Too Big to Fail

Those of you who subscribe to HBO will have undoubtedly seen "Too Big to Fail" by now if you ever channel surf like I do. I watched it last week on the main HBO -- not HBO2, HBO3, HBO Comedy, HBO Thriller, or HBO Financial Meltdown Documentaries. The movie was done with most of the style and flair that HBO has become so well known for by now over the years -- excellent writing, good character development, a very strong cast, and of course the best pre-written plot money could buy -- and the end result was really quite an enjoyable watch for me. I ended up staying up past midnight watching -- kind of shades from back in the day when I used to be permitted to stay up all night playing online no-limit holdem mtt's -- and believe me, nowadays for me to be up past midnight is almost unheard-of, post April 15.

But the thing that struck me the most about my watching of Too Big to Fail last night is how much it still moves me. It's going on roughly three years since I left Lehman Brothers out of fear for the company's future and for my job, and yet I still could not peel my eyes away from the tv screen. As I sat and watched a pretty true to life portrayal of brash former Lehman CEO Dick Fuld by James Woods, John Heard's Joe Gregory and even a small portrayal of Lehman CFO Erin Callahan, the emotions of it all just came pouring back. They really did. The hatred I felt for Fuld there at the end. The despair showing in his eyes as he begged first his competitor investment banks, then other larger commercial banks, and eventually even the Japanese and the Koreans for a lifeline to keep his company afloat, and especially the anger and disappointment while Fuld watched Paulson, Bernanke and co. bail out AIG for over $150 billion just days later. Watching Woods' portrayal of Fuld screw up the investment deals that would have saved the company at the last minute as is commonly told really happened by those on the inside back in 2008 just makes my jaw drop, true today just as much as it was three years ago. It really was an amazing, incredible time in this country's history, and in a lot of ways -- strange as this is to say -- it was almost a privilege in some ways for me to be able to be a direct part of it as much as I was.

The other thing that I think a lot of people will take away from Too Big to Fail is the portrayal of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in the movie. While I think most of us will always think of a bulldog, ramming idea after idea down the throat of Congress and the American people, and the guy who presented the bill for a $750 billion bailout of Wall Street without any controls whatsoever on how Paulson could dole the money out, to whom and for what purposes, this film portrays a different side to the man who spearheaded the movement to avoid the second Great Depression in the United States. While Too Big to Fail seems to me to paint a picture of Tim Geithner as a desperate, gym-addicted, almost whimsical inputter into the country's handling of the financial crisis, the movie tells the story of a hopeful, incredibly solid, formal and almost compassionate Hank Paulson, worrying almost singularly about how to protect the country and solve the worst financial crisis in several generations. While Paulson always seemed calculated and cold-hearted to me in real life while the whole mess was hitting the fan a few years back-- perhaps that is my green Lehman blood still flowing -- HBO portrays him as a deeply concerned and caring man, literally unable to sleep at night due to the constant worry about how to fix things for his country. One of the most moving scenes of the film to me is almost a throwaway, when Tim Geithner calls after another session at the gym and tells Paulson that the financial bailout bill looks like it's not going to pass Congress, and Paulson gets this look on his face like he is literally sick, puts the phone down, and then runs into the bathroom and retches. That's just not the image I ever had of the former head of Goldman Sachs, and I think the distinction between what most of us likely think of Paulson and what the makers of Too Big to Fail obviously want you to think may be one of the highlights as well for any of you out there who choose to watch.

Yeah, it's been well over two and a half years since the events of September 2008 changed Wall Street, and America, overall forever, but to me for very personal reasons the events still feel like they were just yesterday. Watching Too Big to Fail on HBO this past week was like a blast from the past, and even though reliving much of what I lived through that year is not exactly what I would call enjoyable in the strict sense, I have to say that, with a little bit of time under the bridge at this point, I thoroughly enjoyed HBO's take on things. If you find yourself with a couple of hours to kill and you are anyone with an interest in such things, I bet you'll be glad you took the time to watch.

Dude Where's My Car

While channel surfing early last night, one of the HBO's was showing what I think is a greatly underrated comedy of the last decade -- "Dude Where's My Car?". Now I am no kind of Ashton Kutcher fan -- I've never once watched That 70s Show and have never seen Punk'd -- and I don't exactly love Sean William Scott either (though he has been funny in several movies, come to think of it), but "Dude Where's My Car" is a seriously funny movie. There is something about that scene with the back tattoos that makes me able to watch it over and over and over again, and like many of the other good comedies of the past decade, most of the scenes in this flick are are actually pretty damn funny stuff.

Anyways, in watching this movie for the first time in probably five or six years, it occurred to me how much this is actually "The Hangover", but long before "The Hangover" was ever made. Not that "Dude Where's My Car?" invented this move either necessarily, but basically the movie begins with these male friends waking up the morning after a crazy party, totally hung over, their place completely trashed, and not remembering anything about what they did last night. In both films, however, the friends quickly notice that something is missing that they urgently need to find. In "The Hangover", it's their friend who is about to get married, while in "Dude", it's their car (duh). But in both films, what ensues is a hilarious misadventure that involves the friends working backwards from whatever clues they are able to find about what they did the night before, eventually ending up in finding their missing thing that they so desperately need.

What's especially interesting to me is some of the details that are eerily similar between the two movies. Like, both crazy nights involved the friends throwing around tons of money and being all crazy at a strip club. One of the first places the protagonists end up in both films is the strip club, where everybody seems to know them even though they have no clue who any of these people are. In both movies, one of the friends -- who has a wife ("The Hangover") or a girlfriend ("Dude") hooks up with a smokin' hot chick (in "The Hangover" it is Heather Graham, and in "Dude" it is Kristy Swanson) during the night of which they have no memory whatsoever. And, in what has to be the strangest coincidence of them all, in both movies, the friends actually inadvertently stole a bunch of money from a sexually ambiguous person who pursues them throughout the plot. In "The Hangover", it's that crazy Asian guy who also played the doctor in "Knocked Up" for those of you who watch all of these kind of movies, only in "Knocked Up" he was a regular guy, whereas in "The Hangover" he is an oddly effeminate, very strange-talking gangsta type. In "Dude", it's that Rene Russo look-alike stripper who stole 200 grand from her club and apparently gave it to the friends to return to her later, which they never did. It is hard to ignore this obvious parallel between the two movies, and frankly I find it hard to believe that the writers of "The Hangover" were not at least subconsciously influenced by having seen "Dude Where's My Car" previously. The plot commonalities are simply too great to ignore.

"Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude! What's mine say?"
"Saaaaaaaaaaaweeeeeeeeeeeeeettttttt! What's mine say?"
"Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude! What's mine say?"
"Saaaaaaaaaaaweeeeeeeeeeeeeetttttttahhhhhh! What's mine say?"


Classic. Go watch "Dude Where's My Car" if you haven't ever seen it.

Lost n Vegas

So, so much going on right now.

Have I mentioned that it is less than a week until I leave for Las Vegas? Things are so crazy at the office right now that it seems completely surreal at this point. But only three more work days....Three more work days....Three more. I just keep telling myself that in the hopes that sometime soon I will finally wake up to the bright sunrise of Saturday morning.

And speaking of my office, how many effing times am I going to try to open my office door with my home key? Why would the key to my home ever fit my office door? And more importantly, why do I keep doing the same thing -- pretty much 4 out of 5 days every single week -- and never, ever seem to learn? Is it because it's so early in the morning, and I haven't really woken up yet or something? Or is it because of the fact that the PDAs and web-based email access and emailing me .wav files of my voicemails and the cell phones and everything else, there really is very little line anymore between home and work, so I am making a purposeful metaphor by trying to use the key to one place to enter the other.

So the Lost stuff is quickly fading away, as I knew it would. When something this bad gets on to the airwaves in a big spot, it's all the rage for a couple of days, and there's always going to be the contrarians out there beating the bushes about how great it was. As I wrote about here recently, I accepted a long time ago that you just can't do anything about the contrarians. The more prominent and the more obvious the situation is, the more guaranteed you are to have those people out there claiming the opposite of the obvious. With most people as I have mentioned previously, it is some unstated (and sometimes, unconscious) desire to feel smarter than others. Other people will come right out and state it in fact, as we have seen on my blog comments over the past couple of days -- that they "get" the story in a way that nobody else does, because they are smarter, and they really understood it while nobody else on the planet did. It's part of what makes the world go round I guess. But in any event, it's fading now which I think is good. That big of a copout just should not be talked about publicly for very long, and ultimately with so precious little actual content to discuss, there just isn't a lot there to captivate the public.

One other item -- I finally went and read Doc Jensen's two-part column about the Lost finale yesterday on ew.com -- he managed to keep this one to a mere 16 pages so I guess we should be happy it wasn't longer. Jensen is basically the only person I've ever met who aboslutely puts me to shame as far as the amount he writes, most of the time about seemingly nothing when it comes to his ridiculous overanalysis of this show. But strangely, Jensen's 16-page opus on the finale made just a very passing mention of the closing montage, which showed a bunch of plane wreckage strewn across the beach, and no shots of the Losties. Some have speculated that this somehow is the remains of the original Oceanic Flight 815, except that there were no survivors at all, which would somehow suggest that perhaps all that we saw in six years of Lost was just a dream of some kind much like Sideways World ended up being. Others have said this is the remains of the Ajira plane that Lapidus tried to pilot off the island at the end of the finale, which means that it crashed and all those aboard were killed off. My answer? Who cares? Once you've gone and made Sideways World just a purgatory for whenever everyone finally dies to come together again to get ready to "move on" to the afterlife or whateveritis, who cares whether Lapidus, Sawyer, Kate, Miles, et al ended up getting off the island and escaping, went on to live another 50 years back in their "real" lives, or whether they just plummeted to the ground minutes after Jack saw them fly overhead as he himself died in the same bamboo field where he originally found himself in the pilot of this series. The only thing that matter is, we saw Sawyer and Kate there in the church at the end, so eventually they died, and it really doesn't matter how. Don't get me wrong -- it is so quintessentially Lost to end the entire series with an ambiguous scene that deliberately leads some to question whether or not the entire plot of the entire series ever even happened. In an unintentionally comedic way, that is about the best possible way Lost could have ended its run, and the most symptomatic of how they addressed the rest of the plot points on the show in the end. Maybe the whole damn thing never even happened!

