Good news: Blood-spinning therapy is no longer controversial, plus this Daily News article contains a description of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s concerns about the treatment. Good job by them. My only complaint is that WADA is no longer headed by Dick Pound.
Alex Eisenberg from Baseball-Intellect.com drops by Amazin’ Avenue to break down Ike Davis’ swing. I love reading this stuff, and Alex does a nice job putting it all in digestible terms.
Speaking of Amazin’ Avenue, I got a sneak preview of the Amazin’ Avenue Annual. It’s, well, amazin’. I wrote a piece for it, but there’s nothing in there that’ll be new to TedQuarters readers. It’s the rest of it you should check out. It’s super long so I haven’t even scratched the surface yet, but it looks to be awesome.
I’m beginning to fear that Lost sucks now.
Tedquarters 
I’ve never seen Lost, but my gf is a big fan and she commented last night that the show is no longer the “can’t miss” part of her week that it used to be. I think she may have forgotten to watch last week’s episode, in fact.
This season of lost is pretty iffy. I have no faith in the ending of this show… but maybe it’ll surprise me.
This blog though, makes it kinda worthwhile. It is an awesome concept.
I never had much faith in Lost, though I’ve gone through periods of watching it like a crack addict, cause its like that (crack that is). From the beginning, hearing the lack of subtlety in character names alone (John Locke, Jack Shepard, Desmond “David” Hume), I was pretty skeptical that the quality of the writing would live up to the ambition of the concept. I really started to lose faith when I realized there were two distinct types time travel, traditional “Back to the Future” style Time Travel, where you can actually encounter a younger version of yourself, and also a variety where your consciousness slips back to an earlier period of your life but you don’t physically travel through time.
I never suspected it would end well, and nothing has happened to alter that belief so far this season. I thought this episode was slightly more entertaining than the last two, since at least there was some action and Sayid doing badass stuff, which is more fun than FLocke and Richard arguing about things we don’t understand, or Jack and Hurley wandering around the jungle to do something no one cares about (apparently not even Jacob). The previous two episodes might as well have been called “Locke and Sawyer go somewhere” and “Hurley and Jack go somewhere”. The whole names and numbers connection thing was hardly a huge revelation, it was just more trite Lost self referentialism that seems like its never going to really go anywhere particularly meaningful or important. Its now taken them something like seven episodes (from the beginning of the season 5 finale) to explain to us that Jacob brought everyone to the island. Great. Wonderful. That’s seven hours of my life I’ll never get back, and it could have all probably happened just as easily in one.
And I completely agree that the flash-sideways device is annoying, since it seems to suggest that the most interesting elements of the show won’t be explored this season and many of the big puzzles from previous seasons (Widmore, Dharma stuff, what actually happened to the French team, maybe some more Miles backstory, Alpert flashbacks) will be explored. I’ve found just about every set of sideways flashes uninteresting at best. About as uninteresting as the painfully slow flashback unfolding of Charlie’s unoriginal “rock star druggie” story from the first season. And now, it just seems like they’ve started up a whole new set of nonsense that has significantly less to do with the previous sets of nonsense than the previous sets of nonsense had to do with each other.
I think Lost will ulitmately be remembered as a collection of post-modern psychological parlor tricks cleverly designed to build but not necessarily satisfy a large viewership. It set the tone for this from the very beginning by presenting obvious and supposedly complicated mysteries, the answers to which were revealed as slowly as possible (you are aware of the monster in the first episode, but its barely significant again until the season finale. For #@&!’s sake, they’re just going back to the “Adam and Eve” corpses from the first season now!). Throw in a glut of semi-obscure and seemingly unrelated cultural and historical references (philosopher names, hieroglyphs, “Dharma” initiative–with an ancient Chinese logo for some reason) and you have something built to attract audiences like velcro, but again, not necessarily satisfy them.
Sure, some the characters are terrific (though not necessarily because of the character development “devices” the show employs), and there have been plenty of very satisfying high tension moments, but it was a show built to ask more questions than it could possibly answer. In a way it reminds me of a much more complicated version of the X-Files, in that it always seems to imply that there’s some kind of central theme and that the mystery is somehow solvable, but in the end, when the big reveal happens, we’ll probably be just as puzzled as ever.
Also, Desmond better show up again soon. He’s by far the best character, and I see Henry Ian Cusick’s name in the title credits, so I assume he’ll be around eventually. And they really need him. No one’s been particularly interesting this season so far, at least now that Ben’s gone impotent, Sayid’s gone crazy, and people are actually taking Hurley seriously. The most interesting character was Dogen, and well, oh well.
BTW, that blog Pavan linked to is an awesome idea. Some of my fondest memories watching Lost happened when I’d skip 2 seasons ahead and watch a random episode, just to see how ridiculous it is out of context.
With you 100% on the Desmond thing. He’s my favorite character, since my favorite Lost theme has always been the fate vs. free will aspect and he seems to be the one for whom it most frequently surfaces. Plus he’s just kinda awesome and Scottish. It pisses me off big time that he’s only been on about 30 seconds of this season, and I wonder if it has to do with Henry Ian Cusick grabbing PAs asses or whatever.