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I finished The Leftovers

I first encountered The Leftovers while watching other HBO shows, both live and on demand. The network added spoiler-riffic promos for its second season at the beginning of every show for months. Despite my admittedly irrational irritation with knowing more about how Season 1 must have ended than I would like (which is anywhere north of zero), I was still intrigued, and I watched the whole show from the beginning.

I was able to binge season 1 and most of season 2. Season 1 was certainly fascinating if a bit uneven. Still, I was hooked on the acting, the characters, the science fiction scenario, and (after reading the book and finding Season 1 to be very faithful to it) I was excited for what Damon Lindelof would do with it going forward. I was a fan of ABC’s LOST and, though I found its final season conceptually disappointing, I still regard LOST as one of the best network TV shows ever.

Flash forward nearly a decade to The Leftovers. Season 1 was very faithful to the book, which was both good and bad. The story was definitely better as a TV show than as a novel. The fact that Season 1 ended where the novel did, however, created the possibility that the show would become a collaboration between Perrota, Lindelof, Mimi Leder (whom Lindelof cited as key to the show), and other writers and directors, designed specifically for TV. Seasons 2 and 3 were absolutely brilliant and I applaud the show’s creators for finding imaginative ways to work together to transcend the source material. I can only imagine the process of coming up with what to keep and what to get rid of—and how do you get to the point where someone says, “what if we moved it to a small town in Texas and leave most of the rest of the characters behind?”

This show was a huge opportunity for Lindelof to do what he does, with the latitude afforded by being on HBO, and wrap it up in a more satisfying fashion. (“We have to go back” indeed.) As far as I can tell, The Leftovers was free of the baggage that LOST carried as a pop culture phenomenon with superlatives and high pressure expectations attached. That and the fact that this really was a whole new thing (despite the obvious echoes of LOST’s themes and mysteries and manner of storytelling) I think freed them up to make something great.

[Perhaps redundant spoiler alert.] Like LOST, The Leftovers suggests to me an obvious spinoff from an obscure plot point. It would feature J-Lo and Shaq, and it would co-star Gary Busey and Bronson Pinchot. These celebrities, who disappeared in the original show, would of course play themselves in an otherwise fictional and sparsely populated world. This would in no way rival, however, what ABC should have spun off from the “Jack’s death” half of LOST’s sixth season. Sawyer and Miles, as played by Josh Holloway and Ken Leung, were a hilarious unlikely duo reimagined as detectives. This buddy cop show would have been top notch.

[This is the third installment in my ongoing series “Previously Unfinished Thoughts: long-abandoned draft blog posts edited and posted years later.” I wrote it in June 2017 and finished it in January 2021.]

Just now

Ten minutes ago, I woke up from a doze slipped into while reading and taking off my shoes. Both legs stretched out in front of me, I awoke with my right foot entirely asleep, as both feet rested on the seat of a folding chair. When I gingerly started lowering my feet to finish removing my shoes — I had gotten as far as untying the right one — I imagined with a mixture of horror and detached fascination (as I have numerous times in the past) that if I had put all my weight on my foot while it was in that state, I could have easily (if unintentionally) snapped my ankle in half.

I’m fine — actually, pretty great at the moment. Not much to share here, but thought I’d stop by after not having done so in more than three months. With only four blog entries in more than seven months this calendar year, it seems this site is headed for a slow extinction (the whimper kind, not the bang kind, apparently). But, we’ll see.

The art of getting bumped

Neat (via the New York Times):

[A]irlines continue to cut capacity in an effort to keep up with rising fuel prices, leaving fewer seats for passengers…. [T]here are some travelers who see the flight crunch as a lucrative opportunity. Among them is Ben Schlappig. The 20-year-old senior at the University of Florida said he earned “well over $10,000” in flight vouchers in the last three years by strategically booking flights that were likely to be oversold in the hopes of being bumped.

