I was Lost (season three) but now am Found (season four)

Yeah, Lost is back tonight. I can’t wait. A generous Christmas present and a recent long haul trip abroad left me with both the time and means of re-watching the entire third series of Lost so I’m stocked, primed and ready to go.

Not only have I watched the first, second and third series all the way through, I’ve watched the extras and special features on the box sets, listened to the podcasts and carefully combed my way through the fantastic and encyclopaedic (literally!) www.lostpedia.org in order to get my plot lines and conspiracy theories in order.

Will it be worth it? The season finale in Season three got me excited and re-engaged with the story, so I’ll be tuning in tonight and I’m hoping to revisit an island that’s given me some of the most engrossing storylines and fantastic writing of the last ten years worth of television.

It’s may not be as good as the Sopranos (and on that matter, I feel another blog entry coming along any day now) but it does scratch my sci fi/fantasy/thriller itch in a way not much has recently, and that’s good enough for this viewer.

EDIT: Right, I sat down last night in plenty of time for the season premiere and even had the patience to live pause it for ten minutes so I could fastforward through the ads when they came on. Was it worth it? Absolutely - vintage Lost. I loved it and can’t wait to get more.

The writers look like they may have done it again. For Lost fans, series one was all about the crash and the mystery of the island, its monsters and of course, the horrror of The Others. The series ended on a massive cliff hanger with the discovery and opening of the mysterious hatch. Rarely have I shoved a DVD into my player as fast as I did disk one of the second series, and series two did not dissapoint - more excellence as we learned more about the Others and the Dharma Initiative.

This series did dip a little at the end, but came back from another cliffhanger and Series three started with the excellent scene of the Others’ camp at the time of the crash and the revelations regarding Jacob, the ‘magic box’ that produces whatever you want it to, and the story arc concerning the submarine and Ben’s tumour. Truthfully though, this series didn’t grab me as much as S1 and S2 - I think possibly because this was the first series I watched as a series - one episode a week.

The previous two series I’d watched on DVD and so got a different sense of pacing. Three dipped a little, but things are looking up for Series 4. For starters, we now know we’re going somewhere - the writers have announced that there will be another three series (including 4) of 16 episodes each and then it’s finished. The problem with Lost is the lingering suspicion that there’s no end and the makers are just making it up as they go along, but the end is in sight, so it’s go to be wrapped up in 2010.

This first episode has me more excited about Lost since I have been since the end of series 1 - the writers have introduced a totally new story arc and it looks like it’s going to work. A totaly new group of people are coming to the island and through the new technique of flash-forwards, we now have a story being told in three time periods, the past, present and future. Presumably these will all come together as the story is resolved. Bring it on!

Guns are cool, mkay?

I was lucky enough to be in California before Christmas - been doing a lot of travelling lately - and got a chance to call into the LAX gun range to shoot some handguns - .22 calibre revolvers and Glock and Sig Sauer 9 mm semi-automatic handguns to be exact.

(You’d never guess I spent most of my teenage years playing DOOM, would you?)

It might seem weird to be a card carrying leftie - a tree-hugging pseudo-hippie with distinctly pinko leanings - yet also be into guns. However, I’ve no problem seperating the political ideology that goes with gun culture (particularly in the US) from the enjoyment of practicing the technical skill of firing them accurately. To me there is no difference between a handgun and a bow and arrow, or a cross bow, other than the fact that one can be more rapidly deployed as a weapon. However, that said, I find gun culture mostly repugnant.

Because these are dangerous objects, I’m perfectly happy that access to them is restricted in the country I live in. In LA, I thorougly enjoyed the time I spent shooting - if you get a chance, go for it, it’s a blast - but it was also slightly scarey to realise that in Ireland, the odds of you having a gun pointed at you are extremely remote unless you’re involved in the drugs trade or organised crime. In personal crime - muggings and handbag thefts - guns aren’t for the most part used, but in LA, it’s much more likely that a street mugger will be carrying a gun. The police have to make a whole series of different presumptions regarding the level of threat suspects present to them.

I think the society I live in is much richer for the restrictions we have here. The price of these restrictions mean that I can’t own or keep an automatic handgun in my home, but I’m also glad that I don’t feel like I need to. Shooting paper targets is really fun though.

Watch them shuffle out of the way

A friend sent me a link to this video on youtube this morning. I’m just back from a two week training trip and so I find this particularly entertaining. In Japan, bizarrely, bicycles have right of way on the footpath. Why, I have no idea, as it makes no sense whatsoever when there are perfectly good roads all over the place, but as a visitor you’ll frequently find yourself wondering why cyclists expect you to get out of their way when they come up behind you on the footpath ringing their irritating little bells.