I wish.

I'll leave you with this funny Lost link today (shit, forgot to check with Jordan again about whether or not it is ok to link to this), which I picked up from the comments to Goat's blog. Jordan of course will have no need to watch this link, and in fact he will I am sure be totally flabbergasted as to why the narrator is asking all of these obvious questions, but to the other 17 million of you out there, this is just a smattering of some of the interesting questions still remaining about the series, in a roughly chronological order of the time when they first arose and have never been addressed.

And with that, I think I shall end my Lost coverage for now. As I said, the show had a great run, it declined dramatically after the midpoint when the writers officially put an end date to the show and were thus forced to actually decide upon the ending, and then the execution of that ending was done about as poorly as a show could do it over the final two seasons, and in particular in the last episode. But at this point, sure the shock of having been anally lubed by the show's producers and writers is still there, but it's wearing off fast. We've been through this before as many people have commented, be it Dallas or St. Elsewhere or most recently, the Sopranos, and at this point already I am ready to let it go.

Six days till Vegas. Later in the week I should be back with some more reminiscence about past trips to the desert and to the World Series of Poker.

More on Lost

After being out-of-pocket busy basically all day on Monday, I have had a little bit of time to digest some of the things people are saying about the Lost finale this past weekend. To those I will offer a few comments:

For starters -- and this is an objectively true statement I am about to make here -- it does not make a show good simply because it "makes you think" or because people talk about it a lot or think about it a lot outside of the show. Obviously many people could write a show that makes the viewer "draw his own conclusions" or "fill in the dots" by simply not telling you anything. They could show a lot of crazy or thought-provoking images for an hour with no coherent way of tying them together, and people would be left to "draw their own conclusions", while the show could actually suck. Balls. Shit, that's basically exactly what Heroes was/is (is that show even still being made?) -- one of the worst, most thoughtless shows ever made, that was so unmitigatingly stupid that sure, it had very smart people spending hours every week thinking about it, trying to piece it together and make sense of it all. But does that make Heroes a good show? The answer to that is obvious. So, it is clear in an objective sense that simply because the writers told us nothing in the end about Lost and left us completely wondering ourselves and talking amongst our friends, this does not in itself have the slightest bit to do with making Lost a good show, or making the finale a good episode, or anything like that.

And while we are on the topic of the viewers having to draw their own conclusions, I wish wish wish the Lost defenders out there could see the things that they write objectively instead of through their own personal prism. Instead, what we have is an army of Lost devotees who are out doing the writers' dirty work for them, proclaiming the show to have been great and to have answered everything we needed to be answered, and that to me is the saddest part of all this.

After taking the time to trash me and my intellect in the comments to my blog, Jordan's post about the Lost finale has got to be the best out there among the people I actually know. This thing has more gold in it than a prospector's pan in 1849 (god I am so good with the similes):

"Interestingly, the one mystery not conclusively revealed was what exactly the island is and what was that light at the center that “had to be protected.”

Oh. My. God. When you're starting off your post like this, you just know it has got to be good. So this is the one mystery not conclusively revealed, huh? Pure, 32 karat gold right there. And this is written by a guy who just accused me (not him) of having never actually watched the show. Ugh that is so classic, farrr too classic to even respond to. Let us just move on.

To continue from Jordan's post, the pure gold continues like the eternal light springing up from deep within the heart of the island, that thanks to Jordan we now all know what it (obviously) was:

"My best guess, which to me is essentially obvious but also irrelevant, is that the island is essentially an Eden. Not the Eden, insofar as I do not think the show took a literal approach to the Bible comparisons. Rather, it is the well-spring of all life, both of this world and separate. The island itself has some odd properties, which incidentally would make sense in context. If the island is also the source of life (or maybe “souls” moreso than life), it may be the source of other things as well…like time, or perhaps electromagnetism."

Essentially obvious, huh? And irrelevant. So not only am I and 10 million other viewers totally wrong and we somehow missed this key and very obvious, overtly-stated explanation of the nature of the island (I'm just guessing here, but perhaps that is because Jordan's explanation was never given, is clearly not obvious, and in fact is almost certainly idiotically incorrect), but in fact it is obvious! And on top of that, it's also not relevant what the island is! Thank you for making that conclusion for us, which we deserve I suppose since we are all so motherfucking obtuse that we did not see when the writers made it obvious that the island = Eden. Of sorts. It is so clear now, thank you for "filling in the dots" for us. Hahahahahaha.

"The island is protected by some supernatural force. Specifically, throughout time, there was a guardian of the light. The first guardian we meet is Jacob’s “adopted mother” but there were likely those that came before her. That is one of the unexplained mysteries that fall under the banner of what is this island and how did it come to exist. We don’t know that answer, but how could we? Was the show supposed to show the big bang, the creation of the universe, and the formation of our planet and/or life, as coming from this hidden wellspring Eden?"

Wow. I mean, what do you say? So, so far we have explained away the fact (read that: F A C T) that the writers never told us what the island was, by claiming that they not only did tell us but that it was in fact "obvious". Now we've also explained away their not telling us about the origin of the island, because -- if I can follow the apparent "logic" used in the paragraph above -- there's no way we could possibly know the answer to this because to do so would require the writers to go back to the beginning of time and the Big Bang in order to do so. This is logic at its finest, ladies and gentlemen, please run to hire this guy to be your lawyer.

And the shit just keeps rolling downhill in this post:

"Jacob is forced to take over and takes vengeance on Smokey by throwing him into the wellspring/light, which kills his body but leaves him a bodyless sentience. WTF is that all about? I don’t know, but like the show tells you, its best just to accept it. Let it go. Why didn’t it affect Desmond the same way? Because Desmond had some sort of resistance to the island’s forces, which we learned when he survived the explosion of the hatch and was able to see the future, or when he lived through the time-travel sickness in the episode, The Constant. But in the end, you have to take that leap of faith. Smokey turned into Smokey, but Desmond lived because, well, that’s what happened."

Like the show tells you, it's best just to accept it. Let it go. Nothing to question here. The main villain (the only villain in the end) of the entire 6 seasons, the guy who was shrouded in mystery until the third to last episode of the series, we should just "let go" the minor issue of...you know...his very existence. His whatthefuck is he? Who is he? What happened when he went into the light? We should just let it all go of course! Why? Because the show told us to!

You can go ahead and read the rest of his Lost post to see all the other "maybe"s and the "probably"s and the "presumably"s peppered throughout the rest of Jordan's explanation of what happened on the island in the finale, just to get a flavor for what was so "obvious" in addition to not being relevant about that aspect of the finale.

And then of course there is the whole resolution of Sideways World, which Jordan again has the obvious (and I suppose also irrelevant?) explanation for:

"The last season, though, was the Sideways World, which was a mystery. Until now. Now we know that Sideways World us nothing like a flashback or flashforward. It’s something different. Its the place you go when you die, before you can move onto the afterlife (perhaps a return to the light…on the island!).

Admittedly, this last part was not clearly explained, but apparently, somehow, the Losties had bonded to the point that they were going to move onto the afterlife together. They “created” a place where they could meet before crossing over. This does not mean that they died at the same time. Time has no meaning in this afterworld, as we know from some direct statements to that effect by Christian Shephard. So whenever those characters died, be it before Jack (the incestuous step-siblings and Locke) or way after Jack (Hurley and Ben, who acknowledged that the story went on post-Jack by mentioning how well they did as the respective new #1 and 2). They all return to this sideways world.

How did the sideways world come to exist? My guess is that it always existed, in a sense that there is a waiting room for each of us, in the Lost world. The group may’ve been anchored together by Desmond, who said fairly clearly before unplugging the wellspring that he had already seen the afterlife and that he could maybe take everyone with him. So perhaps he was the bonding point that allowed all of them to meet up after the end.

That covers most of it. Any questions? Feel free to ask."

Now how could we have any questions after an obvious and complete explanation like that? Oh sure, Sideways World was a purgatory, hmmm? And how did the Losties create it (Christian Shepherd says at the end that the Losties created it for themselves to be together)? I am going to guess that on their flight out on the Ajira plane, maybe Kate and Lapidus whipped up Sideways World in the in-flight blender somewhere in the airspace over Fiji? Or maybe Sawyer formed Sideways world out of a dump he took mid-flight? Or maybe it was Miles and Claire who thought creating an entire fucking alternate reality would be a cool thing to pass the time out of their airline meal in the middle seat between them while they taxied down the runway at LAX?

I could go on and on and on about Jordan's post, combined with his unbelievable comment on my blog yesterday, but alas I do only have the time for one more thought today, to all you Lost-defenders out there: You come off -- objectively here, now -- sounding like a goddam horse's ass if you equate what the writers didn't tell us about this show with "drawing one's own conclusions" or "filling in the dots". The fact is, only a complete assmuffin bottom-2%-intellect in the history of the Earth would even consider publicly attaching their name or identity to the notion that the viewers not even knowing (1) what the island is, (2) the identity or nature of either of the two main characters who the whole story ended up being about even were, or (3) how or what the alternate reality that comprised about 90% of Season 6 after never being mentioned previous even came from, constitute minor enough omissions to be described as "filling in the dots". A better comparison using that utterly inapt analogy would be not to failing to "fill in the dots" but rather to failing to give us the numbers to connect the dots to, the magazine with the connect-the-dots puzzles in it, in addition to failing to provide a writing implement, the invention of paper, even any usable language or form of communication to work with in the first place, or the creation of life on earth to want to complete the dots puzzle in the first place. This is not "draw your own conclusions" television, folks. Putting aside the unintentionally comedic attempts by Jordan and others at justification for Lost's unthinkable gaffes, which thinking people immediately dismiss as the rantings of a blind denialist, if you're going to be a defender of the show out there, and you care if people think you are dumber than fucking Fluxer, you need to at least make some attempt to stick to this reality, the one we all live in on the present-day Earth -- as opposed to the one "obviously" created by the Losties in their own private little purgatory that we all get to create whenever we want to in life (who knew?). This means you need to actually address the actual shortcomings of the actual show instead of just attempting to explain them away as not actually unclear, not relevant, or otherwise.