If you subscribe to the credo that there’s “nothing new under the sun,” then this is exactly the kind of pursuit you’d expect from young Americans who possess entrepreneurial spirit. There are many worse ways one could devise to maximize one’s benefit by exploiting some aspect of a system.

It’s refreshing to me to see a reversal in the trend of corporations destroying our society, even such an insignificant one. So, thank you, Mr. Schlappig, for doing the legwork. Perhaps others will gain from your pioneering ways.

iPhone 3G + iOS 4 = no good.

When I got my iPhone 4, my iPhone 3G became my new “iPod touch” (essentially). Though it only has 16 gigs of storage, it has better games and a nicer interface (and of course a much nicer screen) than my increasingly irrelevant 60 GB iPod classic. (I can hardly believe I watched half of season 2 of LOST on that tiny screen. However, if this rises to the level of “interesting” or approaches being a “problem,” it simply demonstrates how good my life is overall.)

In any case, “upgrading” the iPhone 3G to iOS 4 was probably a mistake (though I didn’t know it at the time). It is extremely slow at doing most things (the hardware is just not good enough to run the new OS). Luckily the 3G is no longer my phone and just hangs out in the bathroom, waiting to play music while I’m in the shower.

Lifehacker (which I’m starting to get a little bit addicted to) has tips for how to make iOS 4 usable on the iPhone 3G (or at worst how to downgrade it to iOS 3.1.3), since this issue is widespread.

"My iphone is exceedingly slow," the homeless man said.

[ flickr commons ]

Love the commons; hate politics.

Can't wait till the election is over.

[Thanks, Flickr commons.]

“Super Mario Bros. Crossover” flash game – Play as Mega Man??

Oh, my. Just visit:

http://onemorelevel.com/game/super_mario_crossover

It’s a Flash version of the classic Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo, except that you can play as Mega Man, the guy from Contra, Samus from Metroid, etc. etc. It really works.

Note (to all, including self): do not play at work.

Attn: Andy Samberg – your next (enviro) hit digital short?

To all the oil companies out there with a world to impress
It’s easy to do, just follow these steps:

  1. Spill some oil in the Gulf
  2. Put that oil in a box
  3. Pump that oil to a ship

And that’s the way you do it….

Hello, new WordCamp friends

Thank you for randomly clicking on my name. (Perhaps you enjoyed my Gravatar.)

WordPress is great, isn’t it? It allows me to blather inanely about a wide variety of topics without having to upload an HTML file in an FTP program every time I get the urge to write. (That’s how this site used to work.)

Anyway, enjoy your visit.

danger + opportunity ≠ crisis

We’ve all heard the New Age-y proverb about the Chinese word for “crisis” being a combination of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” (I just ran across the canard in the 2001 CLCV Scorecard [good luck finding it online; it seems to be long gone] and my skepticism was immediately piqued.)

According to a Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, it’s pretty much bullshit.

On his web page entitled “danger + opportunity ≠ crisis,” Professor Victor H. Mair writes:

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. For example, one of the most popular websites centered on this mistaken notion about the Chinese word for crisis explains: “The top part of the Chinese Ideogram for ‘Crisis’ is the symbol for ‘Danger’: The bottom symbol represents ‘Opportunity’.”

He goes on to explain the three fatal errors in this misconception:

Refill only with Kikkoman

This is one thing I did the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, during the week in which I was failing to clean my apartment.

REFILL ONLY WITH KIKKOMAN

I had a bit of a brainstorm after washing out this Kikkoman soy sauce bottle. I always have a few soy sauce packets around left over from Suruki’s take-out sushi (it’s usually packaged with two packets but I only ever use one). I never really know what to do with them other than toss them in the fridge (or add them to the pile of random detritus on the coffee table). But one of the things that always amuses me (if only me) is the strident command on the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle to REFILL it ONLY WITH KIKKOMAN. (I used it for homemade vinaigrette for a while. Sorry, Kikkoman.)

The rest is documented photographically.

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