It’s been a while, but we’re finally getting a new episode of Lost tonight. If you haven’t watched all the previous episodes, you can catch up in 8 minutes and 15 seconds. You can also watch the mini-episodes that they did for Verizon. Most are un-important to the story, but the latest one, which isn’t up on the official site yet, is quite interesting.

It’s too late to officially join the Jay and Jack Season 4 Contest, but if you’d like to play along with us, you can.

[Joe]

I just caught on ESPN that the Mets have agreed to a deal with the Twins for Johan Santana. In the trade, the Twins get Carlos Gomez and three pitchers: Phil Humber, Kevin Mulvey and Deolis Guerra. Considering how many people have been saying this was a bad trade for the Twins, I think we did OK. It’s too bad we had to give up Gomez, but we had to lose somebody.

[Joe]

The Counting Crows are releasing a new album on March 25 and decided to give away a couple of tracks for free. 1492 feels like a departure from the usual, which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but I don’t like the direction they’re going with it. When I Dream of Michelangelo is so similar to their previous work, as to not cover much (if any) new ground. It feels like a companion song to Angels of the Silences, though admittedly a bit less of a downer. I didn’t like it much at first, but it’s growing on me. I’m just hoping these are filler tracks.

Last.fm hasn’t been giving me very good recommendations lately (though they’re better than the ones I get from Netflix), so I’ve been mining my neighbors’ top artist lists for ideas. I’ve found some good stuff, plenty of crap, and some unusual stuff. Dick Brave & The Backbeats doesn’t so much fall into that third category, as it dives head first into it. It took me a minute to figure out what I was listening to.

As I was putting the links together for this post I noticed that Last.fm has made on-demand playing of full-length tracks free, sort of. Full-length tracks and albums are free to play three times, after that they hit you with an ad for their subscription service. It’s an improvement, as long as they don’t do away with their playlist feature that lets you listen to full-length tracks of your choosing, just always on shuffle. They haven’t released details about their subscription service, but if it’s cheap enough, I may go that route.

Since signing up for Netflix, I’ve really gotten away from the idea of owning content. For a majority of the movies that I’ve gotten from Netflix, I’m particularly glad that I didn’t buy them. Most recently I rented 3:10 to Yuma, and since it’s a cowboy movie, I thought Dad might want to watch it. I may never be able to get him to take my movie suggestions again. On top of that, you don’t really own movies, so much as rent them for the rest of your life. Add to that the format changes, and I’m ready to rent just about everything. As long as they don’t try to bleed me, which they will.

Wow, I got really off topic.

[Joe]

One of the trailers attached to Cloverfield is the brand new teaser for Star Trek. I noticed that on IMDB it’s sometimes called Star Trek XI, which by the old rule means it’s going to suck. It is a prequel though, so shouldn’t it be numbered 0? Maybe then it has a chance.

The cast listing on IMDB is interesting…
Chris Pine … Kirk
Zachary Quinto … Spock
Eric Bana … Nero
Winona Ryder … Amanda Grayson
Zoe Saldana … Nyota Uhura
Karl Urban … Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy
Bruce Greenwood … Christopher Pike
John Cho … Sulu
Leonard Nimoy … Spock
Simon Pegg … Scotty
Anton Yelchin … Pavel Chekov

[Joe]

I was listening to the latest Lost Podcast with Jay and Jack today, and it included the audio from a talk J.J. Abrams gave at TED. You can watch or listen to the talk at the TED website.

In the talk, Abrams talks about mystery and why he’s drawn to it. One of the things he says is “…maybe there are times when mystery is more important that knowledge.” and immediately after that he goes on to talk about how little time he and Damon Lindelof had to get the pilot for Lost done. My immediate reaction to which was “Oh shit, so they really didn’t have an ending when they started this thing.” My next reaction was “This is what’s wrong with the entertainment these days”. So much of what I read and watch is mostly build up and very little payoff (I’m looking at you mister Heroes), that it just seemed stupid to me for someone to say something like this.

I thought about it some more, saw Cloverfield and was reminded of something that Tolkien wrote. I can’t find the exact quote I was looking for, but one from a letter to his son, Christopher, will do (page 110, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien):

…it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to be climbed, distant trees (like Niggle’s) never to be approached…

This is something that I understand (at least emotionally) and agree with. As a child I would ride around in the car and look at all the forests by the road and wonder what it would be like to explore them. I know now that if I were to actually go to those forests that the trees would become “near trees” as Tolkien would say, and they wouldn’t be all that interesting. So, I suppose this is what J.J. Abrams is talking about, and I certainly hope so for my sanity’s sake come the end of Lost.

After all this, I’m left thinking that there has to be a distinction between the Heroes type “mystery” without a payoff, and Tolkien’s untold stories. It may be as simple as not having an unexplained or poorly explained mystery as the central part of your story. I wonder if I should apply the same rule to my posts. I mean, this topic is interesting to me because I don’t understand it. If I did understand it, I would see it as obvious and not worth posting about.

Crap.

[Joe]