I’ve been thinking up a couple conspiracy theories lately.  Notice:  I consider this entry “fiction.”  Still, number one makes a lot of sense to me.

#1. Flight 1549.

So… about that plane that went down in New York.  They say a flock of birds got into the engine and the engine blew up and so the plane went down.  When was the last time you heard of birds taking down an airplane?  I asked that question once, as a kid, while flying.  I said, “dad, what happens if a bird goes into the engine?”  He said, “it would get chewed up and spit out.”  Granted, my dad is not a pilot.

And I understand a flock of birds may be different, and honestly it probably does happen so infrequently that nobody really knows what would happen.  Either way, this is the result:

So what might have really happened here?  Well, there were reports that the very same plane had engine trouble a week before this incident.  Apparently, fliers heard a loud popping sound from the engine and the pilot had originally came on and said they’d need to land, only to come on a little while later and say “nevermind,” it’s cool now.  The pilot said it was something like “air compression” in the engine, that it was unusual but not unheard of.  He was able to get the engine restarted so they kept going, presumably thinking that a maintenance technician would take care of it when they land.

So what makes more sense?  A flock of birds brings down a A320?  Or some lazy maintenance guy forgets to look at it and it goes down a week later?

US Airways would have to admit their mistake.  So they say “it was birds,” that way the survivors can’t sue them.

#2.  The bailout.

We’ve all heard the news about the Wall Street people giving out 18 billion in bonus pay at the end of the year, after receiving bailout money.  And we’ve all heard our government officials saying that it’s wrong and reprehensible.

But why would they do it?  Are they really that stupid?  Most of me says yes, but what if the answer is no, and the companies are just doing business as usual?

It would give the government a very good excuse to spend that $700+ billion on something without anybody knowing.  In the books, it would just say “-700 billion, bailout.”  Meanwhile, the government spends $700 billion creating some moon base, or some shit.

The 18 billion may really be your tax money, but maybe that’s it.  Not 700 billion, just 18 to keep them quiet and put up with a little bad publicity.  At the same time, the “big 3” ask for a bailout so they get some too—money to build the moon base that’s being “hidden in plain sight,” right in front of us in the guise of bailouts and poor management.

Yes, so.  Them’s my theories.  If I disappear tonight, you’ll know why.

I’ll make contact on this frequency every twelve hours.  The truth is out there, and all that jazz.

Money’s tight, so I’m selling a lot of my comics.  Very little profit, though there should be some—mostly I’ll just be getting my money back.  I estimate I can sell around 200 issues (lumped together as various story-arcs) and get $500-$600, so that’s cool.

Also, Staples.com has a pretty irresistable deal right now that you can turn around and profit from.

First:  add the HP Mini 1010NR Netbook PC to your cart  ($350)

Second:  add the HP Deskjet D4360 Printer to your cart  ($70)

Third:  enjoy the $50 automatic discount while sipping a beverage of your choice  ($-50)

Fourth:  apply coupon code 27083 to your order.  ($-75)

Fifth:  send away for a rebate on the printer  ($-70)

Sixth:  sell the printer on ebay for resale value  ($-40)

Seventh:  sell the Mini 1010Nr Netbook PC on ebay for resale value  ($-375)

Eighth:  enjoy your $190 profit.

Step eight is optional, of course…

EDIT:  two hours after I did this it appeared on slickdeals.net!  Beaten!  Now it’s sold out.

Too many crossovers, price increases, and no reliable way to get each and every issue you need = Adam gives up and cancels all his standing orders.*

Too bad.

*okay, not all my standing orders, but most.  so there.

Digital TV Switchover Delay

I knew this would happen.  After hyping it up for 3 years, apparently 6.5 million homes are completely unaware of the analog/digital switchover and I guess that’s enough for the government to say “whoa there hang on a sec.”  A sec meaning four more months.

It doesn’t effect me either way, but who are these 6.5 million people?

As I knew I eventually would, I had my first nightmare yesterday about flying to Hawaii.  Katy and I are going there on our honeymoon in June, and I think about it every day, but instead of alohas and mahalos I’m thinking about take-offs and touch downs and the deafening roar of jet engines in between.

It’s not really airplanes that scare me, it’s what they represent:  being strapped in a chair, flying through the air at 500mph, 4 miles off the ground.

I guess I am afraid of heights, and they scare the crap out of me.

When we went to Chicago a few years ago I didn’t go into the Sears Tower, and I was ecstatic as I imagined my friends up there swaying back and forth while my feet were stuck on beautiful, solid pavement.  (I did go up to the top the second time we went to Chicago, but couldn’t get down fast enough.  And standing upright required a lot of strength, especially as I stepped back onto the elevator knowing there was 110 stories of EMPTINESS beneath my feet.)

