The Alternate Reality Hypothesis

If, as many esteemed Lost writers have been saying since episode 1 aired earlier this week, Lost is going to try to assert that the explosion in the Swan at the end of Season 5 created two simultaneous realities -- one in which the Losties remained on the island, and a second, concurrent reality in which Oceanic Flight 815 never actually crashed and landed safely in Los Angeles, this show will be dead to me.

Factors weighing in favor of the "concurrent alternate realities" theory:

1. We saw the two different realities during Season 6, Episode 1 this week.

2. Juliette desperately wanting to tell Sawyer that their plan did work after all right before she died, after just minutes earlier crying to him that their plan did not work.

Factors weighing against the "concurrent alternate realities" theory:

1. It is impossibly flip, and a massive copout answer that would not satisfy most thinking members of what remains of the Lost fan base.

2. We have seen flashbacks and flashforwards all throughout the history of this series, often at first without explicitly being told or being given the knowledge that these are in fact flashes in one direction or another. So just because we saw the two realities in episode 1, that does not mean that both are alternate versions of the reality following the H-bomb explosion at the Swan at the end of Season 5.

3. The perfectly plausible explanation -- and the one much more consistent with how the rest of this show has gone, to be honest -- that the scenes we saw this week aboard Flight 815 and then at LAX occur somewhere else along the same timeline as the one we also saw this week with the Losties back on the island trying to figure out what to do next.

Take it from me, Lost did get kinda convoluted and out-there during Season 5, but there is no way the producers are going to try to make the audience deal with the notion that the H-bomb explosion simply created one reality where the Losties stayed on the island, and another concurrently where Flight 815 never crashed in the first place, and that's that. If I have learned anything from six years of watching this show, they are going to find a way to bring the two stories back together, in one way or another.

Two other Lost thoughts I forgot to mention in yesterday's post:

1. Richard Alpert was at some point a slave on the Black Rock. This seems all but assured after the Nemesis told Richard this week that he didn't recognize him "without all the chains". Not sure where to go with this for now, but it's been put out there and seems more or less definite at this point.

2. The producers certainly went out of their way to make Desmond act all weird-like when he saw Jack on Flight 815. This, combined with all the talk from Eloise Hawking about how important Desmond is to the story, and how he is the one character who is "special", and temporally displaced, yadda yadda yadda, leads me to believe that for whatever reason, Desmond was the one person on Flight 815 in the other day's episode who actually knew all the other Losties he was talking to. And when he just up and disappeared from the plane, how much you wanna bet he somehow "flashed" back to some other place and time? Me thinks we will be learning more about Desmond's final chapter later this season.

L O S T

Just time for a quickie post today, but since an off-site work meeting prevented me from my regularly-scheduled posting on Tuesday I thought I would weigh in quickly today on last night's Lost season premiere. I enjoyed it, though as usual even here in the final season the show continues to introduce new ideas and new questions at least as much as it answers the old ones.

New questions I am now pondering after Tuesday night's Lost festivities:

1. Who is this Japanese guy? Where did he come from? And who are the others with them?

2. Really this should be question 1a: How did the nice stewardess from Flight 815 and all those kids get hooked up with the Japanese dude and his group?

3. What did Jacob's nemesis mean when he said "I want to go home". Does this mean he lives somewhere other than the island? Has he been exiled to the island? From where? For what reason? And what rules govern his being allowed to return from whence he came?

3a. Could Jacob's nemesis have been referring to going back to his own time, not his own place?

4. Why does Sayeed's death mean so much trouble for the followers of Jacob?

5. Who the F are these followers of Jacob anyways? Between Ilana and "standing in the shadow of the statue" crew, and the Japanese guy with the nerdy Weird Al-looking assistant, it is hard to keep track of everyone Jacob has working for him on the island at this point.

6. And lastly, but probably most significantly at this point in the story: Did the group's attempt to avoid The Incident at the Swan at the end of Season 5 work, or did it fail? So far they've shown us the Losties back on the island, and back on Flight 815 as if the whole crash never happened. What gives with that? Which is right, which is the true reality?

The early money is on the scenes back on the non-crashed Flight 815 are flash-forwards, to the final end of the story after the Losties, whose plan to avoid the Incident did not work, finally figure out a way during Season 6 to set everything right.

