if they insisted that their post-collegiate, 60s-informed appreciation pre-dated and was somehow more valid then the mainstream, consumer-oriented, TV-Guide style fandom so pervasive amongst viewers like me who actually enjoy explosions and boobs and sports cars and Hot 97 without chalking it all up to irony.

In fact, my horn-rimmed, earth-toned contacts in Bulldawg country not only gushed over the show, they delivered a minor scoop; legendary Athens art-punks Pylon (always and mostly* accurately described as "angular" and "jangly" and best remembered for their contribution to the Athens GA, Inside/Out documentary film) are back together, reunited and it feels so good, but--bigger than that--Pylon drummer Curtis Crowe spends the better part of his time in Hawaii as a set-designer on LOST. Perfunctory internet research confirms the information.

My attempts to contact Curtis in search of spoilers have, so far, gone unanswered.

Like Walt on a milk-carton, straight from Hugo's dream to you comes the Mr. Cluck's Chicken Shack website. It's cute and clever and just surprising enough, but more importantly(?) if you click the little "paragraph" symbol in the bottom corner you get a short list of links including a boring podcast LOST recap (which I only listened to about 10 seconds of) and a webcam of Mount St. Helens, which isn't nearly as entertaining as this African watering-hole webcam... except that the profile of Washington's most famous voclano looks curiously similar to the mountain sketched on crazy Rousseau's map. Are our castaways overdue for an eruption?

One night a few years ago some friends and I were stumbling around a City of Austin municipal golf-course drinking fortified wine, smoking that purp, and generally getting blasted when my homie PaperTrail hit upon what he thought was a brilliant idea for a movie: some Mexican soldiers from the Mexican–American war walk into a time-warp of some kind and emerge right then and right there--scruffy, surly, and a little drunk--in modern times on that very same golf course. They do not remember the Alamo, since for them it has not yet occurred. Wacky hi-jinks ensue.

This, he insisted, can’t miss.

Naturally, everybody acknowledged this idea as the retarded musings of a stoned simpleton and clowned on dude accordingly. In fact--along with the time he got all drunk and red-faced and weepy and confessed that if he had to have sex with a guy (not that he wants to, of course, but if he had to,) that guy would without a doubt be Ving Rhames—it’s one of those things we’ve never really let old PaperTrail live down.

All of which explains, I guess, why the idea of time-travel was recently bubbling up in his (in actuality far removed from simple) mind in reference to what was then the upcoming second season of LOST.

Back on September 20 of this year he sent me the following in an email:

The island and its inner workings are actually the nexus of some sort of time-traveling apparatus. The people and polar bears and shit have all been pulled there from different points in time and space. The pirate guys are actually the crew of the Black Rock (the big old ship with the dynamite). The magic numbers are some sort of temporal coordinates, describing the island's location in space-time.

Brilliant, I thought. Beautiful. So what if the guy wants to screw Marcellus Wallace, he’s onto something here. Time-travel is the perfect explanation for all these wacky island happenings. The crash. The numbers. The old ship. Locke and Walt’s prescience (they could be receiving clues from their future selves). Jin’s mysteriously important watch. The “monster,” which could be a T-Rex. Hell, Charlie might even be Marc Bolan.

It’s perfect because, since time-travel actually makes very little sense once you begin to get down to it’s logistical specifics, it can be used to explain anything.

I bring this up now, following the recent clue-filled bonanza of the hatch and its Orientation video with their myriad indications that everything on the island may be explained by some sort of scientific experiments into magnets and eugenics and paranormal military weaponry, because I hope there’s more to it than that. This Dharma initiative stuff is cool, I just hope it’s not the end of the mysterious road so many have been sucked into.

Enough of Sanskrit scientists and shadowy Norwegian businessmen, where are the anachronous, befuddled, and mustachioed Mexican-American War soldiers who mistake Jack for Davey Crockett and Hurley for Santa Ana?

Seriously, JJ, step it up.

This Bigspaceship1 website (found by going here instead of here) keeps changing (every 108 minutes?) and flashing all kinds of crazy images and Morse-code references and audio files about Alice in Wonderland and Star Wars and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Watership Down and obscure Island of Dr. Moreau-type arcana.

When I last stopped by the page had nothing but the two dancing, fuzzy polar bears you see above, but earlier they were rocking this tripped out optical illusion while in the background wailed an ill version of the Gilligan's Island theme-song sung over a cover version of "Stairway to Heaven."

Thanks to Henrik, our man in Norway, we now know the location of the buildings seen in the Orientation video (and perhaps in the photo of Desmond and his lady-friend.) The buildings are in the small town of Narvik, Norway, and the mysterious Alvor Hanso is thought to be a local politician and the father of a local footballer.

A great piece of detective work, but it can't possibly mean shit. Can it? LOST producers just grabbed some obscure and suitably creepy stock-footage. Right? I hope so. If there's a Black Metal connection I'm out of here. Babylon don't mess with no Count Grishnakh.

A hidden link at the bottom of the list of projects on the "Active Projects" page of the Hanso Foundation website allows one, if one is so inclined, to watch the Dharma Initiative training film.

Upon repeat viewing I was struck, amidst all the corpro-pharmaceutical imagery, by the somewhat anomalous appearance of the two granola-type University of Michigan doctors. Could they be the same people as Walt's kidnappers, the Southern Rock Uhzzahs?

UPDATE: Click here for a photoshopped comparison-collage (thanks Henrik).

Incidentally, Alvor Hanso is an anagram for Lava Horns, which has nothing to do with any LOST mysteries, but does seem to indicate that the University of Texas football Longhorns will stomp a mudhole in the Oklahoma Sooners this afternoon in the Red River Shootout.

Anybody actually read "Turn of the Screw," the Henry James-penned ghost-story novella, or "The Third Policeman," Flann O'Brien's comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence--both prominently featured on Desmond's quite respectable underground bookshelf? Feel like sharing how they might relate to our castaways-cum-labrats?

UK viewers have all the fun. First that absurd David LaChapelle promo video and now this extensive "explore the mystery" type Flash site from Channel 4. Not sure if those of us that have actually seen the first season have anything to learn there, but it's maddeningfun to click around for a little while.

(click for larger image)
If this isn't a "dharma-logo" tongue-tattoo in the mouth of the polar bear from Season 1, then what is it? Hard to make out, but it's clearly soft-white... like a ???

It's a good thing they never showed this ridiculous UK-only LOST Season 1 promotional spot over here, because if they had I would have made a point to never ever watch the show. Was this directed by the guy who designs Danielle Steele's book-jackets?

Conflicting geographic loyalties within the plush and expansive Flight 815 offices have made it impossible to reach a consensus as to which fair city, NYC or Boston, the above photograph is a good or bad omen for.

Ducking the question, the only sensible conclusion becomes obvious: Go Bravos! ATL Shawwtty...

Invalid IP? Damn. Who's got that secret-Google-cheat-code heat? 893, where you at?

UPDATE: The url for this, btw, is from the numbers printed on the cans and whatnot in Desmond's pantry.