LOST-1/29-Jughead

With this episode of LOST, it seems the writers are taking some time to flush out the history of the Island, which I think is needed and gives the writers two more seasons to get the Oceanic 6 back to the Island.
I finally thought of where I've seen Charlotte before:

• Remember when Jack and Sayid were in the Hatch in Season 2, and Sayid said that the last time he had seen something covered in so much cement was Chernobyl? Now the is an H-Bomb on the Island that needs to be covered in cement to stop it from exploding. Coincidence?
• I find it funny that Desmond named his son after Charlie.
• With the revelation that Widmore was once an Other, it brings up the questions of what happened that made him leave? What happened that made him want to kill all the other Others? Numerous questions.
• I also find it funny that the Others refer to themselves as "Others."
• Desmond has to go to Los Angeles to find Faraday's mom. Who is in Los Angeles? Mrs. Hawking.
• Now that we are again showed that Alpert is ageless, I want to know if he has four toes. I wonder if the time-travelers will be brought back to the time where the four-toed statue is still standing.
  
• Does future Alpert remember running into Locke and Faraday, and if he does, why has he not said anything?
  

Twilight part 3

Spoilers On

Well, this morning I finished Breaking Dawn.
You know how the movie Alien was good, and Predator was good, and Alien vs. Predator was entertaining, but in Alien vs. Predator 2 there was the hybrid Alien/Predator and the movie was crap. Well, in Breaking Dawn there is a hybrid human/vampire, and though I was not a fan of the character, it was not hokey and made the story interesting. In this book, Bella marries Edward and gets what she has wanted since the first book: immortality as a vampire.
The book does something real interesting and tells about three hundred pages from Jacob's point of view, and though I didn't think I would like that, it made me feel better about Jacob, and I would have rather watched Bella's pregnancy from Jacob's perspective then hear about it from Bella's.
I am not a fan of the imprinting on toddlers. I don't think it is necessary, though it made Jacob's story more interesting.
Now, say you are watching Return of the King, and all the Riders of Rohan and the armies of Gondor all line all and are all ready to fight the forces of Mordor. You are super pumped for an epic battle with lots of death and destruction. And then Aaragorn and Gandolf go and talk Sauron out of fighting. That is how Breaking Dawn ends. All the build up for no battle.
But none the less I did enjoy the book and the entire Twilight series. I can't say I have a favorite book, just favorite moments. On of those moments being the gathering of all of the vampires from around the world. That was great.

Scorpion Woman

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3689592.stm

So, if you read this article, you will find that a woman in Malaysia has beaten the world record for living with scorpions.

A) There was already a record for living with scorpions.
B)Someone beat it
C) The original record setter took it back

I don't think I could ever be that desperate for fame. Honestly, who comes up with this?

LOST-1/21-Because You Left/The Lie

Holy Crap! What a great way to start of the second to last season of LOST. Starting off with Dr. Marvin Candle filming a Dharma video sometime in the past, we see Daniel Faraday working for Dharma. Let the gigantic Mind-F^^k begin.

• The Oceanic Survivors and the science team from the freighter are traveling through various points in time on the island. Alpert and the rest of the Others do not travel through time, but Alpert realizes that Locke is, and gives him a compass that seems to be the one from when Alpert gave Locke a Buddist Test.
• Lawyers appear at Kate's house in 2007 to take blood samples from both her and Aaron. This causes her to leave and go find Sun. Who sent the lawyers to Kate's house?
• Jack and Ben need to get everyone from the island back to the island. Kate and Sun are now together, though it appears they are under watch of Charles Widmore. Hurley and Sayid are together, but Sayid took a couple of darts to the back and is now a vegetable. Hurley is accused of murdering three people, and instead of going with Ben and making things easy, he gives himself over to the LAPD.
• Faraday finds the past Desmond, and tells him he needs to find his mother at Oxford. Desmond wakes up in the future, now remembering this, and tells Penny they need to go to Oxford.
• Dr. Candle lives on the island in the past, and he seems to have a healthy baby with an alive wife.
• Best line: "Why is there a dead Pakistani on my couch?"
• Hurley spills the beans to his mom about the island, and she tells him she believes him.
• Ben is told he has 70 hours to bring the Oceanic 6 back to the island. Is the show now going to be like 24 set in real time?
• The woman who tells Ben he has 70 hours is the woman who sold Desmond his engagement ring from the episode where Desmond was flashing in and out of time.
  

Twilight 2

Spoilers On

So I enjoyed Twilight and its sequel, New Moon. Eclipse, the third in the series, was the obvious next book. Where Twilight deals with Bella’s relationship with Edward and New Moon deals with Edward’s absence and Bella’s friendship with Jacob, Eclipse deals with the confrontation of the two. Of course, Edward is a vampire and Jacob is a werewolf, and they happen to be mortal enemies. By now, Edward and Bella are madly in love and Bella wants to become a vampire. Jacob’s friendship with Bella has made Jacob fall in love her. And, of course, an evil vampire named Victoria has developed an army of young vampires to raid the town of Forks and kill Bella.

