Poppycock! Part One

A few random musings that have been swishing around my brain this weekend.....

Fathers.
How some can encourage you, some can discourage you and some can completely ignore you and all your hopes and dreams. Which is best? Someone who encourages you, who believes in you, is someone you may end up disappointing. Someone who discourages you can leave you feeling that they are right, you are useless, but can, in their own roundabout way, be showing you that they care. And those that ignore you, well sometimes it's best that they do. Because no advice is better than the wrong advice from someone who doesn't really care.

Television.
Apart from "Lost" (which was a bit poo this week) there's no TV show currently on air that provokes as much discussion for me, that keeps me awake at night thinking about all the possibilities and trying to work out what is coming next. At the moment, I currently watch on a weekly basis: "Dollhouse", "Heroes" and "How I Met Your Mother". Occasionally I'll watch "Flight Of The Conchords", or "The Big Bang Theory", and very rarely lately I'll catch up with "ER". None of these shows excite me as much as "Lost" does, and "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" did. TV shows are watched, then forgotten. Like popcorn.

Games.
Why are there no girl friendly games for the Playstation 3? OK, so I suppose "Little Big Planet" is fairly gender neutral, but the rest of them seem to be shoot-em up games. I have gotten into "Mirror's Edge" this weekend, but I've had to give it up, as I can't do this stupid wall jump thingy. Why couldn't there have been a nice pony, or a fairy, to help me along?

Holidays.
I really want to go one one this year. Actually go away somewhere, slightly exotic, or at least slightly different to where I live, for a few days and relax. Have a change of scenery. I haven't been on a holiday in six years. Six years. And it doesn't look like I'll get to go away this year. My friends are having a weekend away and I can't go as I have no money. That makes me sad, knowing that I'll miss out on experiences that, knowing my friends, they will talk about for YEARS.

Books.
I always try to finish a book I start, even if I know it's terrible. It's like, I can't honestly say what I think about it unless I've read it cover to cover. But sometimes, it's a chore. Like the book I just finished, "Love Comes Tumbling" by Denise Deegan. I did actually stop reading it at one point, when the main character goes to meet her fiance's two children (a boy and a girl) for the first time. She looks out into the garden and remarks 'It wasn't hard to tell them apart.' Well, of course it wasn't. How could you not tell which was a girl and which was a boy? It's lazy editing, and it makes me wonder if anyone actually read this book before it was published. Of course, just as I figured, the whole story wasn't up to much - a tale of bipolar disorder that doesn't really deal with the emotional rollercoaster of the disease, doesn't address it or even attempt to explain what sufferers feel. The ironic thing is, that the character in the book who has bipolar, writes a book about his suffering and is praised for bringing to light such a misunderstood disorder and for helping others by publishing his story - it's a pity I can't say the same for the book its self.

Internet.
A million gizzilion trillion web pages - so how come I'm bored?

What does Best Loved mean, anyway?

There's a list circulating on Facebook that supposed to be the BBC Big Read Top 100 (it's not though - the actual list can be found here) Book lists are an interesting animal - they usually contain quite a few books that I have actually read, but more often or not, they are made up of books I know I should read. Classics, such as Austen or Dickens, or books that everyone else is reading, such as "The Da Vinci Code" (just to see what all the fuss is about) Should I feel inferior if I haven't read the entire list, or even half of it? Or maybe I should take comfort in the fact that I don't read what the sheep read - I read what I want to.

And who votes for these things anyway, and why do they pick what they pick? Is Tolkien number one on every list because he is the best, or because people think that's who they should pick? The Big Read was supposed to be the nation's 'best loved' books. Best loved does not mean best, as in the best written, but the one book you love above all else, because it speaks to you, or you can relate to it, or because it's silly, throwaway entertainment that makes you happy. For me, my best loved book, would have to be "Flowers In The Attic" by Virginia Andrews, and the subsequent sequels. I have no idea why. From a critical point of view, its simplistic writing and melodramatic plots mean it's not going to be gracing the top spot on any list, but I have read it every year since I was 14, and each time I get sucked into the story and all else is forgotten. That to me, is the mark of a good book.