It's kind of like poker, in a strange way. Some people play poker over time by denying the truth and simply ignoring the problems they might have because they don't want to accept that they are beat in a given hand, that they have not broken even this year, that they are not a good player overall, etc. Others who are successful rise above this "obvious", self-serving denialism and learn to see things for what they actually are, rather than allowing themselves to get emotionally involved in things to the point that they lose all ability to be objective. Although I can conceive of a response to the Lost finale from someone who addresses the show's shortcomings in real, intelligent ways and still overall enjoyed the show (not that I have seen that yet), to simply state that the show is great because it leaves the viewers to fill in the minor details and in particular because they did explain all of the outstanding mysteries (save for one) is simply being the proverbial ostrich in the sand.

Worst Finale of All Time?

Or just of recent memory?

Not too much time today, but let me just say this about this weekend's Lost series finale:

First and foremost, those writers have got some mf'ing balls to not even attempt to explain what the island is in the finale. Or in the entire show, for that matter. To give us a show with this much mystery, have it basically all be about The Island, and then to end the show never even giving us a clue about what the island is? That shit is criminal. I'm sure these ahole pompass writers will tell everyone and their mother that they wanted to do it this way, that this is the beauty of the whole thing, but in reality, they're monkey turds. It is downright assholic to end the show like that, with not even a beginning of an explanation as to what the island actually is, where it is, when it is, anything. Nothing. To do that to your loyal fans for six years, who've stuck with you when the show was good years ago and even when it got horrible for the past couple, to do that to us just because you can is, well, assholic.

So no island explanations whatsoever in the finale. And how do they resolve Sideways World? With the equivalent of "it's all a dream"! It's unbelievable, really. This was the best plot idea the writers could come up with a couple of years ago? This plot? That Sideways World -- you know, that thing that you spent about 15 hours this season revealing to us piece by piece by piece -- was actually just a purgatory-type of place, where all the Losties went when they died in the real world. A place that does not exist in time or space, just a place that the Losties "created themselves, together" as Christian Shephard put it at the end, so they could all be together and then "move on" as a group. WTF. I repeat -- that was the best plot arc you fucknuts could come up with over the past two years?

I'll go you one further by the way -- the Lost writers were so discombobulated this year that they didn't even know this was how they were going to end it up. Because don't even tell me they would have had Juliette mumble to Sawyer just minutes before she died in the season premiere this year that "It worked", and then never even go on to explain wtf that means. And if Sideways World was not somehow created at all by the bomb going off, then Juliette was totally wrong that it worked, and the whole thing just makes no sense. But they just never explained it, did they? Just left it out there twisting in the wind.

And the last horrifyingly stupid thing the writers did in this finale was end up having Flocke killed by fucking shooting him. With a regular gun. In the back. That's it. Forget the black smoke -- shiat, the closed the black smoke got to making any appearance at all on Sunday night was one of those ghey promos during the breaks -- and forget all the week-long, season-long and really to some extent series-long wondering about how one can actually "kill" the body-less black smoke. No need. Instead they just have Desmond big special power mean that he can crawl into the light and remove the stopper -- quite anticlimactic in its own right -- which then I guess removed Flocke's powers (hence Jack drawing blood on his ass with a vicious right hook), and then they just kill him, the great evil baddie of the island, with a quick shot to the back, and that's it.

It's amazing, really, that the pomp of some people can swell so large that it leads them to try to pull one over on the very viewers who made them what they have become today. Cuse and Littleton (whatevertbefucktheirnamesare) are dead to me, and to millions of other people in this country and around the world from here on out, and I have zero doubt that those two f-heads won't ever amount to anything ever again in their pathetic little lives. It's hard for two people to step down harder in a big spot than those two asseaters did this weekend, this season, and really for the past coupe of years. Although in a way the finale was perfectly symbolic of all the problems Lost has had since the powerfully captivating "We have to go back!" scene between Jack and Kate a few years back, ultimately what galls me more than anything else is the fact that the writers literally created an entire construct just for this season that ended up being basically a meaningless, dreamlike "purgatory" where everyone's dead soul goes when they finally die. Very little effort was made in wrapping up this story for the past couple of years, and after making us invest so much over the years, it's a move that is as unthinkable as it is a great big "yuck fou" to all the audience over the years. I hope those two producer douchebags who made the first two hours on Sunday night all about themselves really savored the moment, because it'll be the last we hear from either of them in any positive way for some time.

Go ahead, I dare you to disagree in the comments.

L O S T

OK ok, after a number of texts and emails from people looking for my thoughts on the second-to-last episode of Lost, I watched this week's ep again this week, and here are my thoughts.

In general, I thought this was a fairly mediocre show. Ultimately, in my view this episode continued very well along with the main Season 6 themes of answers that are too pat to be believed, and just generally bad storytelling that here at the end shows just how far the writers have strayed from anything they ever thought of even earlier this season, let alone last year or in earlier seasons.

This week's episode had a lot in the "too pat" category as we have seen more and more of heading towards the end of the show. For example, how convenient that Ben just happened to have four huge bars of C4 hidden in a secret safe in his old barracks? We never heard about that before. And wasn't it convenient how now, when the story kind of "needs" them to, all of the Losties can now suddenly see Jacob. And speaking of Jacob, something tells me that we might have just seen the only explanation we're going to see for why a young Jacob appeared randomly around the island this season following MIB succeeding in killing Jacob through Ben Linus -- it was a young Jacob, and they will both likely disappear once the ashes burned down in that fire Jacob set. And don't even get me started on Richard. If that wa Richard's death scene that we just saw with the smoke, that was -- well -- fast. Too pat. I would say it was a horrible death scene, but given the last few weeks of this show it is basically par for the course as far as how these writers have been killing our characters off of late. I don't buy that we've seen the last of Richard though -- he will have to have some role in this finale, even these writers cannot be that demented to leave Richard out of the series finale, could they? After that ignominious death scene? Come on. It's almost like the writers have turned bitter and angry and are taking it out on the viewers here as the show winds towards its conclusion.

The bad storytelling is the other big aspect to this week's show, and it applies equally well to this entire season and really Season 5 of Lost as well. Fr one thing, am I the only one who feels like the writers kinda shot their wad here in the second-to-last episode? I mean, sure we still need to see how the story ends up getting resolved, but really, with Jack taking over the helm for Jacob so willingly here, and assuming there is going to be some kind of ultimate happy ending to the show, what suspense really is there left for the finale? And plus, amazingly we still have Sideways world completely unresolved heading into the finale! Ugh. Here we are going into the final episode of this epic series, and the big secret is the thing that never even existed until earlier this season. In fact, that's the problem with the whole story these past couple of years on Lost -- there is simply no relationship whatsoever nowadays to the story from the first four seasons of the show. Period. It's become a story of Jacob vs MIB, rendering everything we watched for four seasons -- the caves, Dharma, all the stations hidden all over the island, the Hatch, all of it -- totally without any significance at all. Shit, why'd they even bother introducing Dogen, and Weird Al, and the temple with the crazy rejuvenating spring and such, given that none of it has any meaning whatsoever in the end with this show? Wazzup with the writers needing this much filler during the final season of a show that used to be so ridiculously rich in story and suspense.

And while we're on the topic of Jacob and bad storytelling by the Lost writers, how does Jacob say that Kate can be his successor even though her name was crossed off the wall (let's put aside btw the fact that Jacob said he crossed her name off because she became a mother, which she did not wtf -- don't even try to go there with Aaron, come on now?!). I mean shiat, so it turns out that anybody can be the next Jacob when Jacob is done huh? What about me? If I appeared on the island just now, could I be the one too, even if my name wasn't up on Jacob's wall either? Come on, writers! "It's just a line of chalk on a wall, Kate. If you want the job, it's yours." Come on with that. Then wtf have we been paying attention to this whole notion of the "candidates" for all season? Why did you writers tell us that was important if it actually has no meaning at all?

And while we're at it, this whole thing about Jacob having brought these Losties to the island because none of them have anything to go back to? Sorry, but I gotta call bullshit on that one, too. Kate? Sure. She was in handcuffs, going to jail, a murderer and the most annoying biatch in LA as far as we can tell. If you want to argue Sawyer was facing a similar situation, with absolutely no one to go back to, reeling from having killed an innocent man in Australia as I recall before boarding Oceanic Flight 815, I suppose I can buy that too. Claire as well I suppose. But everyone else? Come on now. Jack had nothing to go back to? Why, because he didn't have a wife and kids? Come on. For a long part of my life, I didn't have a wife and kids, and at some points I was also a raging alcoholic like Jack. That doesn't mean I had nothing to go back to reality for, though, not by a long shot. What about Jack's job? His family? Please, with the "nothing to go back to" crap. OK, and Sun and Jin? They had "nothing to go back to"? Yes, they were having problems, and Sun was going to leave Jin, but how can you say she had nothing to go back to? I'm sure she felt that she had everything to go back to now that she had finaly decided to leave Jin. Hurley, sure he believed he was somehow cursed, but he did have 165 million reasons waiting for him to go back off the island. And this doesn't even get in to the other Losties from years past -- Charlie had nothing to go back to? Shannon? Boone? Come on with that, Jacob, your writers should surely be able to do better than that. It's just yet another too-pat answer to a long-running question on this show -- why them? Why did Jacob choose them, specifically, to come to the island? And that, my friends, is one shittyass, silly, over-simplified answer. Come on, they were all "flawed"? Who could you plug in there that isn't "flawed" in some way or another?

Then there is the way that Jack just up and chose to take over for Jacob. This whole thing about Jacob giving them "the one thing he was never given -- a choice" would have resonated far more with myself and all the viewers if we had learned Jacob's story more than one week ago. That is just bad storytelling, plain and simple. Same thing when Jack drank the water and then Jacob said to him, "Now you're like me", just like his mother had said to Jacob some 2000 years before. If we had seen that scene with Jacob taking over for his mother five years ago, now that would have been powerful to hear again this week. Instead, once again, it's just another plot device that the writers completely swung and missed with. And Jack in just seconds is standing up and volunteering for the job, without even knowing what the job is, what it means, anything? He gives up his life as a successful spinal surgeon. His life with his mother. His friends, presumably he has some of them. His money -- as a well-known surgical specialist like he is, he is likely quite rich. He just up and gives it all up, on a dime, no thought needed, oh and btw at the same time gives up his right to ever return to the Earth. Uh huh.