My work just opened a huge, brand new six story building and during a slow period last week I went exploring, and decided to take the new stairwell, which attaches to the OUTSIDE of the building and is enclosed in glass.  I got to the fourth floor with no problem, and coached my way to the sixth, but when I got there I was clutching the railing swearing to myself I could feel the stairs buckling and soon the bolts would pop out from the wall and—wait, was that a sign that construction was not yet complete and I shouldn’t be here, yet?—and I’d tumble to my death.

Anyway, I’m not looking for advice or anything, I’m just sharing anecdotes about irrational fears.  Do you have any?

Reader Eric points out that the sporadic emails may be caused by different mail servers, in which case ain’t nothin can be done ‘cept wait, but another thought occured to me.

Multiple people say they do not recieve emails every day with my posts, even though they have subscribed (via the handy link to your right… heh heh), and it just occured to me that I don’t post everyday.  So maybe you don’t get emails on the days I don’t post?  In addition, they aren’t sent until 3am.  So if I post at 10am, it won’t be sent out until 3am the next day.  So I’mma say the email service is likely working just fine, just goofy in it’s time schedule.

Thanks all for troubleshooting with me and (more importantly) reading.

I need your-guyses-help.

A few people who subscribe to this via email say that they do not get emails everyday, and when they do occasionally the posts they see are not reflected when they visit this actual page.

So, if you are subscribed via email, how often do you get the email, and is it accurate?

Thanky.

From, your friend,

Adam

…is to see the Milky Way, like this:

Where I live, I can look up at the sky and see a dot or two when the sky is not overcast (rarely), but all the rest is outshined by the bright lights from Detroit, Ann Arbor, etc.

At least once in my life I’d like to travel to the middle of nowhere, 4 hours from civilization, and look at the sky for hours on end.

I felt like I should do more with the 20+ year old $20 bill I found in the used book, “Contact” than just go and buy Wendy’s with it.

So I adjusted for inflation and donated it to SETI!

Chrysler Buys Ads Thanking You For Tax Money, You Get Pissed, Chrysler Censors You
Chrysler spends $200,000+ of the bailout money taking out an ad “thanking” the American public for the money?  I can’t even laugh, it’s so damn funny.  I really hope this is the beginning of the end for The Suits and their whole condescending corporate-speech.

If you ever want to be incredibly humbled, watch this:

“Journey to the Edge of the Universe”

Bonus points for watching on Blu-Ray.  If totally immersive 3-D virtual reality actually existed, I’m pretty sure I would have had a spiritual experience.

I dedicate this long-ass post to Megan, who asked for it and promised to comment, even if the comment is just “Noodles.”

Spoiler warning for the first two episodes of Lost, Season 5, from here on out.

Ultimately I was left underwhelmed with both episodes of Lost yesterday.  That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy them—but the “high” just never happened for me like it has for most episodes in the past, and I suspect it has something to do with the mysteries starting to wind down.

It started out strong.  I was smiling with anticipation as the mysterious person got out of bed and it turned out to be Dr. Pierre Chang, aka Marvin Candle, aka Edgar Halliwax, aka Mark Wickmund, aka “the guy from the orientation videos.”  It was cool to see that the frozen donkey wheel—the thing under the Orchid station that Ben turned to move the island—was there before Dharma got even got to the island.  I think it’s safe to say that the wheel and the four toed statue are connected somehow… likely some kind of ancient civilization, and so the mystery still remains… who built them, how, are they still around and if so how do they feel about Dharma poking around at their shit?

On a side note, I think it’s also safe to say that the “incident” that Dr. Candle spoke about while clutching his artificial arm way back in one of the first orientation videos was some kind of release of this ‘dark energy’ that he is scared to drill into.

Anyway, the climax to this scene was of course the revelation that Dr. Daniel Faraday was there, that he was among the construction crew working for Dharma in the construction of the Orchid station.  However, the look on his face made it clear to me that he was there as a spy from the future and not just a “young Faraday”—a theory supported by everything that happened regarding time travel from there on out.

So.  Speaking of time travel…

Being a huge sci-fi fan, I love the concept of time travel with one huge caveat:  it has to make at least some kind of sense.  And, truth be told, it’s not that hard for it to make sense.  I can even accept paradoxes, such as Skynet going back in time to create itself.  I accept things like that because I feel like limiting time and space to what our puny little human senses can accept is a pretty egotistical thing for us to do.  We experience time as linear but that doesn’t mean that it is.  We only see a certain spectrum of light but that doesn’t mean things like ultraviolet doesn’t exist.

Anyway, what I mean to say is that I don’t have a problem with time travel itself, but it has to make sense in relation to the story being told.  Terminator is a great time travel story.  Back To The Future, while entertaining, is a great time travel story (though not actually rooted in much science).  Battlestar Galactica would not be a good time travel story, because it just doesn’t lend itself to the story.  I guess my mind is still undecided as to whether or not I like it having such a prominent role on Lost.

I do, however, like how they’ve set the rules so far.  We know from seasons 3 and 4 that “the universe has a way of course correcting…” that is to say that everything that can happen has already been decided:  the major turning points in your life and the universe as a whole have already fallen into place, and it doesn’t really matter how they happen, just that they do… and you can’t change it.  Sarah Connor’s mantra “no fate but what we make” doesn’t apply here because you simply cannot change the past.