Here's that list, reorganised so that the ones I've actually read are first, with comments on some of them. The books in italics are books I own, but haven't read yet.

1 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Well, duh. This is the one that always crops up at the top of any 'best of' list and it's easy to see why. It's a fantastic epic tale of brotherhood, war, fantasy; it's an example of exemplary writing - the descriptive skill of Tolkien is one to be admired - but best loved? It's such a slog to get through, even for those of us who devour books, and although it's beautifully written, sometimes you do wish that Tolkien would have left out half the description of the landscape.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
This is a great example of what I was saying before. JK Rowling is not the best writer. Heck, she wouldn't even be in the top twenty of my list, but she's a great storyteller. Her books are loved, because she makes you really care about the story and the roles that the individual characters play. OK, so each book is pretty formulaic, the seventh book relies too much on deus ex machina and don't even get me started on her selling out to Hollywood, but I still enjoy the books on a purely entertainment level.

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Is it wrong for me to love the prequel more than the trilogy? After all, "Lord Of The Rings "regularly tops these kind of lists, whereas "The Hobbit" is a lowly number 16, so surely I must be wrong, giving all my love to this one? In my opinion, "The Hobbit" showcases all the talent of Tolkien, but with a much more relatable story. It's the tale of one little hobbit and the adventure he takes to become more than he ever thought he could be, without the grandiose battles of the trilogy, and the subtext of industrialisation.

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
When I first read this, I fell in love with it. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to wrap myself in this story and never leave. It's a beautiful tale of love, an eternal love that can never be eternal, due to circumstances beyond the protagonist control. I defend this book to all those I came across who didn't like it, for whatever reason. This was my new favourite book. Then I read it again. Oh, how disappointed I was. It's the perfect example of how I read - first, I read emotionally, taking in the story and the characters. Then I read, critically. I noticed the bad writing, the repetition of unnecessary points, the lack of details about the characters and the contradictions.... there's a great diatribe about this here - it covers a lot of what I think, although a lot harsher!

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
This book, along with some of Douglas Adams' writing, really changed my view on religion. It's a sign of a good book that can convey exactly what you think, without even realising that you think it.

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
As someone who is petrified about what happens after we die, I found this book oddly comforting. To read about someone's idea of heaven, or of an afterlife, made my own fears subside slightly, knowing that maybe the blackness I foresee may not be true.

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
The only book it took me years to finish reading. Maybe it's one of those books that you need to read at a certain time of your life, but all I know is that at 16 I couldn't get into it at all. It was better at 24, but I wouldn't say I'm in a hurry to read it again. I can understand the rambling style mirrors the rambling nature of the characters, and that it's a book very much 'of it's time' but will it be on the top 100 lists in ten, twenty, fifty years time?

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

2 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
6 The Bible
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

"Namaste" This is what I think....

So I've just watched the latest episode of Lost and I thought it was awesome, yet again. Another episode mainly focused on character interactions and less on the big mysteries - which is what I loved about the show way back in Season One. Of course, there are still many things that leave us stroking our invisible beards.

Like where (or maybe, when?) is Daniel, especially after Sawyer's remark to Jack and the gang.

JACK: Did you say Faraday? He's here?
SAWYER: Not anymore.

Could it be that he left the island via the sub, sometime after he was seen at the Orchid station, went back to 1970s America (which would explain why he was living in the US when we first saw him) and that's why he was crying when he saw the news report about flight 815? He knew that somewhere out there, his other self, was about to be recruited and sent to the island and Charlotte was going to die? Of course, when asked why he was crying, he couldn't remember, but as we know, Daniel's had memory problems before (with the cards in "Eggtown") It would be interesting if that were true, as it would mean two versions of the same person could exist at the same time, OFF the Island, not just on. We know that on Island it is possible - like when Locke saw his flash of light.