Now, the story line did not bother me. I enjoyed the build-up to the battle and for the most part the battle itself.

What bothered me was the way that Jacob turned out. Jacob is in love with Bella, but Bella made it clear that she was in love with Edward. Jacob wasn’t about to take “no” for an answer. His actions are borderline assault. After forcing her to kiss him, and then getting into her sleeping bag, he tells her that if she does not choose him he will run into the battle and have himself killed.

Now, two things bug me:

A) Edward did not rip Jacobs jaw off and then force him to choke on it.

B) Bella, still loving Edward, played with Jacob’s emotions and basically gave him the idea that she could leave Edward and choose him.

As much as I grew to hate Jacob, I really started to dislike Bella. Actually, I really hate Bella. I feel she is begging for constant attention and companionship. And it is annoying. Even though Jacob is turning into a sexual deviant, she still needs his friendship and does not want to let him go.

Now, I used to think Edward was creepy and controlling, and now I feel that Edward is very classy. He should have every right to rip off Jacob’s arm and beat him to death with it, but he stays calm and collective. Even though Bella is too eager to lose her virginity (which Meyer goes out of her way to not say by name), Edward sticks to his morals and holds off her advances, making deals of his own to hold off Bella’s need to become a vampire.

I still enjoyed the book itself, but I was not a fan of the character development.

Twilight

Twilight.

When my cousin got married this summer in St. Louis, I decided to walk over to the Borders across from our hotel around 11:00 at night. I knew Border stores were open late, but I thing had not crossed my mind. It was August seventh, and at midnight the fourth book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, was to be released. To get to the Graphic Novel section I had to adventure through the different covens of high school girls dressed all in black, camped out so they could be the first to read the newest adventure of Edward and Bella. I knew the feeling from the Harry Potter days. I picked up a couple copies of New Avengers, used my Borders Rewards card, and started on my way out, hoping that I would not have my blood drained by the floor full of vampire wannabe’s. An older worker with a bag full of buttons caught my attention. He was handing out buttons to the campers that read, “I was bitten by Breaking Dawn.” I snuck into the crowd of girls and was handed a button. As I walked out with my button, I told myself that I would not read Twilight. I would not be sucked into the cult.

That was August 7^th, 2008.

January 7^th 2009 I drank the Kool Aid and started reading Twilight. It is now January 13^th, almost a week later, and I just finished New Moon.

What happened to me? I am now halfway through this tale of Vampires that I promised myself that I would not read. Because they are actually good. Of course the books have faults, but still. The first thing I like is how Stephanie Meyer has taken the myth of the Vampire and the Werewolf and made them more real-life. Gone are the crosses and coffins, garlic, wooden stakes, bats, full moons, and as far as I can tell, silver bullets. The same basic myths apply. The Vampires are basically immortal. They drink blood and are “undead.” Beside the mythology, the book is well written. Meyer captures emotion very well. The story is a love story and every emotion is very descriptive. But, even though the emotion is captured well, other story elements were fast and not as drawn out. It might just be me, but the fight scenes and chase sequences could use a lot more detail. And it seemed that characters were thrown into sudden peril. Were it seems it most books the amount of danger gradually builds; in Twilight it seems that everyone is hopping around la la la and then you turn the page and they are racing the clock for their lives.

Even with its faults I have found myself given my full attention to this book. I want to know what will happen to Edward and Bella, and now Jacob. But with the first book about her falling for a vampire, and the second almost falling for a werewolf, I am half expecting the third to involve a trip to Egypt to met the Mummy, and then running into Frankenstein’s monster. That would cover all the Universal movie monsters. But seriously, I am finding myself excited to pick up the third book, when just five months ago I had sworn myself off of them completely. I have drunk the Twilight Kool Aid, and I like it.

Mannequin

I recently acquired the coolest thing ever: a mannequin from Steve and Berry's. The Steve and Berry's in the Quad Cities is going out of business, and Aaron Wells and I both picked up mannequin's. In order to get mannequin's that we could bring home day of, we had to follow one of the workers into a back room full of mannequin's that was like Jefferey Dahmer's basement. An arm there, a torso there. As we were leaving, Aaron carrying the top of a female mannequin, myself carrying the top of a male, a small boy was being lead by his mother. He asked, "Mommy, what are they doing with those?" She replied, "That's none of our business now, is it honey?"
The mannequin is now in the window of my dorm room, dressed. Every now and again it startles me or scares the crap out of me. Sometimes I catch it's reflection in my TV like the alien at the end of Signs.