And the last part of bad storytelling from this week's ep came in the final scene, which ended with Flocke starting into the camera and saying in his sinister, angry voice, "I'm going to detroy the island." Did we not already basically know this already? Is that an appropriate level of cliffhanger for the second to last episode? Come on, you could tell by the music and the closeup camera angle that the writers thought they were really messing with our minds with that. Oh my god he's going to destroy the island! Who cares?!!

For the finale, I think we will still need to find out what Widmore's real motiviation here is, because does anyone possibly think Widmore was actually visited by Jacob like he claimed, saw the err of his ways, and then found out from Jacob just how to get to the island to make things right? God no, what an idiot story. I wouldn't have thought even the Lost writers would try to pass that one off as true. And, we're going to need to hear from Ben again as well, because I don't believe that he has once again turned all bad, either. Sideways world will resolve in some way -- I don't really care how -- and otherwise while I will watch the show on Sunday of course, it is hard to imagine how they are going to fill another 2.5 hours with this story.

Who woulda thought it, all this rich story and mystery and mystique and intrigue, and in the end I can't even imagine what they're going to fill 150 minutes with in the finale.

It's been a sad, sad ending to a once-proud series, that is for sure.

"Lost": The Final Stretch

Wow. I'm not sure what surprises me more -- some of the revelations from this week's episode of Lost, or the generally very negative reaction I am seeing out there from seemingly 75% or more of Lost fans to that episode. After having to sit and listen to people make excuse after excuse for this show all through Season 6 (and Season 5 too, really, who am I kidding), through bad episode after bad episode and after all the inconsistencies, the dropped storylines, the pat explanations, all of it, this week the producers give us a 100% mythology-based episode, and the people are up in arms. Sure, so 11 worthless hours of Sideways World this season was all fine and good -- great even -- but now finally seeing the origin of Jacob and MIB, much about the nature of the island, the black smoke, etc., and that sucks.

It's so funny. People are just contrarians. It makes people feel superior if they can act and talk as if they are smart enough to know that what the other guy is saying or is thinking is totally, obviously wrong. And with the anonymity of the internet, and the free and easy access for anyone to just post their opinion for all to see, this is only magnified. It happens even with us poker bloggers. Post a poker hand that you obviously played correctly, and half the people by definition will find something wrong with it. Shit, this phenomenon happens all the time, in particular with "the masses". Bill Belichick makes the known poor decision to go for it on 4th and 7 late in the 4th quarter, misses and loses the game as a direct result? You don't have to go far to find people who will still tell you it was the right call. They'll quote you numbers, they'll work backwards with the math just to concoct a reason to argue against the obvious truth. It makes people feel smart I think. So Lost gives us that redonkulous explanation of the Island's whispers being trapped souls, and right away there are people out there saying what a great, satisfying answer it is. "I knew it!" they'll say, "That's awesome!". Uh huh.

So then this week, we get what I will admit was a frustratingly incomplete episode given the fact that there are...oh...two episodes left in the history of what used to be the best series of the millennium. But let's be honest guys: whereas most of the episodes this entire season on Lost have been 2 or 3 out of 10, this week's had to be a good 5.5 or 6. Defending the show all through these horrifying last two seasons, and then getting on its case after this week's show? I'm sorry, but you are just a moron.

All that said, how frustrating is it that they still haven't told us the true nature of the island? At all. In fact, Jacob and MIB's mother was clear that (1) there had been other men to visit the island already previously (they came, destroyed, corrupted, etc.), and (2) she was not the first of the protectors of the island's mysterious life/light source. So we don't know who she was, we don't know how she got there (she claimed it was the same way as Claudia -- the twins' real mother -- arrived, which was in a shipwreck). But I got the sense that the writers wanted us to get a vibe of some dark side going on with this lady, and I really found myself simply not believing most of what she said in this episode. In a way, this may be where Jacob and MIB learned their incredibly devious, self-centered, manipulative ways when it comes to other people. Because I got the distinct impression that their mother basically said whatever she needed to people to get them to do what she wanted. So I don't know how much of what the woman said was true, but it seems she at least buried some good kernels of truth even inside what were ultimately lies she was telling. But, assuming she was being truthful about not somehow being the mother of the island or something, it is to me highly frustrating that even after this episode, we still don't know what the island itself is, where it is, anything at all about how or why it was created, or by whom.

Moreover, I can't deny that the whole light source in the cave thing was, ultimately, quite cheesey. It's hard to put words around it, but if you're telling me three episodes from the end that oh, the island is on top of a great yellow source of enternal life-giving energy, that somehow flows throughout the whole universe or whatever, I mean, what can I say about that. It's an extremely pat answer, one that will and should be wholly unsatisfying to Lost viewers, well, because, ultimately it is stupid and the show has purported to be not stupid. That's really what it comes down to. The writers obviously find it a totally acceptable explanation, but for me and it sounds like for many others out there, it is basically an insult. Tell me what that light is, or how it got there in the first place, justify it in some way with a plot point from earlier in the show, I don't know, you figure it out, you're the writers! But the bottom line is, there is a smart way to present what this light is, and there's a dumb way. Lost went with the latter on this one, and it seems to have really stuck in the collective viewership's craw.

Not that this was the only too-pat explanation we got this week, which of course only adds to the frustration. The skeletons? Check -- it was MIB and Jacob's mother. I recognize that the writers are wiping their hands together and ticking off another item on the list of loose ends that they have now tied up, but they should realize that -- to the extent anybody even really cares about the skeletons anymore -- this is not a satisfying ending when the two people whose skeletons these are literally never even appeared on the series until (1) the finale of Season 5 (MIB), and (2) the 3rd to last episode of the entire series (Jacob's mother).

And this really gets at the central problem ultimately with the way Lost has gone these past few seasons, and it's something I have mentioned here over and over and over again during that time -- the writers had no clue whatsoever what they were doing with this show until somebody finally decided on a plot arc at some point late during or even after Season 4. It's that simple. The bottom line is that everything we saw on Lost for the first three or four seasons -- everything, from all the backstories of the main players, to the Hatch, the Others, Hydra Island, the frigging polar bears, the freighter, to all of Dharma, all of it -- ends up being totally and utterly meaningless. It is devoid of any meaning at all with the way the writers have taken us here in the end. That's why you keep getting answers like Michael's lameass explanation of the whispers a few weeks back, or last season's inexplicably worthless visit of Walk by Locke, or this week's letdown with the skeletons: because back then was a 100% completely different show than what it is now, with a completely different plot arc. The fact that this week's entire episode -- start to finish -- could have been played at any time earlier this season, or even last season at any time for that matter, belies as well just what I'm talking about. For four years we watched a show about these castaways on an island, discovering things that had been left there from past expedititions by others, mysterious secrets, etc. all while desperately trying to get off the island and return home, to civilization, to the real world. In the end, all the show comes down to a long-running fight between two brothers born to some kind of a supernatural mother in some kind of a(n unexplained) supernatural state, who have been manipulating these other characters all along in furtherance of their own self-involved game. That's all it is. Who cares why Dharma ever came to the island at this point (something they've never really explained). Who cares what that brainwashing room was for at Dharma. Who cares why Libby had previously been in Hurley's mental institution. Who cares why Walt was special? Who cares, right? It turns out, the only story the writers left any real interest in by the end was the one involving two characters who were never even seen or heard from (other than "Help me" in the cabin) before the Season 5 finale, and even during this final season, they've only been seen for what, a total of maybe three more hours? Now I don't know whose genius idea this was, but it has ultimately made a total clusterfuck of the ending of the series, and it's been going on for so long and is so far down the path now, there is aboslutely zero way it changes in the final two episodes. And that's what everybody is feeling inside who's watched this show for six years, whether they can put their finger on it or not. Everything we ever saw on this show has been a waste of time, only interesting us at the time so much because they never told us until Season 6 how totally meaningless it all was. It's unthinkable to me that this was the best idea the writers could come up with at that fateful time after Season 4 when the decision was obviously made as to what was all really going on on the island. But here we are.

The biggest question I have that was generated by this week's episode is (and sadly, I don't really expect any of our outstanding questions to get answered any more than they already were this week, don't get me wrong) whether the black smoke was actually created when Jacob threw his brother's body into the cave of light, over his mother's express warning that this would be "a fate worse than death". In other words, was what we saw there the genesis of the smoke monster? Or was smokey already there, just as the mother said others had been the guardians there before her. At first it seemed like the show was intimating that smokey was born right there, before our eyes. But the more I watched the show, the more I just don't think so. I mean, who was that who appeared to the young twins as Claudia, their real (dead) mother? Do you think it was a "good" ghost -- like I think Richard's wife was earlier this year, or the Jacob sightings, or Hurley's old friend from the mental home a couple of seasons back, etc.? Or, like me, do you think that was smokey, appearing as the dead mother of the children, purposefully to tempt and lure MIB away from the mother and to the other side of the island? That just seems like the most likely answer to me, which means that smokey was already on the island when Jacob and MIB were kids, already able to take the form of any dead person for his own manipulative ends. And if smokey was already on the island when Jacob and MIB were kids, then when we saw MIB go into the cave of light, and come out a minute later as the smoke monster, that was not the first time the smoke had been on this island. In fact, for all we know, there could have been several smokeys on the island.

There is a good possibility from this week's episode, I think, that even the twins' mother might have had smokey capabilities. I mean, they had her kill the entire camp of the first "others", in addition to filling in all of their wells with mud and rocks, seemingly doing so much too quickly even if she was adept enough to commit all those killings and such. I think they were clearly trying to suggest that perhaps she had the same sort of destructive powers as she ended up somehow passing on to her adopted son. She always liked MIB best, she embraced his innate ability to lie and to manipulate, and deep down she even encouraged his rebelliousness and his unwillingness to follow her rules. She liked it. She always liked her evil son best. Perhaps because she was part evil herself, in addition to having been the island's protector. Who knows how that all works. And who cares really, at this point?