Now, armed with that nugget of information, watch this video and see how this person came up with an innovative way to make navigating busy tokyo streets that bit easier. I particularly like the way it works indoors, on escalators and in places it’s very hard to imagine people are expecting to hear a bicycle bell!

I really love the almost pavlovian way that people wander into single file - excellent!

Italian fantastic

Went to Italy last weekend. The wife had to go on business, so we paid for me to go on the cheap with Ryanair. Ryanair sucked (Seriously, the decent into Forli airport prematurely aged me. The pilot took four goes to land the plan, aborting each at the last second to go around again. We were in the air for an extra hour due to “adverse weather conditions” but the sky was clear and there was no wind on the ground. Not funny at all. All that was missing was a hysterical woman standing up and screaming “we’re all going to die!”)

Anyway, Italy rocked. I’m a major foodie, much to the detriment of my waistline, and this was a great trip to a place called Campofilone around two hours south of Forli and two hours north east of Rome. A very nice place that’s totally off the tourist trail. We spent a fantastic two days stuffing ourselves silly with fantastic cheeses (various pecorino and scarmorzi served with different honeys), deep fried artichokes, stuffed olives, broadbeans in garlic oil and the best pasta I’ve ever had.

We visited a pasta workshop where some very skilled women hand made different kinds of fresh egg pasta such as tagliatelle, pappardelle, spaghetti and the regional speciality macaroncini – a sort of thin vermicelli-like pasta. This place was incredible and extremely cheap. I also learned quite a bit about pasta that I didn’t know. The place we visited makes a pasta dough using tipo 00 extra fine durham wheat, and then hand rolls the pasta out on large marble slabs using long wooden rolling pins. The lady there told me that the reason this is better than factory produced pasta is that in factories, the pasta is made using teflon moulds and as such is perfectly smooth. Handmade pasta has a rougher texture which allows it to hold sauce better than the mass produced version.

She’s obviously doing something right because her pasta is fantastic, and also, she is extremely busy supplying restaurants in her area - they all buy from her rather than make it themselves and having tasted it, I know exactly why. Fantastico!

In the local restaurants we had spaghetti in lemon sauce, tagliatelli with truffles, gnocchi with sage and butter and a sort of risotto made with radicchio lettuce. The carnivores had 101 different types of sausages and hams, steaks in greenpepper sauce, pork chops in prune and congnac and lots of excellent wine. Fantastic. Anyway, more anon.

All hail King Fry!

The intellectual and comedic colossus that is Stephen Fry has a blog. It’s new and only has two or three things on it, but because it’s Fry and not an ordinary human being, the few entries that are there so far are many, many thousands of words long, enourmously significant and massively entertaining. I think we should crown Fry king of humanity in an absolute monarchy and be done with. You know it would make sense. Eventually.

Anyway, if you haven’t been, you should. And if like me you have, you may find you slink away from Fry’s blog experiencing mild depression as a result of the realisation that you are in fact an insignificant carbuncle on the backside of literary expression.

If you’re also like me, you’ll also find your self slinking back, unable to stay away. Drats.

Dumbledore is what now?

Apparantly Dumbledore is gay. Seriously.

JK Rowling “. . . made her revelation to a packed house in New York’s Carnegie Hall on Friday, as part of her US book tour.

She took audience questions and was asked if Dumbledore found “true love”. “Dumbledore is gay,” she said, adding he was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, who he beat in a battle between good and bad wizards long ago.

Well, call me old fashioned, but I think if it’s not in the book, it’s not in the story. Did anyone think Dumbledore was ‘playing for the other team’ when they read the books? No, didn’t think so. So, can an author radically revise aspects of a published story by adding verbally later on key information?

Well, they can - and Rowling has - but I think that’s a king-sized cop out. If it’s in black ink on white paper, it’s in the story. If it’s not, it’s not.

As to the nature of the information - that Dumbledore is gay - I suppose it doesn’t mean anything really. It’s a fact of life that a certain percentage of the population is gay. Anyone living in the real world knows that. Unless I missed something in the books, at no point are we told there are no gay people in Harry’s world, so why would we presume otherwise?

