- Apparently, there’s some sort of major televised sporting event happening this weekend. While I know very little about football, the Super Bowl has always been most interesting for its status as the one televised event where advertisements are just as renown as the actual programming, and this year is shaping up to be particularly notable. There are already controversies about two Super Bowl ads, one about a dating site for gay men that has been removed from the Super Bowl lineup, and one ad produced by Focus on the Family in which football star Tim Tebow discusses his mother’s decision not to abort him. (Presumably the message is that your unborn child might also grow up to play for the Florida Gators, and thus deserves life). To recap – the Super Bowl: not interested in gay men or Democrats.
- Conan O’Brien’s future has not yet been settled, and although it’s been widely rumored that he’ll jump over to FOX, apparently Rupert Murdoch isn’t so sure yet. It seems they’re not entirely certain they a FOX Conan show can “make a profit.”
- You know what, I just did these bullet points as an excuse to keep talking about Lost. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were on Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday night after the episode aired, and Jimmy grilled them on a list of observations that may or may not be coincidences.
Obviously they confirm that changes to the alternate Flight 815 are meaningful – Shannon’s disappearance, Jack’s slightly altered conversation with Rose and the flight attendant, etc. They also confirm that Evil Locke is the Smoke Monster, much to the shock of several audience members who clearly weren’t aware that spoilers of that magnitude were going to be revealed. My favorite thing about this interview,* though, is when Cuse and Lindelof remark on the importance of the punctuation for the season opener’s title: “LA X.” Kimmel asks them if they meant to put a space there, and through the joking about typos, they agree that the space is actually significant.I love stuff like that. It’s a such a tiny, nit-picky, fine-toothed comb thing to do, and these guys know that their fans are crazy enough to instantly pick up on and caterwaul endlessly about the fact that they put an unnecessary space in the title of one of their episodes. And I want to close read it as much as the next crazy Lostie, although more because I like the exercise than because I’m painfully impatient to get some answers.
- *When I said that was my favorite part of the interview, that probably wasn’t true. My favorite part was actually the bit when Jimmy asks them if it’s important that Hurley picks up a book by Soren Kierkegaard in the recent episode. They say yes, of course they knew what they were doing, but the subtext here is really “Um, duh. No one – no one - throws in a Kierkegaard reference and expects it to be a meaningless gesture. It’s Kierkegaard.”