Crap Throwing Monkey

And another character connection to the numbers...Claire was 8 months pregnant when they crashed. And Locke was paralysed for 4 years, and had been speaking to his 900-number "friend" for eight months before leaving for Australia. The French lady's transmission had been going for "16 years". The reward for Kate was $23k. The Australian she met in episode 3 lost his wife eight months previous. She buried her time capsule on August 15th. Jin had to be at the airport at 15 minutes after the hour. Michael was in construction for eight years. Charlie had lined up an eight week gig for his band at some point in the past. Aside from the lotter numbers themselves...the week Hurley won was the 16th week in a row no one'd won. A good portion of those are conicidental, I'm sure...but I'm equally sure some aren't. And I'm sure there's more...

815...that's 8, and 15. And 815 factors into 5*163, which is really significant because...well, okay, it's not. It means nothing. It's not even interesting. But I was hoping... I think, if you reorder all the numbers, something significant falls out mathematically speaking (because there's sure damned little significance when they're in numerical order). Hell if I know what that order would be, though.

Means you sit here and throw crap at everyone, just like me. Personally, I wouldn't see that as necessarily flattering...

You do okay, though...

Unbelievable...

There's no need to take it that far (particularly on such flimsy evidence - what is there, REALLY, that dictates the numbers predict anyone's survival?) It's enough to say at this point that everyone on the island is somehow connected to some or all of the numbers before the crash. Anyone know what the number or numbers were on the safe deposit box Kate robbed? It's interesting, too, that the total difference between the first five numbers equals the difference between the fifth and sixth (8-4 = 4, 15-8 = 7, 16-15 = 1, 23-16 = 7. 4+7+1+7 = 19. 42-23 = 19.) Probably - almost certainly - just conicidental...but I just blew your mind, didn't I?

Into "Joe Theisman" stupid territory again. Based on their data, one could just as easily conclude that being a more competitive athlete makes one prefer bright colors like red as you could that wearing red makes one more competitive. Pure junk, like you said. And yet...they probably got public money for it. I wonder if I can get a federal grant to study the effects of bird logos on the winning percentages in the NFL...?

I hope it's NOT a T-Rex, as that would be extremely hokey. However, the producers sneak a lot of little tributes to their favorite movies into the filming. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were a not-so-little tribute to Jurrasic Park.

The general shape of the ship would be roughly consistent with that timeline and purpose, too.

That's one of the reasons that I don't particularly care what the result of this current "crisis" is...basically, if the Republicans manage to take away the "right to fillibuster", they've stripped the minority power of the ability to hold their breath 'til they turn blue rather than eat their strained peas. If it were a real fillibuster we were talking about, I might actually start to care...but no one's done that in a few decades. But then, if the Republicans DO manage to strip the fillibuster from the rules...it might force things back to the old methods: block action by actually taking the floor and not relinquishing it. Unless the "nuclear option" also includes completely ditching any and all rules of order, and letting anyone who chooses shout down whoever has the floor, which would actually surprise me. Or allowing the speaker to say to someone who does have the floor: "Okay, you're done. Sit down." Which wouldn't surprise me, and would be a very worrisome development...

The Newsweek story was irresponsible journalism, by Newsweek's own admission. I can't believe so many people are willing to say "Well, that's okay, because they were reporting on something that's related to something else that's fundamentally !@#$ed up, anyway." Is Newsweek REALLY that blameless for their own piss-poor reporting?

And the Twilight Zone episode itself was based on a short story published a few years previously in one of the SF magazines of the time. Used to have it, don't know where it went...

Yes, it does.

I whine about Newsweek because they ran a single-sourced story without doing any meaningful investigation into its veracity. Just like people whine about the administration going to war over a single-sourced story without doing any meaningful investingation into its veracity. Why is it okay when Newsweek does it, but not the government? And don't give me that "because people died when the government did it" line, either. People died over Newsweek's bull sh--.

"Virtual fillibuster" is my name for it (though I'm sure I heard it somewhere else before I started using it). It basically describes what they do now: they effectively just declare "Fillibuster!", and everything stops on that one particular fillibustered issue. Reasoning behind doing it that way, I suppose, being that it doesn't block other Congressional work, and they can the get around to important issues like voting on motions to congratulate Idaho's Miss Potato runner-up. I call it "virtual" simply because it isn't a real fillibuster...and it also makes it too easy. If you believe stopping business is important enough to fillibuster, you should commit yourself to wasting your time standing on the Senate floor reading nursery rhymes and "The Joy of Cooking" out loud until you drop. The phone book...you're right, they probably couldn't do it these days. But when fillibusters were real fillibusters, they used to. There's probably hundreds of pages of phone numbers read into old congressional records...

My thinking is that it's an oversimplification of Heinlein's point so gross it's ignorant. 1) It is, unquestionably, a masterpiece. 2) Last I checked, I don't answer to you, so I choose not to share my analysis.

Conversely, I think you're a brain-dead idiot who jumps to conclusions so quickly and is so ready to assume insult that you're not even capable of having a rational discussion on any topic without degenerating it to some overly rhetorical equivalent of "Yo' mama!" So we'll just have to agree to disagree...

What benefit did having it at 21 have to our society? Either way, we keep electing the same idiots. The Athenians at least discriminated on the basis of land ownership. If you owned a piece of Athens, you had a say. At the very worst, that method is only as stupid as discriminating by age.

By its pure definition, democracy equates to universal suffrage. By its practical application - by the Athenians, for example, who DID have a democratic form of governance - it never does. Nor can it, most likely.

Geez...when's that picture from? Every other picture of her I've seen, she at least has a shape and looks like she's eaten in the past week...

What part of "those on the Left" implies "well, not ALL of those on the Left"? What, are you channelling BF today?

And a found a screen capture. It's definitely not a galleon. Far too small, no gun ports, flush deck, two-masted, no stern gallery. And it's out of Portsmouth (says so on the stern of the ship, it's evident in the capture). Looks like a fairly good replica of a generic 18th century small merchant. It's odd, too, in that the bottom's perfectly clean, the ship's in very good shape...and not nearly as overgrown as it should be. I suspect that IS artistic license; a fully overgrown ship wouldn't have nearly the visual impact as it did. Another thing I'm surprised no one noted...there's a nice congruence in them finding an old sailing ship a few miles inland while everyone else is on the beach launching the raft, isn't there...?

Probably not an oversight as much as major dramatic license, since they needed him to survive (evidently), and thus needed to put him in the surviving section.

Galleons tended to have higher fo'cas'les and poop decks than that ship had, and were larger. It looked to me to be from a later era. And as I dimly recall, it was two-masted, not three, which would make it something other than a galleon, too. But I don't really know, it was too quick a glimpse. Does anyone actually have a video capture of that shot, so I can get a better look? I've got stuff here I can reference to make a reasonable guess at the ship type...