Lastly, was anyone else left with the feeling that, although the writers showed the young MIB's anger over not being able to leave the island, to go with his people, they didn't really give a good enough explanation for why things got so bad with him? I mean, I understand he was (rightfully) pissy to have been lied to, to have had his mother killed, and to be forced to be separated from his own people by a mother with some kind of an ulterior motive. But how does this make him pure evil, the darkness, or chaos or whatever Jacob called it in the Richard episode when he explained that the island is the cork keeping the darkness that is MIB in. How is MIB "darkness" or evil? He wasn't evil as a child. Rebellious, yes. Dishonest? Sure. Manipulative? You bet. But he wasn't evil. Somewhere, somehow along the way, things switched from the guy we saw in this week's episode, to the "evil incarnate" theme they've been hinting at all through this season. But they did a very poor job of showing that in this week's episode, and I can't imagine a more logical time to cover that than in this week's show. So I'm not sure what to make of that. I mean, it may be true (this week's episode was a bit ambiguous on this point) that Jacob's brother is just plain dead, and that smokey took the form of his body when, for example, we saw the "Do you know how much I want to kill you?" scene in last year's finale. But then, if smokey had been on the island already for a long time even before Jacob and MIB were born, then why does the smoke monster currently residing in Flocke's body want to get off the island so badly? That was Jacob's brother who wanted that. And if smokey is somehow Jacob's brother, then again I ask, what is it that made him so evil that he is willing to do anything to unleash his chaos and darkness on the universe. How does Jacob's brother even represent darkness? The way he was shown to us this week, he was just a boy, a human, like his brother was. Where do we get from that kid to pure chaos?

So many questions. It was cute in Season 1 and Season 2. I remember nearly having a nervous breakdown waiting for a week to find out who the hell turned on that light down in the hatch, and what awaited the castways in there. But having this many questions, on this kind of a level, with just two episodes remaining, I have to admit is quite a bit disheartening. Either way, there are just 3.5 hours left of what was once the best show of the 2000s on ABC.

BuddyDay, the BBT and Lost

Wednesdays are fun during the BBT, ain't they? Tonight will be the third of six Buddy tournaments during the BBT5, and tonight we will also learn the identity of the 12th of 24 qualifiers for the series-ending Tournament of Champions. After tonight, it's halfway gone. You guys who keep getting in ahead but just not lasting to the end, keep at it and with twelve more chances you've still got a better chance of getting there than anyone else in the field. Those of you who've been off your game, pushing too hard for the early double-up, stacking off earlier than you're used to with subpar hands, after you bust early tonight you will have wasted half of your chances to get in to the ToC without even playing the way you have had success with in the past. So sad, and so unnecessary. Let the halfway point be your wake-up call to start making better decisions, and in particular stop calling and pushing allin so early in the tournament when you know you are either behind or at best only slightly ahead if you get called.

I will probably be paying better attention than usual tonight since in the recent past I would often watch Lost a second time on Wednesdays during the Buddy just to figure out what the hell went on, but that's just not necessary for this show as it continues its de-evolution into Heroes. Last night, the candidates can't be killed by the bomb if the Losties don't pull the wires out. But if they do pull the wires out, then they can be killed? Oy vey. And the whole story -- from the start six years ago to the finish -- of Jin and Sun? Sucked. They never made those two actually relevant, to anything. Then for like two years they kept having one of them think the other was dead, which was done undramatically. Then a couple weeks back they finally had the at-long-last reunion between the two, and that was botched perhaps as badly as any scene this season. Who cares about Jin and Sun? Who ever cared? And certainly who cares about them now? I don't know either. Sayid? Who cares. They're leaving Claire? Who claires?

Oh, and by the way. Is there no opening that can simply eject that tiny little bomb from the submarine? They have to surface -- which apparently was 50 miles up in the just the 10 seconds they had been under water -- to get rid of the bomb, because otherwise, there's what, no airlock on this baby? No place where divers or passengers could exit the sub if need be or in case of repairs or emergency? No hangar or portal of any kind where a flat, square thing that easily fits in a breadbox can be just let out into the water to blow up there? What about the hatch they entered the sub through, is there no emergency override that would allow them to open that hatch up for 10 seconds and let this bomb out? Sayid hugging the bomb tightly and running to another part of the ship is the best plan they had huh. So a bunch of people discover a bomb on a submarine that they have total control of, they've got 3 minutes before it blows, and their best suggestions for dealing with the situation are to (1) let it tick down, because nothing will happen, (2) pull two random wires and hope it stops, (3) surface, or (4) hug the bomb tight and run away. Next thing you'll be telling me Jack's real name is Hiro and that he has the superpower to erase time or something. Sheesh.

And I'm not even going to get in to what a generally horrible job the show has done of actually explaining in any kind of a convincing way why almost any of the people currently "with" Flocke are actually with him. What was Kate ever doing there this season, "helping" him, actually? Why on earth was Jack ever there helping Flocke? Ever? They didn't even really try to put up a good explanation for Jack coming along with Flocke last night. Flocke just said, "I could kill you and all your friends, but I'm not. So you have to help me." And Jack just ate that one up, hook line and sinker. Makes sense, right? Evil incarnate tells you he could kill you -- a fact which we know from multiple episodes this season including the end of the show last night that Jack is positive is not true, mind you -- and that means you have to help Pure Evil escape its prison and unleash itself on the rest of the universe forever. Lezdoit!!

At least next week's scenes look good -- as I've been saying all season, next week's scenes, with Jacob and the Man in Black, and what looks like some flashbacks of theirs, the little boy who keeps the rules, that's the only shit anyone really cares about anymore. Sideways world, Desmond, even the battle with Flocke and Widmore doesn't mean doggy doo to me anymore. Just show me the mythology bitches. So next week's episode looks good. But this week was to say the least, not a good show. Stupid, insultingly stupid plot lines, just plain horrible killing off of characters in totally gratuitous and often silly ways, clearly in an attempt to just narrow down the surviving candidates one by one by one for us. The show has become so simple it is almost like watching the Teletubbies some times.

Anyways, I digress. Tonight is the Buddy at 10pm ET on full tilt. The password as always is "vegas1". The BBT5 is in effect again today, so I would probably expect maybe 85, 90 runners tonight once again, maybe more, in the battle for the $10 buyins, with the most skilled player in the field this evening sure to grab the midpoint seat in the upcoming ToC later this month.

Why Lost Sucks

Back for this week's version of Why Lost Sucks. The writers have now taken to explaining away significant questions or tying up significant loose ends in just about the most pat way imaginable, almost like they are running for the exits as the series winds down its six-year run with nary a whimper.

I mean, did you ever wonder what happened to Libby? Yes, you remember Libby, Tailie during season two who was shot and killed by Michael shortly after taking a liking to Hurley, and one show after we saw a flashback of Libby living in the same mental institution (and looking really effed up, at that) as Hurley had been shortly before coming to the island. And then, that was it. No more Libby, for four years later, the story all but forgotten.

Michael's son, Walt? Also gone since leaving the island in Season 2. But never fear, inquisitive Lost fan! Last season, we saw Locke inexplicably go to visit Walt, for no apparent reason, before Locke was killed by Ben off-island, where absolutely nothing of any significance whatsoever was done or said between the two. But hey, now the Walt story has been all finished up! They've explained everything, haven't they? Walt's strange visions, his ability to control the minds of animals, the telepathy, all of it, explained away because Locke went to see him last year and they shared a meaningless five-minute conversation about nothing.

And now, we finally know the story of Libby. In one fell swoop, the writers have now sewn up probably their most embarrassing gaffe of the entire series -- starting up a whole flashback with Libby and Hurley, but then literally dropping it on a dime and never picking it up again -- by simply showing Libby in Sideways world, also living voluntarily in the same mental institution, but this time she plays an integral part in Sideways Hurley realizing that he needs to go back to the island reality to make things right. So I guess now we know why Libby was in the mental institution with Hurley in the real world prior to Oceanic Flight 815 in her flashback, right? Once again, the writers have explained everything coherently and with integrity to the original story lines they presented to us years ago. Thanks so much for the respect, Lost.

And the worst example of all of this, also from this week's episode? For everyone who has spent the better part of six years wondering where the hell all these whispers on the island are coming from, now we know! Michael explained it very succinctly to Hurley in this week's show: "We're the ones who can't move on."

Of course! They're the ones who can't move on! Why didn't I think of that? It's so obvious now that Michael has explained it for us.

And for those of you who will spend countless hours this week pondering the meaning and significance of Michael's cryptic comment -- about whether it supports the theory of the island as a purgatory of some kind or even hell itself -- I have just one message for you as you wait with baited breath to figure out just what this all means:

Don't hold you breath.

I solemnly guarantee you, loyal, let-down Lost fans that Michael's final statement about the nature of the island whisperers will be the last thing you ever hear about them. Period. The writers of Heroes Lost now think they have sufficiently explained the existence of the weird whispers on the island. Why, they're the voices of the people who can't move on, of course! Now we know exactly what that means! Next week they'll probably move on to explaining away something else that's been at issue for years on Lost -- maybe the polar bears, maybe the identity of the skeletons in the central cave.

What will we learn next about the island's great mysteries? The little blond boy who keeps appearing to Flocke this season is actually just a kid from suburban Chicago who was left alone on the island after his family accidentally returned from a tropical vacation without him? Or no, that the ash ring around Jacob's cabin is really magical pixie dust that spewed from the tail of Mr. Eko's brother Yemey's plane when it crash landed on the island back in the 1970s.

Anything is poossible if you keep makin it up as you go along, guys. Clearly it's been working these past couple of seasons.

Lost Rant

I promised myself I was not going to do this on the blog. But after this week's Lost episode, I just can't contain myself anymore.

Lost sucks. It sucks. It's sucked for at least two full years now. Season 5 was just about the worst abomination of a cool story that could possibly have been done, with the characters randomly flashing through time thoroughly confusing the viewers and leading hundreds of thousands of viewers to just tune out. Now they are back with Desmond this week, with the random time flashing, with his "constant". My god that shit is so stupid I want to scream out in pain every time I see it. And now Season 6 is following right in its foosteps.