But then why go on with Charlie getting arrested, Kate escaping the bounty hunter, Jin and Sun continuing on with their sham relationship, and Jack losing his father's coffin?

Only time will tell.

McDonalds, and Bank Employment

Not quite as many interesting responses to yesterday's question as I had hoped, but at least one resourceful reader did manage to come pretty close just using internet research. The question was how would you go about trying to guess how many eggs McDonalds goes through around the world in an entire year.

Here is my formula, and then I'll give you the answer:

So there are 31,000 McDonalds restuarants worldwide, 13,000 of them in the U.S. (this I already knew as a stockholder in the company). Let's assume that over the entire roughly 5-hour breakfast session in the U.S., the busy McDonalds restaurant near my office at work serves one breakfast, averaging two eggs per order, every minute or so. This includes an average of the real busy periods as well as the outlier times just after opening and just before the lunch switchover when things are less busy. In fact, this is a busy McDonalds in the middle of Manhattan, so let's say the average store is 50% less busy, serving up one two-eggs breakfast every 90 seconds over 5 hours. That is 300 minutes of breakfast, and thus 200 breakfasts served on average. That is 400 eggs per day for your average U.S. store.

Let's assume that outside the U.S., people in general eat breakfast as McDonalds less frequently, and also that the breakfast foods available in those regions include fewer eggs overall, to include for local customs and eating habits. So, for McDonalds' 13,000 U.S. stores, that is 400 eggs a day, and for the 18,000 foreign stores, let's peg the number a little lower, let's say at 300 eggs per day. So that is 13,000 x 400 eggs = 5,200,000 eggs per day from the U.S. stores, and 18,000 x 300 eggs = 5,400,000 eggs per day from outside the U.S. This is a total of 10.6 million eggs per day for McDonalds. Multiply that number times 365 (let's ignore any differences from weekdays vs weekends and assume those are already factored in to my above daily averages) and you get 10,600,000 x 365 = 3,869,000,000 eggs per year.

The real answer is somewhere between two and three billion eggs per year. As Lester pointed out in the comments, this is some sick figure like 2% of the total worldwide production of eggs from fowl, all to McDonalds just for their breakfasts. But as I said yesterday, the real fun is in the way you choose to figure out the answer to a question like this. I've heard that some prominent U.S. companies ask questions like this in interviews -- one blogger IMd me that he was asked by a large technology company how many white cars there are in America -- and I had heard this one and thought it was interesting.

There's my thoughts for a Friday. Other than that, this is the story that most caught my eye so far in the financial news today. A prominent and well-respected banking analyst expects another 30% job cuts at the major investment banks over the coming years, something with which I fully agree. This was the biggest reason why I left Lehman Brothers last summer when I did -- although I certainly thought Lehman was going to have a tough time getting along independently, it's not that I necessarily knew the company would be declaring bankrupcty less than a month after my departure. My issue was that, even if Lehman could make it alone, I simply did not think financial services was the industry to be in for some time, as the banks as a whole will have to go through a painful time of deleveraging and rightsizing and compensation-cutting that I simply did not feel the need to be working there for. Still, that expectation for job cuts of as much as 30%, that is going to be a fugly time for anyone working in the banking industry as well as those companies who depend on selling to or buying from such firms. Maybe this new bank bailout to be announced on Monday can help these bloated firms get a bit better of a handle on their businesses.

Great Interview Question

If I asked you how many eggs McDonalds Corporation goes through around the world in a year, how would you go about figuring that out? I'm looking not just for an overall number, but for how you go about arriving at that answer.

Thoughts of Running Bad

I've got nothing fresh or original about poker swirling around my head today to be quite honest. The truth of the truth is that this past week has been one of my least enjoyable weeks of poker in a looooong time. The thing with being me is that when I run bad, I will take 15-20 bad beats a night. It is sick. I've learned to handle a ton of bad beats, and really I can't remember the last time I even close to tilted from any particular beat. But as mostly a tournament player, these bad beats never seem to come at a good time or in an unimportant pot, and lately they have been ending some nice runs I've been building up over several hours, most often just short of the bubble in the nightly majors.

