This post is currently down for maintenance.
Don’t Let Me Down
Well, I guess my episode analyses are going to mirror one another to a degree, the
way this season of Lost is at times mirroring itself, and the first season, and the series to date.
I’ll have no individual writeup here of last week’s episode, “What They Died For”, in advance of tonight’s two-part series finale, “The End” — just as there was no writeup of the first individual hour of the season, “What Kate Does”, following the one for the two-part season premiere, “LA X”. My laptop has started acting hinky again, the Internet connection has been at a crawl, and I’ve come down with a cold.
Season 6 ends tonight and thus so does Lost as a whole. Its finale begins at 9 p.m.
EST on ABC, following a two-hour series retrospective at 7, and runs until 11:30; then, after the local news, the one-hour Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to ‘Lost’ comes on at 12:05 a.m. with cast members and creative staff. That’s all true for the USA, at least. What reminds me of viewers outside our borders is that also immediately following the finale will be a live online chat at the CTV website [bad link] featuring my friend and Finding ‘Lost’ author / Nik at Nite blogmistress Nikki Stafford. My plan is to kick back and enjoy the last Lost as much as possible as television, ideally after catching up with comments from my clique at Nik at Nite and Jeff Jensen’s Totally ‘Lost’ insights for Entertainment Weekly [bad link].
The post title, however, a Beatles song that I can’t get out of my head, does not refer
to my own recent lack of bloggitude. No, I had the title slotted for my episode analysis of “Across the Sea” in reference to Island Momma’s desperate pleas to Jacob and Esau — until I realized that it perfectly summed up my and so many other viewers’ feelings about what to expect in “The End”.
Mean Business
If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog, you may very well have come across word verification — and if you’ve been following this blog at all the past several months, you may very well have seen my lists of verification-word definitions.
As I explained in my first such post (“Mean”), then illustrated in one last month
(“Even Meaner”), word verification is a check that authors on Blogger/Blogspot can select to help ensure that it’s humans leaving comments and not spamming robots. When one has comments enabled on one’s blog, among the info at the end of a post (labels, time stamp, etc.) is how many comments there are. Clicking on that line takes you to the comments page and/or a pop-up window where you can read the comments to date and submit your own. When verification is turned on, below the comment box will be a jumble of letters that usually could almost be a word — as opposed to the total mess of consonants and numbers often seen when filling out forms online — but isn’t, except on the rare occasions when the randomizing algorithm ends up with an actual word accidentally; you must type those letters correctly for your comment to be accepted. Some blogs also have moderation turned on for all or at least older posts, so your comment won’t show up until the proprietor of the blog has reviewed it.
I’ve taken to sharing definitions for my verification words in my comments, should a definition come readily to mind for the word on the screen at that moment. The idea is similar to Sniglets, which Rich Hall popularized on HBO’s Not Necessarily the News and in a series of books back in the ’80s, but in reverse. While I lay absolutely no claim to being either the first or the best at this, I amass these definitions regularly when commenting on other blogs and now offer them up periodically here on mine, often when there’s a dry spell. In this case, although I have posts in the pipeline, the Internet connection has been troublesome and my metaphorical batteries are low, so it’s a fine time. You’re not only welcome but encouraged to leave definitions for your own verification words when leaving a comment on this or any post here.
Cold Beans
I went to McDonald’s for an iced coffee the other day and had the following exchange at the register.