Okay, if that isn’t an obscure title I don’t know what is. Basically, I’m a little stunned and disappointed with myself for not remembering that Fort Lauderdale is the home of Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald‘s beach bum "salvage consultant" who lived on a houseboat, until after we got back home. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d remembered; perhaps visited Bahia Mar marina or something.

I love those books. Time to bust them out again.

We’re back from Florida none the worse for wear; we actually got back Saturday late, missing hurricane Wilma by two days. As my friend Kerry said, ironic that the one time we should pick to visit Florida, the biggest storm ever tracked starts building up nearby.

Florida was… flat and humid. No, really.

Well, it was. Anyway, we had a good time. My wife’s grandparents have a swimming pool (of course) so we spent a lot of time in it. And of course we drove up to Disney World for a few days (three and a half hours each way), that was a trip; it’s utterly mind-boggling just how big Disney World is. We only had time to visit the Magic Kingdom (which is basically all of Disney Land), and part of Epcot.

Some general Florida observations, from an outsider: what’s up with drivers there? Nobody uses turn signals! And apparently they’ll hit-and-run other cars in parking lots (which seemed to happen to us— borrowing the grandparents’ car— on our mini-trip to Disney) all the time, we’re told. Also, everywhere you go— and I mean everywhere— there’s air conditioning. All the time. Many times we were in restaurants and it was too cold— people were wearing sweaters or jackets. Not what you expect to see in Florida, of all places.

Didn’t see any gators (in the wild, anyway). I was kind of hoping.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note some of the local goings-on while we were away:

• There was an E. coli outbreak at McGrath’s; Bulletin story here, Bend.com here. Damn, I knew there was a reason I’m always resisting going to eat there… What really worries me though is the Bulletin’s article states, "No changes in McGrath’s operating procedure were suggested"— say what? Yeah, I’m done.
• More information has come to light regarding Deschutes County Commissioner Tom DeWolf’s sex abuse scandal: details from the investigation reveal that he allegedly put his hand down two separate women’s pants and groped their genitals. Bulletin story here, Bend.com story here. Not surprisingly, DeWolf is resigning. His statement is here. Not really much more to say, other than I’m not really surprised. That’s some seriously stupid shit to do, Tom.

Anything exciting anybody wants to tell me about?

Ah, we’re quite the travelers this year: tomorrow we’re flying out to Florida for a week. We’ll be visiting my wife’s grandparents near Fort Lauderdale and yes, taking some time to drive up to Orlando for Disney World.

It probably goes without saying that I won’t be online much, or at all. We’re taking the laptop, but time and connectivity may not permit much. I’m not too devastated by this.

See y’all on the other side.

So these days the one show during the week I have to watch is Lost. Any other show I could miss and catch in reruns and it’s no big deal. What can I say—I’m hooked. I’m along for the ride, and despite my best intentions to simply sit back and enjoy the story as it unfolds, I find myself getting caught up in rampant speculation about—well, everything. So, it’s spilling over into a long blog post that will contain spoilers and that has no central thesis, just random musings and speculation about the show.

The numbers

No diatribe on Lost these days could be complete without talking about the numbers. Those would be the same as in the title of this post: 4 8 15 16 23 42. What do they mean? Where do they come from?

Personally, I suspect they just came up with a cool-sounding sequence of numbers, partially inspired by geeky inside-joke sources: 42 is of course the answer to life, the universe and everything, as anyone who’s read Douglas Adams knows. 23 plays a big role in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I don’t know about the others; perhaps they’re inspired by I-Ching, as some online theories hold. But I have a hard time believing they hold any real-world significance, other than now being permanently identified with the show.

And more importantly, did any of the numbers show up significantly before the episode that focused on Hurley and the numbers? What I’m wondering is, did they just think up the numbers at that point, on the fly, and decide to change the direction of the show to revolve more around them? Or were they there from the start? I’d have to go back and watch those early episodes to see.

Random thoughts

…Everyone thinks the title of the second-season premiere, "Man of Science, Man of Faith," refers to Jack and Locke. I rather think it refers to Jack and Desmond instead. Their conversation on the steps of the stadium was much more Science-vs.-Faith than the Jack-Locke stuff.

…After watching the "orientation" film, it immediately became apparent to me that there are more hatches/stations on the island. Last night’s episode proved me right. Why did I think so? Because Desmond’s station is station #3 (there’s gotta be at least 1 and 2), the film talked about differerent fields of study and indicated that station #3 was devoted to studying the magnetic anomaly "on that part of the island" (emphasis mine). They’d only isolate a specific part of the island like that if they were familiar with the whole island, hence they must have built multiple stations elsewhere on the island.