Consider just the most painful ones from just Thursday night. I lost a ragingly monstrous stack in the Riverchasers when I got it in with my AA against KK allin preflop, and I still couldn't find a way to win the hand. When I caught someone bluffing with their 74o allin reraise vs. my pocket Queens late in the 32k, the guy rivers the straight. And in the $150 satellite to the $1060 buyin FTOPS #10, first my JJ loses to 99 allin preflop to rape half my stack, but through my greatness I managed to rebuild and was back in the top third of the field with about half of the entrants eliminated, and then my AA loses allin preflop to QTs when the guy flops a migga fligging flush on me. I mean WTF.

Anyways even I have to admit some digghead ranting about the bad beats he took last night is no kind of good blog reading. It doesn't even feel good to write it, believe me. Suffice it to say that I when I run bad, I take a lot more bad beats than most people could deal with, and it can really sap away my enthusiasm pretty quick if it continues for long. So today after yet another night of spankage, I got nothing fresh.

So be it.

Let me change things up then by asking a few questions of the readers today.

First, Esquire80 left me this comment to yesterday's Bet or Check the River post:

"I've got to agree w/ shrike, your optimal play is to bet out right into him. In this particular case he would have most likely folded but he could have called, folded or you would have induced a bluff which you were prepared to snap off.

Based on your read you are assigning him something like a 10% chance of a flush?

Overall, you are losing value here unless your plan is to check raise the river with your strong holding in an attempt to squeeze more out of him. In this case he didn't have anything to squeeze but if he had someting like Krag w/ 2 pair or got a cooler w/ a set you could felted him.

Frankley, to be results oriented I don't think you could have got any more value out of that hand given his holding but the value bet on the river is the superior play in the long run." (emphasis added)

This is a very black-and-white-ly stated position, and in my experience in poker such matter-of-fact strategies generally prove not to be nearly so cut and dried. So I get it, my presumed fellow lawyer guy, you say that betting is better than checking in this spot. But not once do you say why that is correct. And the why is at least as important as the what. So do tell, I am all ears.

Secondly, let me ask a more general question here. Am I the guy everyone is talking about who uses too many commas and uses them too liberally? I mean, I like to think I'm pretty self-aware, and it's not like I don't know that I seem to write more and longer posts than most people. But when people are out there commenting on how people use commas all wrong, have they actually been talking about me this time for real? That would be fucked up.

Here's another good one: Who the fuck would ever be betting on an NBA game right now? Go read that link. I have to credit our man for the inside scoop on the betting lines in Las Vegas Miami Don for that link. But dayummm, who on earth is betting basketball these days? Think the NBA might have to revise its stance that this was an isolated referee, acting alone, all along? Christ, that shit just gets worse and worse.

Oh and before I go, for those who don't know, Bayne and Waffles have a $100 staight-up bet going where Waffles bets that he can climb to the top of the year's Mookie leaderboard within I think two more months or so. When the bet was made earlier this week, I think Waffles was in 7th place or something, and was basically $260 or something behind the current leaders, LJ and Surflexus. Well, already Waffles busted out with a third-place finish in this week's Mookie tournament, climbing a bit on the board and narrowing the amount he has to recover in the next several tournaments. So today I am going to establish some odds on this bet, which I will plan to track the rest of the way through the challenge.

When Waffles agreed to bet $100 straight-up that he could climb Donk Mountain enough times to overtake the leaderboard top spot in just a couple of months in the Mookie of all tournament, in my own head I set Waffles' chances at about 3% of winning that bet. Now, however, after this week's performance alone, I'm going to kick those odds up to about 12%. That is a big jump right there, but think of it this way: what kind of odds would I be willing to offer someone who wanted to bet me, say, $50 that Waffles would win. So I get to keep his $50 if Waffles does not take the Mookie lead, but if he does take the lead at any time in the next two months, would I be willing to pay $500 in exchange for the $50 now? I would not, not quite. I'm setting that line at around 8 to 1 odds, like I would take the $50 now if I knew I would have to pay out $400 if Waffles wins the bet. So 8 to 1 is where I'm setting "the Waffles line" for now. 8 to 1 everyone, place your bets, 8 to 1.