The Lost writers have clearly made a crucial miscalculation with respect to the public's interest in the ending of the show, which ABC is obviously counting on to market several new series to take the place of Lost starting next year. These writers actually think we care about the plot of the story anymore. They really think I care about Sawyer's plan to get the Losties off the island. They think I stay up at night wondering what will become of Claire's relationship with Kate. They think I honestly care whether Jack's son likes him in Sideways World. In fact, they actually think I care anything about Sideways World.

And that's where they're wrong. We don't care about Sawyer, or Kate, or Sideways World at all. Three years ago, now then I cared a lot about getting these people off the island. But now? They already got off the island, most of them anyways. And then they willingly chose to go back (most of them, anyways). They were home, and then they decided on their own to go back. And now Lost thinks I care how they get off? Again? Come on. The mystery of escaping the island is dead to all but the most plot-blind of viewers, and the writers should have figured this out a long time ago.

Similarly, and more problematic for this season, nobody actually cares about Sideways World. What the hell do I care if Kate is a fugitive or not, if Charlie died from his overdose or lives to sing at Eloise Widmore's party. So much of this season has been worthless drivel filler to add to the roughly 2 hours worth of the only thing anyone cares a whit about on Lost anymore -- the mythology.

The mythology. That's the only reason anyone watches anymore, isn't it? We want to know what is the island? Who is Jacob? What is MIB's name, and what is his relationship to Jacob? How did these people all get here, and who put them on the island in the first place? What are the "rules" of Jacob and MIB's battle? And who made those rules? Why?

Bottom line, this is all we care about anymore on Lost. The story the writers have come up with these past few seasons since bringing the Oceanic 6 off the island have forced them into this corner, and now they keep trying desperately to fill up 45 minutes out of every show (or, more accurately, 60 minutes on 3 straight shows, and then one show almost entirely about the mythology) with filler story that nobody actually cares about.

So what gimmick have the writers resorted to in this latest episode to try to make somebody give a crap about the Sideways story? They actually believe that they can just put something in a random episode with Desmond flashing randomly through time with absolutely no explanation whatsoever (other then merely stating as fact that Desmond is "special"), and that the fans will accept it. That we will like it. It's unthinkable, really. So in Sideways world, the Widmores are married, and Charles likes Desmond, who works for him. OMG!!! My heart is palpitating at the thought. And guess what else? Wait for it...wait for it....

Desmond is flashing through time! Again!!!!!!!

[Cue heart attack....Just...too...crazy}]

I haven't been this flat out bored by an episode of Lost since Hurley found the bus. Eff you, Lost. Like apprixmately 98% of the people who religiously watched your show four years ago now, I no longer give a shit. I'm just waiting for your little story to end so I can move on to other things.

L O S T

Wow. Sorry for the no post yesterday, but I have to admit then while I was watching this week's Lost episode on Tuesday night, my head popped right off of my neck and it took me an entire day to get it back on straight after all that new information. Well, some of the information was more confirmations of things we already more or less "knew" I suppose, but there was a lot of fodder in there as well, and I think the writers might be laying the groundwork for some more mindfvcks in the coming weeks.

For starters, I'll just mention that I thought the actor who plays Richard Alpert did a great job this week, pretty much for the first time all series long. He has come a long way from when he was seen running through the jungle all panicked and wearing those pirate clothes, hasn't he? While I could have done without the overdrama of the early scenes with Richard and Isabella from the 1850s, I thought the actor did a fine job near the end of the episode, in particular in the scene where Huge helped him to communicate with Isabella's ghost. I enjoyed it, and as a guy who has never understood the hub-bub about the guy who plays Sawyer (Josh Holloway), who I think is one of the most trite and boring actors on television today, I have truly enjoyed the acting jobs put in by both Richard and of course Terry O'Quinn this season as Flocke.

OK, putting past that, this was an episode where we learned a lot about the nature of the island, and a little more about the true nature of the Man In Black, whom we get to see in his "real body" (more on that later) for only the second time in the series, and this time for much longer than the first which was just briefly at the very beginning of last season's finale. One of the things that was "confirmed" in this week's episode -- and I use the quotes there because, with this show and all the mystery and the deception and really with how little we all still understand, nothing is every set-in-stone-decided I have determined -- is that, as explained by Jacob to Richard back in 1850, the MIB represents evil, entropy, darkness, chaos, whatever you want to call it, and that the island is like the cork that keeps the darkness bottled up, and ultimately what keeps it from spreading everywhere and destroying everything. This has been hinted at many many times during the arc of Lost so I do not think this was exactly earth-shattering to anyone who saw Jacob say it this week, but at the same time there is a certain satisfaction to having a fact like that "confirmed" by the deity Jacob in a context that makes it seem very believable and true.

Assuming Jacob can be believed -- again I think a dubious assumption given how manipulative and unforthcoming Jacob has been time and again about his true intentions -- he also confirmed another fact that has been widely speculated since that opening scene of last season's finale -- that MIB thinks human nature is essentially bad, and that Jacob repeatedly brings people to the island to prove that MIB is wrong that humans will always make the wrong choices due to our dark nature. Same thing really with Jacob's desire to have people make the right choices due to their own free will rather than Jacob getting involved directly and forcing it, which presumably would prove MIB's point more than his own. This explains why so much of what the characters on the island do comes down to free will, in particular Ben's decision in last season's finale to kill Jacob, with Jacob right up to the moment before Ben plunged the knife into Jacob's chest pleading with Ben that he did not have to do anything he did not want to do, anything he did not choose to do. For whatever reason, the rules (which rules still remain a complete and total mystery to Lost viewers -- What other rules are there? Who made the rules? Why?) forbid Jacob (and probably MIB as well, I would guess) to "force" the people drawn to the island to do bad or good, but rather the point is to allow the humans to show their true nature, with some (limited) influence from the island's all-powerful, all-knowing deities. Anyways, all this was nice to hear as I mentioned but something we had already pretty much put together given what we've seen over the last season or so, so nothing too earth-shattering in my view.

OK so then let's move on to some of the more interesting stuff -- the questions, the strange out-of-place things, and the other ideas I think these might be pointing towards.

For starters, I'm sure most of you Lost viewers out there were as curious as I was when MIB gave Richard the exact same speech about taking the knife and plunging it deep into Jacob's chest to kill him, and not to let him talk, that if he speaks at all it will be too late, Jacob has tremendous powers of persuasion, etc. I mean, it was like the exact same words that Dogen said to Sayid a couple of weeks ago about MIB before sending Sayid to "kill" Flocke. What is the significance of the fact that the exact same instructions were given to both of these people -- almost word for frigging word -- 150 years apart, and about the other guy (first with Richard it was said about how to kill Jacob, then with Dogen it was said about how to kill MIB/Flocke).

Another very strange fact that was specifically shown to the viewers just 30 seconds in to this week's episode was that Jacob was dressed head-to-toe in all black when he went to visit Ilana at the hospital when she was all bandaged up n stuff. I mean, I went and watched it again on abc.com yesterday just to verify, and there he is, clad in black boots, black pants, black shirt, black overcoat, even a black scarf and black gloves. I know that Ilana was seemingly in the real world, and in the real world Jacob has been seen wearing things other than white or off-white, but still are we really supposed to just dismiss this as pure randomness? The actor just happened to be clad head to foot in black that day when they shot this scene? Come on. At the least, it means nothing and the writers are throwing in a red herring just to get us thinking. It wouldn't be anywhere near the first time a show used such a device, but I just think this has more significance than that. Every single article of clothing was black, even the accessories, and what's more, the camera shot panned down first from his shoes, up his pants, and then showed the whole body, making sure it was very clear that he was all dressed in black. What are we supposed to make of the only time Jacob has ever been seen dressed in black like this?

The third item that really struck me most about this episode was something that MIB says to Richard just past the 30-minute mark of the episode, for those of you watching on abc.com. At one point MIB explains to Richard, "You're not the only one who's lost something, Richard. The Devil [talking about Jacob] betrayed me. He took my body, my humanity."

"He took my body"? Whaaaa? To me that was the strangest, least explainable and at the same time most interesting line of the entire episode, and something that I had to go back and confirm even was really said as I started to form my new Lost Theory of the Week here heading into the home stretch of the series. But he said it. MIB claimed to Richard that Jacob "stole his body" and betrayed him.

So here's what I'm looking at here. We've got instructions given on how to kill the MIB by Dogen to Sayid just a couple of weeks back, and those same instructions were given by MIB to Richard 150 years ago on how to kill Jacob. We've got Jacob showing up at Ilana's hospital room clad entirely in black from head to toe. And we've got MIB claiming that Jacob "stole his body" at some point in the past as well. I do not have all aspects of this theory crystallized at all in my mind right now, but something smells fishy about this whole setup to me after this week's episode. I am afraid that there is at least some chance that MIB at some point in the past was Jacob, or at least one or both of them occupied the other's body at some point in the past. I am maybe 10% concerned that it wasn't even Jacob who went to visit Ilana in the hospital to begin with, but rather was the MIB taking Jacob's form in some way or another. Perhaps this was related to MIB's claim that Jacob stole his body, I don't know, but it's entirely possible that maybe it was MIB who told Ilana to come to the island -- remember, it was Ilana who went and found Sayid and brought him against his will back to the island, the same Sayid who willfully killed Dogen and Weird Al Yankovic and who opened the Temple doors to allow MIB to enter and kill all the remaining Jacobians on the island, the same Sayid who is now set up to become the next MIB, and who "has the darkness growing in him". There could definitely be something there. Those three items I mentioned above I think combine together to suggest that there may still be much more than meets the eye to who these two deities are, and the evidence is growing that they were at least at some point in the past occupying different bodies -- even each other's bodies -- perhaps to the deception of others involved in the coming war on the island. And everything we've been led to believe about Ilana fighting for the "good" side this season could be turned right on its head -- either with or without her knowledge -- as more facts are uncovered in the coming weeks. But I say there was too much put out there for us to glom on to for this to just be dismissed without any further mention of the "body stealing" or the possibility that at some point, the MIB looked like Jacob, was Jacob, or something like that.