How about Sun and Frank being on the Island in 2007! Bang goes my theory that the two islands exist in separate times. I knew I couldn't be right, as the Hydra island disappeared at the same time the main Island did. The only way I can wrap my head around it, is if I think of the Island as having many different layers, (kinda like an onion, Shrek fans) and each layer is a different time. So Sun and Frank are in the 2007 layer and Sawyer et al are in the 1977 layer. That would explain how Locke disappeared and Richard didn't - Locke was pulled into a different layer. The whispers are the echos of the other layers, filtering through. Maybe this is how Desmond could see Charlie's deaths - he was given power to see through the layers.

I was wrong about the baby. I had concluded that it was not important who the baby was, that it probably wasn't anyone we knew. The importance of the baby being born was to show us three things; 1) that at one point on the island, mothers could give birth without dying and 2) Juliet was able to overcome her fear that she was some kind of Doctor Death, and 3) the supportive relationship that Juliet and Sawyer now have, compared to whatever was between Sawyer/Kate.

BUT even though I was wrong, it still wasn't that important. Neither was it a trademark OMG Lost moment. If it had been one of the 815 survivors, maybe it would have been, but Ethan? Meh. Although, it's interesting that he survived the Purge. He would have been 15 at the time, so maybe Ben spared the young? Or maybe someone tells Ben that he can't be killed because he has to be alive in order to recruit Juliet, in order to be born, to preserve the timeline. It's amazing to think how many events actually lead to Ethan being born:

Desmond arrives on the Island, and doesn't push the button one day, causing 815 to crash and Locke refusing to push the button, so Desmond turns the fail safe key and prevents Charlie from dying, until he can turn off the jamming signal in the Looking Glass, causing the Kahana to find the Island, which makes Ben turn the frozen donkey wheel, spinning the Island through time, eventually landing in the 70s, where Juliet can be there to deliver Ethan.

That's forgetting the fact that Ethan was an instrument in his own birth, by going to the mainland with Richard in order to recruit Juliet to the Island.

Plus, this means that he is now only one of three people that we know were definitely born on the Island*, along with Alex and Aaron. Both Alex and Ethan were shot - doesn't bode well for Aaron if he ends up back on the Island! The difference with Ethan is he was also conceived on the Island as well - does this mean that Ethan is possibly the most connected with the Island then any of the Others/Survivors/Dharmites or anyone else we have seen?

(*I know that Charlotte said she was born on the Island, but the doctor in the last episode said that pregnant women were taken off the Island to give birth, so it's more than likely she wasn't.)

I did hear the message repeating the numbers during the plane crash and contrary to what people have been saying about it being a mistake, or an indication that the 2007 they're in now is a different future, I think it's something much more simple. I think it's just because they had passed through what looked like a time flash, all the instruments were going wonky, and the radio was picking up the signal from another time. Remember Sayid and Hurley sitting on the beach, waaaay back in season one's "The Long Con", listening to a Glenn Miller song on the radio?

SAYID: Radio waves at this frequency bounce off the ionosphere. They can travel thousands of miles. It could be coming from anywhere.
HURLEY: Or, anytime. Just kidding, dude.

Maybe he was right and they were listening to a broadcast from the 1950s and so the airplane radio picked up the signal from the 1980s.

Radinsky was a bit of a let down - thought he'd be a bit crazy and eccentric. Does make me wonder though, how he was originally in the Flame, building the Swan model, then ends up in the Swan, painting the map and killing himself. And he's yet another member of Dharma that survived the Purge... unless he was in the Swan when it happened and had no idea about it?

This is what I don't think - there aren't multiple timelines, you can't change the past and as Daniel says - Whatever Happens, Happened. This isn't Back To The Future, people. Yes, you can change some things - Charlie not dying by a lightening strike, or drowing or, falling off the rocks was proof that Desmond, at least, can postpone the inevitable. But Fate will always get you, will always preserve the natural order of things.

To finish: A quote from my favourite doctor (sorry Jack)

THE DOCTOR: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.