…Wikipedia has a really good section on Lost: start with the Lost (TV series) page and follow the links. It’s a good source of background, episodes, themes, and round-up of theories. Gotta love that Wikipedia.

…I wonder how much of the overall story they’ve planned out in advance, and how much they’re just making up as they go along. Some early elements (see my "Unanswered questions" section below) seem to have been abandoned, while later ones (like the numbers) have developed into the main focus, which seems like the hallmarks of write-as-you-go. The X-Files was particulary bad about this; while there was an overall theme for the series, there was no overall story arc, so as the series progressed the ever-changing plot cruft accumulated and bogged it down, and was really, really disorganized. I’m hoping that’s not the case here, or they at least headed that off early and wrote some sort of syllabus for the series… it’d be much cooler if they’ve thought (and plotted) everything out.

…One of my theories was that they crashed on an island in the Indian Ocean, not the South Pacific. Why? Because of the African elements: the drug running plane with Nigerian money, and the east African slave ship—the Black Rock; it seems more likely to me that these vessels—the plane in particular, since it doesn’t look like it could travel halfway around the world—would not have been found in the South Pacific. But I don’t think that theory holds much water anymore (if it ever did).

Damn I’m good

My wife reads spoilers about the show ahead of time, and told me that (last season) a major character was to be killed off. I predicted it would be Boone, and I was spot on.

This season, she tells me a major female character will die, largely because the actress got into a money dispute with the producers. My prediction: Kate, played by Evangeline Lilly. Why? Well, she’s the hot flavor of the month right now, popping up everywhere and cashing in on her newfound celebrity (she was previously a waitress or something). Sounds like a perfect David Caruso scenario. Plus, they hinted that it was a major character, so that fits.

We’ll see how my prediction holds up.

…I immediately called bullshit on that doofy "genetic twin" theory that popped up online—it naturally turned out to be a hoax. And not even a very good one.

…To be fair, I’ve had my share of misses, too. In particular I didn’t think the "others" with Ana Lucia would be other survivors of the plane crash—I bought into the line that she was the sole survivor of the tail section. My theory was that they were a second group of Others on the island, leading me to wonder how many groups were running around.

It should have been obvious, in retrospect. My wife called it an episode before I did.

Unanswered questions

Is Walt really "special" in a reality-altering sense?

What’s up with Jack’s dead father? If he’s truly dead, why was the coffin empty—where’s the body? If he’s not… how does that fit in with what we know about the island now? Does it fit in, or was it simply a throwaway idea from one of the earliest episodes before they had a concrete direction in mind?

They seemed to have abandoned the black-and-white theme… has that come up again since Locke was playing backgammon and made a big deal of it, and Jack found the black and white stones on the dead bodies from the dead father episode I mentioned above? Or was that an early idea that fell by the wayside?

Who was Desmond racing around the world against? I mean, it’s not really a race unless you’re racing someone else, right? What happened to his craft?

What does Kate’s toy airplane have to do with anything?

The Shakespeare connection

Hey, I’ve even come up with my own goofy theory as to the origin of the numbers (this is all totally tongue-in-cheek, just to show how easy it can be to ascribe deeper meaning to fictional plotlines): They’re all about William Shakespeare. Dig it:

• He was born (we think) on April 23, and also died that same day. That’s 4-23. And of course being born and dying on the same day is significant.
• The year he was born was 1564. (64, of course, is the square of 8, and the product of 4 and 16.)
• The year he died was 1616.
• He wrote all his works between 1588 and 1616.
• He authored 42 major works: 38 plays and 4 long poems.
• He also wrote 154 sonnets.
• His play The Tempest could be a template for the show: people crash on a strange island, are separated, and deal with the strange inhabitents already present. Very mythic. And two themes are family ties and reconciliation, similar to Lost.

You know what? Even though it’s tongue-in-cheek, I kind of like this theory.

Mom delivers 16th child, thinking of more: I’m sorry, but this is just messed up. That’s pretty much all I can say about it. Except for a few quotes which demonstrate how truly creepy this is.

Michelle Duggar had her first child at age 21, four years after the couple married.

Which of course means they got married… at age 17…

Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar’s children include two sets of twins. Each child’s name begins with the letter "J"… [includes list of names, including some zingers]

I’m just speechless.