Also, one other question about something I watched again last night that I just simply do not get. Why can Jacob not bring Richard's wife back to life, at least on the island? They got real-life ghosts there, Hurley has seen several dead people appear on the island (that I do not think were supposed to be MIB, like many of the apparitions of dead people that we have seen), and we've seen a number of strange people appear magically on the island who were not dead at the time (Locke's father, for example, who Sawyer killed on the island). So why did Jacob say no to Richard's request to bring his wife back to life? Similarly, why can Jacob not absolve Richard of his sins? What would that even entail that would be so difficult? But then why is it that Jacob can grant Richard eternal life? Just what kind of a genie is this Jacob?

What an episode. Here's hoping for more of the same over the final two months of this millennium's best television series.

National Bunch of Clowns (NBC) and the Conan Speech

I am so, so confused. So because Jay Leno is an unfunny clown who has cost the local NBC affiliates millions of dollars with his bomb of a 10pm Tonight Show clone, NBC is now kicking Conan O'Brien to the curb from his own long-promised "Tonight Show" hosting job? After just seven months? Of Jay Leno sucking? That is some promise right there, way to keep your word, NBC.

Somebody get NBC a poker blog right away please.

In any event, no matter how all this ridiculousness with Late Night shakes out, Conan O'Brien's commencement speech at Harvard back in 2000 was and still remains the funniest, best commencement speech ever given as far as I know:

I'd like to thank the Class Marshals for inviting me here today. The last time I was invited to Harvard it cost me $110,000, so you'll forgive me if I'm a bit suspicious. I'd like to announce up front that I have one goal this afternoon: to be half as funny as tomorrow's Commencement Speaker, Moral Philosopher and Economist, Amartya Sen. Must get more laughs than seminal wage/price theoretician.

Students of the Harvard Class of 2000, fifteen years ago I sat where you sit now and I thought exactly what you are now thinking: What's going to happen to me? Will I find my place in the world? Am I really graduating a virgin? I still have 24 hours and my roommate's Mom is hot. I swear she was checking me out. Being here today is very special for me. I miss this place. I especially miss Harvard Square - it's so unique. No where else in the world will you find a man with a turban wearing a Red Sox jacket and working in a lesbian bookstore. Hey, I'm just glad my dad's working.

It's particularly sweet for me to be here today because when I graduated, I wanted very badly to be a Class Day Speaker. Unfortunately, my speech was rejected. So, if you'll indulge me, I'd like to read a portion of that speech from fifteen years ago: "Fellow students, as we sit here today listening to that classic Ah-ha tune which will definitely stand the test of time, I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: "I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority." "I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule." "I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography." "And finally, I believe that one day I will have a television show on a major network, seen by millions of people a night, which I will use to re-enact crimes and help catch at-large criminals." And then there's some stuff about the death of Wall Street which I don't think we need to get into....

The point is that, although you see me as a celebrity, a member of the cultural elite, a kind of demigod, I was actually a student here once much like you. I came here in the fall of 1981 and lived in Holworthy. I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshman Face book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records, so I literally jogged in the August heat to a passport photo office and sat for a morgue photo. To make matters worse, when the Face Book came out they put my picture next to Catherine Oxenberg, a stunning blonde actress who was accepted to the class of '85 but decided to defer admission so she could join the cast of "Dynasty." My photo would have looked bad on any page, but next to Catherine Oxenberg, I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident. You see, in those days I was six feet four inches tall and I weighed 150 pounds. Recently, I had some structural engineers run those numbers into a computer model and, according to the computer, I collapsed in 1987, killing hundreds in Taiwan.

After freshman year I moved to Mather House. Mather House, incidentally, was designed by the same firm that built Hitler's bunker. In fact, if Hitler had conducted the war from Mather House, he'd have shot himself a year earlier. 1985 seems like a long time ago now. When I had my Class Day, you students would have been seven years old. Seven years old. Do you know what that means? Back then I could have beaten any of you in a fight. And I mean bad. It would be no contest. If any one here has a time machine, seriously, let's get it on, I will whip your seven year old butt. When I was here, they sold diapers at the Coop that said "Harvard Class of 2000." At the time, it was kind of a joke, but now I realize you wore those diapers. How embarrassing for you. A lot has happened in fifteen years. When you think about it, we come from completely different worlds. When I graduated, we watched movies starring Tom Cruise and listened to music by Madonna. I come from a time when we huddled around our TV sets and watched "The Cosby Show" on NBC, never imagining that there would one day be a show called "Cosby" on CBS. In 1985 we drove cars with driver's side airbags, but if you told us that one day there'd be passenger side airbags, we'd have burned you for witchcraft.

But of course, I think there is some common ground between us. I remember well the great uncertainty of this day. Many of you are justifiably nervous about leaving the safe, comfortable world of Harvard Yard and hurling yourself headlong into the cold, harsh world of Harvard Grad School, a plum job at your father's firm, or a year abroad with a gold Amex card and then a plum job in your father's firm. But let me assure you that the knowledge you've gained here at Harvard is a precious gift that will never leave you. Take it from me, your education is yours to keep forever. Why, many of you have read the Merchant of Florence, and that will inspire you when you travel to the island of Spain. Your knowledge of that problem they had with those people in Russia, or that guy in South America-you know, that guy-will enrich you for the rest of your life.

There is also sadness today, a feeling of loss that you're leaving Harvard forever. Well, let me assure you that you never really leave Harvard. The Harvard Fundraising Committee will be on your ass until the day you die. Right now, a member of the Alumni Association is at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery shaking down the corpse of Henry Adams. They heard he had a brass toe ring and they aims to get it. Imagine: These people just raised 2.5 billion dollars and they only got through the B's in the alumni directory. Here's how it works. Your phone rings, usually after a big meal when you're tired and most vulnerable. A voice asks you for money. Knowing they just raised 2.5 billion dollars you ask, "What do you need it for?" Then there's a long pause and the voice on the other end of the line says, "We don't need it, we just want it." It's chilling.

What else can you expect? Let me see, by your applause, who here wrote a thesis. (APPLAUSE) A lot of hard work, a lot of your blood went into that thesis... and no one is ever going to care. I wrote a thesis: Literary Progeria in the works of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. Let's just say that, during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn't come up much. For three years after graduation I kept my thesis in the glove compartment of my car so I could show it to a policeman in case I was pulled over. (ACT OUT) License, registration, cultural exploration of the Man Child in the Sound and the Fury...

So what can you expect out there in the real world? Let me tell you. As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain: Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In most situations the correct response to where did you to school is, "School? Why, I never had much in the way of book larnin' and such." Then, get in your BMW and get the hell out of there.

You see, you're in for a lifetime of "And you went to Harvard?" Accidentally give the wrong amount of change in a transaction and it's, "And you went to Harvard?" Ask the guy at the hardware store how these jumper cables work and hear, "And you went to Harvard?" Forget just once that your underwear goes inside your pants and it's "and you went to Harvard." Get your head stuck in your niece's dollhouse because you wanted to see what it was like to be a giant and it's "Uncle Conan, you went to Harvard!?"

But to really know what's in store for you after Harvard, I have to tell you what happened to me after graduation. I'm going to tell you my story because, first of all, my perspective may give many of you hope, and, secondly, it's an amazing rush to stand in front of six thousand people and talk about yourself.

After graduating in May, I moved to Los Angeles and got a three week contract at a small cable show. I got a $380 a month apartment and bought a 1977 Isuzu Opel, a car Isuzu only manufactured for a year because they found out that, technically, it's not a car. Here's a quick tip, graduates: no four cylinder vehicle should have a racing stripe. I worked at that show for over a year, feeling pretty good about myself, when one day they told me they were letting me go. I was fired and, I hadn't saved a lot of money. I tried to get another job in television but I couldn't find one.

So, with nowhere else to turn, I went to a temp agency and filled out a questionnaire. I made damn sure they knew I had been to Harvard and that I expected the very best treatment. And so, the next day, I was sent to the Santa Monica branch of Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. When you have a Harvard degree and you're working at Wilson's House of Suede and Leather, you are haunted by the ghostly images of your classmates who chose Graduate School. You see their faces everywhere: in coffee cups, in fish tanks, and they're always laughing at you as you stack suede shirts no man, in good conscience, would ever wear. I tried a lot of things during this period: acting in corporate infomercials, serving drinks in a non-equity theatre, I even took a job entertaining at a seven year olds' birthday party. In desperate need of work, I put together some sketches and scored a job at the fledgling Fox Network as a writer and performer for a new show called "The Wilton North Report." I was finally on a network and really excited. The producer told me the show was going to revolutionize television. And, in a way, it did. The show was so hated and did so badly that when, four weeks later, news of its cancellation was announced to the Fox affiliates, they burst into applause.

Eventually, though, I got a huge break. I had submitted, along with my writing partner, a batch of sketches to Saturday Night Live and, after a year and a half, they read it and gave us a two week tryout. The two weeks turned into two seasons and I felt successful. Successful enough to write a TV pilot for an original sitcom and, when the network decided to make it, I left Saturday Night Live. This TV show was going to be groundbreaking. It was going to resurrect the career of TV's Batman, Adam West. It was going to be a comedy without a laugh track or a studio audience. It was going to change all the rules. And here's what happened: When the pilot aired it was the second lowest-rated television show of all time. It's tied with a test pattern they show in Nova Scotia.

So, I was 28 and, once again, I had no job. I had good writing credits in New York, but I was filled with disappointment and didn't know what to do next. I started smelling suede on my fingertips. And that's when The Simpsons saved me. I got a job there and started writing episodes about Springfield getting a Monorail and Homer going to College. I was finally putting my Harvard education to good use, writing dialogue for a man who's so stupid that in one episode he forgot to make his own heart beat. Life was good.

And then, an insane, inexplicable opportunity came my way . A chance to audition for host of the new Late Night Show. I took the opportunity seriously but, at the same time, I had the relaxed confidence of someone who knew he had no real shot. I couldn't fear losing a great job I had never had. And, I think that attitude made the difference. I'll never forget being in the Simpson's recording basement that morning when the phone rang. It was for me. My car was blocking a fire lane. But a week later I got another call: I got the job.