It is summed up nicely by Daniel:  “picture time like a street.  You can go forward and backward, but you can never make a new street.”  Easy enough.  When you start introducing tangents and alternate timelines, things can get mucked up pretty easy.

I like this rule of “one street” because it’s what makes the most sense to me.  Think of time more like space.  In space, we exist on planet Earth and it’s what we know.  We have not yet been to Mars, or Alpha Centauri.  But we know they exist.  Now think of time similar to that.  We exist here in 2009.  We have not yet been to 2015 or 2999, but we know they exist.  So when you “go back in time” or “go to the future” with the intent to change something, you’re giving yourself way too much credit.  Everything that has ever happened and can already happen is already as concrete as the galaxy around us, and your puny little human self can’t do anything about it beyond moving tiny little insignificant pieces of sand that don’t matter much to the bigger picture.

This doesn’t sit well with people who are all about free-will, but whatever.  Like I said, it’s what makes the most sense to me and I’m glad it’s how Lost appears to be approaching things, too.

One thing that concerns me, though, is exactly what can travel through time.  Terminator is flawed in this respect, but I hold Lost to a higher standard because it’s been so real up to this point.  What I mean is, why do things like Daniel’s backpack, their clothes, Locke’s knife, and the raft travel through time with them, but their tents don’t?  Juliet’s line about “things that were with us are taken along” doesn’t make much sense.  What constitutes something being “with them?”  How was the raft “with them” more so than the tents and food in their camp?

This concerns me because I fear that it won’t be explained.  It may seem like a minor detail but it really is the difference between a believable yet fat-fetched idea and something totally ridiculous.  Like Superman’s costume.  Why is it that his cape is never torn, or his costume doesn’t burn off when he runs into burning buildings?  They explain it by saying his “Kryptonian essence” bubbles out to encompass things within a certain distance from his skin.  I suppose I could accept a similar logic with Lost’s idea of time travel, and that would explain their clothes and their notebooks and backpacks, but it still doesn’t explain why the raft was taken with them and not, say, each grain of sand under their feet.

Still, it was damn cool to see Yemi’s plane crash in person.  I wonder what else we’ll see, and if we’ll eventually run into the season one versions of the castaways.

This leads to an interesting idea, too.  If the time-shifting castaways encounter their previous selves, perhaps those are the mysterious “whispers” that have yet to be explained.  Two possibilities here:  1) either the time-shifting castaways are keeping their voices low so as to not disturb their past-selves, or 2) perhaps the time-shifted people can’t be seen by older versions of themselves, so back in season one the whispers were just their season four selves traveling down Time Street.

I think I like Possibility #2 better, but it runs into snags when you consider how Daniel spoke to past-Desmond, and of course there’s that Marvin Candle video where he freaks out when Bunny #8 appears and threatens to touch the other Bunny #8.  “Don’t let them touch each other!” he exclaims, as if doing so would result in some kind of cataclysmic… incident.  If possibility #2 were true, that couldn’t have happened.

Also:  I’m confident we’ll run into Rousseau again, and that’s awesome because I’m still upset that she died.  I’ve been waiting to hear her entire story since Day 1, and the thought that we might experience it in “real time” is even more intriguing.

And even more intriguing than that, is the idea that’s been knocking around in my head since early on… that “Adam & Eve” are people that we know.

At first I thought that somehow Jack and Kate would skip around the timeline and end up being the corpses discovered in Season One.  Now I’m thinking it may be Sawyer and Juliet, Faraday and Charlotte, or, more likely… Desmond and Penny.  Regardless, I am 88.15% certain it’s a couple we’ve already met, or at least know about.  Consequently, they may be part of the ancient civilization that created the Donkey Wheel and Four Toed Statue.

So, as it does with every season, the show has taken on a much bigger scope.  “Lost (on an island)” has now given way to “Lost (in Time),” which is what it appears to have been about since the beginning.

So I guess my sense of being left “underwhelmed” is just a desire to have these things explained confidently, because once they are then I can get back into enjoying the show.  As of right now my belief has to be too far suspended to really get into the story as much as I’d like.

I also think it has a lot to do with the Oceanic 6/Ben storyline.  I’m just not engaged in that.  I wanted to stay on the island, not skip around the real world with Ben constantly repeating the importance of going back to the island.  I GET IT.  Ben has gone from legitimately scary, to slightly threatening, to, at times, legitimately annoying.  For some reason, that whole drama just isn’t doing it for me, but I fear it’s what we’ll be seeing for the remainder of the season.

Anyway, it’s good to have Lost to look forward to again on a weekly basis.  I’m not sure I can do a blog like this every week but I’m always flattered when people tell me I should.

Also, a senseless yet fairly obvious prediction:  Ms. Hawking (the white haired hooded woman who is presumably finding the island for Ben) is Daniel’s mom.