Some critics have given Rowling a hard time because this aspect of the character didn’t come out more prominently (or at all) in the books and films - I’d guess they would have liked Dumbledore to have a gay lover ensconced at Hogwarts, to make a point. But isn’t this a children’s story, albeit one that appeals to adults as well? Did Rowling wuss out of showing Dumbledore being gay? No, I don’t think she did. I think it was totally irrelevant to the story, and it would have been fairly offensive tokenism to concoct such a subplot merely to be politically correct. Don’t you think?

The swordsman cometh

Finally, the day draws nigh!

After almost seven months, my sword is nearly ready! Regular readers of this blog will know that amongst many other things, I’m a bit of a Japanese sword nut. I’ve studied the use of the Japanese sword for several years and on a trip to Japan earlier this year, I decided it was time to pick up a real one.

I have quite a few imitation swords that are functional in that I can train with them, but they are factory made and really, not comparable in quality to the real thing. So I saved up for a few years and with a wad of yen burning a hole in my pocket, I picked up an antique authentic nihonto (Japanese sword) in Tokyo.

As a budoka, finding a usable sword is a little like catching lightening. You have to try to find a sword which not only ‘speaks to you’ and which feels right to use, you also have find one that you can afford and also that has fittings in good enough condition that it’s safe to use. Very old or wasted fittings are extremely dangerous, because if not looked after, the blade can actually fly out of the handle when it’s swung.

Anyway, because of this, I took the decision to buy an antique blade in shira saya. What’s a shirasaya? Well, briefly, for those who may not have come across such things before, real Japanese swords are manufactured as a collaborative effort between at least four or more people. There is a smith who makes the blade, a polisher who gives the blade its final shape and also ‘polishes’ it using a series of fine stones to give it its final appearance and sharpness. This is then sent to a guy who makes a shirasaya, a plain wooden storage case that holds the blade and allows it to be transported or inspected.

The shirasaya is just a temporary storage case - the sword next needs to have koshirae (furniture) made for it - a wooden handle needs to be carved from two pieces of a particular kind of wood to exactly fit the nakago (tang) and this handle then needs to be encased in specially prepared ray skin and then further wrapped using tsukaito - a kind of silk or leather lacing that gives the handle it’s distinctive diamond-patterned grip.

The blade itself also needs a wooden scabbard custom carved for it to give it an exact fit, and this then needs to have various bits and bobs added to it to strengthen it, before it’s lacquered to make it weather proof. In addition to the handle and the scabbard, the sword also needs various specialist craftsmen to make a tsuba (sword guard) as well as the various washers and other metal items used in its assembly.

As you can tell, it’s a lot of work and it’s extremely hard to find people up to the task of carrying it out now. In Japan it costs many hundreds of thousands of yen (or thousands of euro) to get this done for you. However, my plan was to get the sword in Japan, and then have the koshirae made for it in the US, where there is rather oddly enough demand for such services to support the existence of a few specialist craft companies.

So that was six months ago, when I got the sword back to Ireland and shipped it off the US. And then yesterday, the e-mail I’d been waiting for – it’s ready.

: )

I’ll post more here when it arrives. Perhaps with some pictures, if there’s interest.

It’s a what, now?

So back from Japan and there are quite a few blog entries on the way, as I get the time. The first thing I’m moved to blog about is the new Sony Rolly. Myself and Jason spent a full twenty minutes standing in front of a kiosk in an electronics store in Japan looking at a promotional video of the rolly.

Really. Twenty minutes - twenty full minutes - spent watching a video of the rolly doing what rollys do. Exactly what that is, I’m afraid I can’t tell you, because I still don’t know. Which is why we spent so long looking at it. I couldn’t decide if this was some sort of cross cultural misunderstanding - maybe Japanese people ‘get it’ instantly - or marketing genius along the lines of “let’s make the promos so ambigous, it will keep people guessing!”

It seems to be some sort of music player, except it lights up, pulses colours, dances and has bluetooth functions. But quite what it is or why you’d want it I’m not sure. The Japanese promo videos feature children dancing with their rollys, couple snuggling in bed with their rolly, and people meditating beside their rolly. Apparently you can programme your rolly to dance in specific ways, and then share your dance programmes across the net with your rolly-owning friends. Quite why you would want to do this, I don’t know but this does come from the same culture that brought us the virtual pet in the form of the tamagotchi so who can say?

Either Sony has invented something so totally and uterly redundent and useless that nobody will buy it and it will go the way of the Sinclair C5 or in fact, Sony has come up with an entirely new and original kind of personal electronics.

Thou shalt always kill

I’m off to Japan for a week or two.

In the meantime, you should watch this.

Really. You should - it’s genius.

The last day of summer

The North Beach in Greystones, County Wicklow.