So, this was undeniably the it: the truly life-altering break I had always dreamed of. And, I went to work. I gathered all my funny friends and poured all my years of comedy experience into building that show over the summer, gathering the talent and figuring out the sensibility. We debuted on September 13, 1993 and I was happy with our effort. I felt like I had seized the moment and put my very best foot forward. And this is what the most respected and widely read television critic, Tom Shales, wrote in the Washington Post: "O'Brien is a living collage of annoying nervous habits. He giggles and titters, jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He had dark, beady little eyes like a rabbit. He's one of the whitest white men ever. O'Brien is a switch on the guest who won't leave: he's the host who should never have come. Let the Late show with Conan O'Brien become the late, Late Show and may the host return to Conan O'Blivion whence he came." There's more but it gets kind of mean.

Needless to say, I took a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, some of it excessive. And it hurt like you wouldn't believe. But I'm telling you all this for a reason. I've had a lot of success and I've had a lot of failure. I've looked good and I've looked bad. I've been praised and I've been criticized. But my mistakes have been necessary. Except for Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. That was just stupid.

I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.

So, that's what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over. If it's all right, I'd like to read a little something from just this year: "Somehow, Conan O'Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the Late Night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possible the greatest host ever."

Ladies and Gentlemen, Class of 2000, I wrote that this morning, as proof that, when all else fails, there's always delusion.

I'll go now, to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought: If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you're drunk.

Thank you.


Now doesn't the guy who wrote and delivered that to a bunch of teenaged nerds in Boston deserve his own show during the prime time late-night slot? Especially one that was promised to him for nearly 10 years? I mean, at least for more than seven months, right?

Internet Poker Killed the WPT

I realized this week that having a baby recently has given me a whole new perspective on watching televised poker. I'm serious about this, and I think I really mean what I said in the title up there: the spread of internet poker ultimately hurts, not helps, the popularity of poker on television.

For years I've thought it's more or less the exact opposite -- people will watch poker on tv, get into it, and soon they'll realize they can qualify for those very same tournaments they're watching by playing online, so they'll play more poker, and the cycle goes on. All the while, my (and ESPN's, clearly) thinking has been that people getting more and more in to playing poker would also be getting more and more in to watching poker. I mean, it stands to reason, right? You're becoming more interested in the game, you're taking shots at playing in the very same size tournaments as the ones you can watch on tv, against some of the very same players you can watch on tv, and in some of the very same situations as you can watch on tv. And, over the past several years, there's been tons of poker on the tube to choose from -- not just 16 episodes of ESPN WSOP coverage every summer, but also the WPT all year round, High Stakes Poker for the big cash games, the Heads-Up Championship, and various other sitngo, cash and tournament options to watch. So why wouldn't people watch more and more poker as they get more and more in to playing poker, especially online?

Overload.

It's that simple. It's poker overload.

This has finally occurred to me because since having a baby I have more or less not turned on the computer at home. Hardly even once. I can't have even logged in to full tilt more than two or three times since the little guy came, and I haven't seen an image of a playing card on a screen for maybe the longest time in a few years. Poker, in all its forms, has just been on a hiatus with me for a little bit with more important things take up the time that poker has competed for.

But then a couple days ago I happened to be rocking the kid to sleep while zoning out to some random tv, and on ESPN after sportscenter ended suddenly came up the coverage of the WSOP Main Event, Day 2, which I haven't been watching much of this year, just as I haven't watched most of the past couple of years' coverage either. But this time, it was different. For me anyways. The colors of the cards were bright. The guys' characters were on display. George was there and even giving up some famous George quotes for the table. Lawyer-turned-poker-player Greg Raymer was there too, making for a really fun feature table. It was really interesting, and I watched poker on tv with more gusto than I have in several years, without a doubt. I was really into it. Hammer Wife couldn't believe it but I was honestly even laughing out loud at Norman Chad (!!) with all the Seinfeld references.

And further, there was the poker. Ahh the poker. I watched some Russian dude in sunglasses at the feature table call down a c-bet from Raymer on the flop with just overcards for about 6% of his stack. Then I got really interested as he checked, Raymer fired out again on the turn (which gave the Russian dude second pair with second kicker), and the guy pondered forever, staring Raymer down, and eventually slid out another sixth of his stack to call again. I was really rapt by the time the river fell a rag, Raymer pushed out a big bet for about half of the Russian's remaining stack, and the guy thought forever again before actually calling down Raymer's two pairs with his QJ on an xxK-Q-x board. I couldn't believe it.

Later I was similarly interested to watch Greg Raymer himself make a seriously call-stationy play, calling an preflop raising opponent's decently large allin bet on the flop when Raymer had just top pair with a Ten kicker. Frankly I could not believe Raymer made that call, and somehow of course he happened to be right, the other guy had top pair with a 9 kicker, which just added to my amazement.

But when I really knew something was up was when I watched Jesus raise preflop from early position with pocket Jacks, and get called from late position by AQo. The flop came down an amazing JTT, and I was completely glued to the tv set. I really wanted to see how Jesus would play this hand. I was truly excited to get to watch how an amazingly successful WSOP player like Chris Ferguson opts to play a flopped monster like this. And I don't just mean watching whether he bets or checks the flop. I mean, how long he waits to make the bets or calls (or raises) that he makes throughout the hand. How he holds and moves the chips he does bet from his stack into the pot. And any other clues or signals that Chris seems to give off when he knows from the getgo he's got the board locked up.

What made that hand particularly enthralling to me was that Chris played it more or less totally differently than the line I would have taken. And boy did it pay off. When that flop came down JTT, knowing I had not just flopped a boat but the over boat on the board, I am pretty certain I would have checked. I would have check-called the flop for sure. On the turn, if my opponent had checked behind on the flop, I would bet out around 2/3 the size of the pot and hope my opponent thinks I'm trying to steal. But if my opponent had bed the flop and I had called, then I would probably check to him and hope he leads out again so I can at that point move in my stack and he will have to call for the pot odds. For what it's worth, I do seem to recall Doyle even saying in Super System that he tends to check the flop with the overboat, just because you have the board locked and there isn't much your opponent can have hit when you connect with the flop that hard.

But Chris doesn't play by Doyle's rules, and he doesn't play by what I'm sure is the standard donkey move of checking the flopped boat even regardless of having been the raiser before the flop. Chris figured he raised from early position before the flop and this guy called him from late position, so he's got to have something good. Two high cards maybe, or a medium pair. And Chris knows -- instantaneously, I was extremely impressed to note -- that for either of those hands (two high cards or a medium pair), the TTJ flop is not necessarily a bad thing. If his opponent called preflop with AK or AQ, he's now got 6 outs to top pair and another four outs to a straight. If it was KQ, he's now got the open ended straight draw. If it was AJ, KJ or QJ, he's just made top pair and a decent kicker on a paired board, which is also playable in many situations. And lordy if the guy called preflop with AT, KT, QT or even JT, then he is in a world of hurt cuz he will obviously play those hands as well. So Chris considers all of this over the span of maybe two seconds after the flop hits the board, and then he slides right out a standard c-bet, just like he'd been planning the move since last Thursday. His opponent, who does have AQ and reasonably thinks he has ten outs, calls there as the pot odds plus the implied odds make that a pretty good call against a decent stack early in a big no-limit event like this.

When the turn brings a rag, I am once again really interested in what's on the tv, and I of course am immediately thinking of my favorite move, which is to bet when I flop strong as if it's a c-bet, and then if I get called, to check the turn even though I actually did flop strong to the hand. This way the other guy, who already called my flop c-bet so clearly has something or some intent to steal the pot from me later in the hand, will often lead out on the turn as if I am admitting defeat and willing to give up my c-bet. Then I spring the allin check-raise on them, and only the really good players fold. It's a great move and I've made thousands of dollars in real cash just doing that to donkeys, especially early in tournaments.

But once again Chris had another surprise for me up his sleeve. Jesus didn't even skip a beat before sliding another bet out on the turn, larger this time since the pot itself has grown larger after the bet and call on the flop. I mean, this guy flopped the over boat, immediately c-bet the flop, got called and then immediately bet out again with a standard second-bullet bet on the turn. I couldn't believe he would waste his chance to double up on that play, but wouldn't you know it, the guy smooth called again. I guess Chris's immediate betting was making this guy think Chris was just firing a second-bullet bluff, I don't know, but I couldn't believe he called again. Amazingly, the river card brought the killer K, making the final board JTTxK, and when Jesus quickly moved allin on the river, his opponent had to call having rivered broadway and getting exactly the card he was calling all the way to pick up.

It was really an amazing hand, and just one of several interesting showdowns I saw in just under an hour of watching the first poker on tv I've seen in years probably. And I had an awesome time, something I definitely haven't felt about televised poker in a long, long time. And I could tell while I was watching it exactly why that is: because I haven't spent the last several nights already staring at a screen, flopping full houses and making those calls with top pair. Even after just a couple of weeks, the whole game seems fresher to me, more interesting.

Playing online poker a couple of hours every night causes a tremendous overload of poker in my brain, and I would venture to say the brains of most of you out there as well. It may not feel that way, and I'm not saying we would necessarily be happier playing less, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and guess publicly here that most of you who have played online poker with some regularity over the past, say, two years or more, now watch far less televised poker than they did two years ago. I'm sure it's true for most people out there. When I'm already facing these exact same situations myself, night in and night out -- sometimes several times a night -- seeing the cards fall, the big calls or folds, the rush of praying for that miracle on the river, the thrill of successfully slow-playing a donkey out of his stack, then watching more of the same on tv is really quite boring nowadays. Back when I didn't have online poker is an outlet for my interest in the game, I was an online poker junkie. You couldn't get me to turn it off and I wouldn't even go out on Tuesday nights when the WSOP coverage was running. But then I got into actually playing the game instead of just watching it, started playing in tournaments regularly, and suddenly poker on tv just seemed, well, second-best.

Now after just a couple of weeks away from online poker and the immersion that medium allows me in this game I still love and enjoy, I'm already ready to let my old poker outlet back into my life just a little bit. ESPN's WSOP coverage was just about the best hour of tv I've watched since the one where SpongeBob gets left in charge of the Krusty Krab and tries to make Squidward do all this extra work, and Squidward tells SpongeBob all those funny lies and SpongeBob believes every single one of them because he is the most gullible sponge in the sea.