Sunday my dad and I took the kids to see Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Hands down, the best movie I’ve seen this year. The story is funny and quirky, and the claymation is simply a delight to watch. And it’s genuinely funny, which is rare in a movie these days; like my dad said, I haven’t laughed so hard at a movie in a long time.

Amazon has a good deal on the first three Wallace and Gromit films on DVD. I’ve got a couple of them on videotape around here somewhere, but it sure would be nice to get a hold of this…

In other related news, a fire wiped out Aardman Animations over the weekend… destroyed nearly everything, including the props and sets from those first Wallace and Gromit films. That’s rough.

Okay, this is getting crazy: my Burger King mask post is up to 236 comments, and there’s currently active discussion on where to find a Burger King mask online, and a guy named "John" is even making his own masks and selling them on eBay! In fact, I grabbed a couple of his pictures of the homemade mask—click through to see…

The weird and creepy…

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder!

And I’ll throw a link to John’s auctions on eBay—better get a mask while the getting’s good…

With all this going on, I figured it was high time The King got himself a posse:

Among other things, Bandon, Oregon is known for two things: cranberries and cheese. Whenever we’ve been to Bandon we’d stop at the Bandon Cheese store and indulge in a bit of tasting and shopping. Not long ago, though, someone told me that the Tillamook Creamery had bought and made Bandon Cheese, though still sold it under the Bandon label.

Now I see that Tillamook has closed the Bandon cheese store completely. So, now you can’t even buy Bandon cheese in Bandon? That’s just dumb. What’s worse, the cheese is now being made in Wisconsin—Tillamook can’t even be bothered to make their own cheese?

They’re even goofier than that, according to the Pacific Northwest Cheese Project article I linked to above:

Another aspect of the sordid Tale of Tillamook and Bandon encompasses Tillamook’s misguided pursuit of its newly acquired "Bandon" trademark. Tillamook threatened the city of Bandon, Oregon with a lawsuit for violating its intellectual property by using the name "Bandon."

Threatened the city itself for violating the trademark? Uh, hello?

Lee on RoguePundit has more on the closure and goofy Tillamook practices, too. Of course, he has a good point:

At one time, the purpose of the store wasn’t just sales, but promoting the brand. Since the brand looks rather hollow when the cheese has to be imported for sale, maybe it’s better to not remind folks that the Bandon Cheeses are just flavors that can be made anywhere. The attractive label with the Coquille River Lighthouse is just marketing.

Although the flavors can’t necessarily be "made" anywhere; cheese acquires some of its characteristics from the types of food the cows (or goats, or whatever milk-producing animal) eats, and that can certainly be regional.

Anyway, I just thought it sucked. That’s one less neat thing about Bandon, and that much more unemployment for Oregon.

Check this out: BendSearch.com. Alpine, the company I used to work for, has finally resurrected it and updated it. Good for them.

I was responsible for a lot of the work that went into that site back in the day (this would be in 2000-2001). Oh, I’m not bragging; that was, of course, early in my career as a PHP developer, so there was a lot of ugly, bad code floating around in there, courtesy of yours truly.

Hopefully they’ll be able to get somebody to give it the attention it deserves; it’s looking a little sparse right now but I rather like what I’m seeing.

By now the geeky part of the blogosphere and, er, web-o-sphere has been rocked by the announcement of Ning two days ago. Check it out. Their one-line description reads "Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications."

What this means is they’re hosting a service/platform that allows people to build their own social software applications… things like online voting/polls, dating services, bookmarks, review sites. In theory the level of complexity in creating these ranges from point-and-click Clone-N-Theme all the way up to Advanced PHP Developer.

Yup, PHP. It looks like they’re opening the doors to the system and letting you code the apps directly. "Uh-oh," I thought. "I hope they have PHP sandboxed." And sure enough, it says in the FAQ that they do. Sounds iffy to me (let’s just say I’m glad I’m not responsible for running this service!), though I’ll give them points for innovation and guts here.

Looks like they offer up an API for their developer environment, all running under PHP 5. And from what I’ve been seeing, they’ve assembled a team of some of the top PHP people out there to put this together, so that’s impressive.

It’s all very Web 2.0, especially with tags (and the annoying/clever convention of showing the relative popularity of various tags with different font sizes). I don’t know, it looks interesting, and it’ll be hot for awhile, but I gotta wonder just how valuable it is to have hundreds of crappy variations of "Which is cuter," most of which were created as throwaway examples and abandoned by idly curious people (like me)…