More LOST Than I’ve Ever Been

I’ve been thinking a lot today about last night’s episoe of Lost.  Why am I thinking about that?  Why not?  What would you have me think about?

Anyway, there are some spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen it yet stop reading.  Feed readers sometimes don’t pick up on the –more– from WordPress (that ruined this week’s episode of The Wire for me), so be extra careful.

Continue reading “More LOST Than I’ve Ever Been”

The Wire and The Press

Last night we watched the first episode of season 5 of The Wire, and it is already shaping up to be very interesting. This season is focusing heavily on the newsroom of The Baltimore Sun and how news is sorted and reported. The best quote so far is, “I wonder what it’s like to work for a real newspaper,” which is ironically the same thing said about the Baltimore Police Department in season 3.

All we know of the newsroom so far is that staff has been cut by the parent corporation in Chicago, and the older guys who can actually write (“you don’t want to say that people were evacuated”) are being pushed out in favor of young kids who see the Sun only as a stopping point on their way to The Times or The Post.

One thing I’ve noticed about The Wire is that it exposes the fact that every profession they’ve examined is made up of people that basically fit into the same categories. There are always people who only care about their stats, the people that are there to do the minimum to get the paycheck, the ones who are only interested in furthering their careers, and the ones who do the job because it is a part of who they are and only want to do their best work. So far this has held true for police, politicians, teachers, drug dealers, thieves, and sometimes drug addicts.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the newsroom.

Latest from the Tour de Dope

For the second straight day the stage winner has been booted from the race, this time by his own team. Michael Rasmussen was sent home by Rabobank for violating team rules.

I know most people in the U.S. don’t care about the Tour now that Lance Armstrong has retired, but I can’t help it. I love to sit on the couch and watch these ‘roided out oxygen-doped-blood junkies pedal up the mountain as drunk Europeans run naked in front of them, basking in the glory of socialized health care and 35 hour work weeks.

This new twist puts American Levi Leipheimer only 2:49 seconds behind the new race leader, Alberto Contador. But time is not what matters the most here.

With four stages left, that means that four more leaders are likely to get hit with doping charges. If Leipheimer can position himself into 5th place at the end of tomorrow’s stage, he has a good chance of the winner of tomorrow’s stage being disqualified along with the three winners of the next three stages, and he will sneak away with a Tour victory.

Then we can get another year of European complaints about how the Tour is rigged for Americans to win.

Let’s just hope the rest of the world doesn’t catch up to us in our ability to beat drug tests by next July.