Some days it's just about the news

It was an uneventful Wednesday, full of teaching and coffee and a little Lost in the evening. Mini-spoilers within.

And in Lost they finally got around to confirming a plot point that was made rather obvious but not 100% explicit at the end of season 2, in the same episode in which Michael killed Ana-Lucia and Libby, for that was all about about Ana-Lucia's trip to Australia with Jack's father. Along the way we get the (or rather: another) connection to Sawyer by way of a car door, but the important point was the drunken, late-night, during-the-rain trip to a working or lower-middle class house, and when Jack's father pounds on the door, argues with the blonde woman in the door, and demands to (be able to) talk to his daughter, you would have been blind not to conclude that, “Hey, we're in Australia, Claire's Australian ... Jack's father is her father, so we've got unsuspecting (half) siblings on the island!”

Yes, it was that obvious, but that plot thread was dropped as quickly as Ana-Lucia and Libby after a night of drunk driving in Hawaii, and with all the emphasis in the first part of season 3 on the Others and those in their custody it took a while to return to the other others, those regular Joes (and Janes) back on the main island. So tonight we got Claire flashbacks, even further back than the earlier ones—that's the thing with most of the flashbacks, they often go even further and further back in a character's history as the series progresses, casting previous flashbacks in a new light—and we see her mother's injury, Claire with black hair, Claire pre-pregnancy, and Claire with daddy-issues. Enter Jack's dad ... make that Claire's dad.

I find it easy to be sympathetic to Claire's plight, but since Charlie is such an annoying f**k and so much of what Claire deals with revolves around Charlie, her stories are, by extension, likewise annoying. I am not advocating killing off or otherwise getting rid of Charlie; the series needs someone everyone wants to hurt and pound, at whom we want to scream, “You stupid, stupid Hobbit!”

Man Tells Cops Unicorn Caused Crash
Mar 14, 7:14 AM (ET)

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - A man told police not to blame him for crashing his truck into a light post - it was that unicorn behind the wheel. Prosecutor Ingrid Rosenquist said Phillip C. Holliday Jr. initially denied driving the truck involved in the March 7 crash in Billings. He told officers at the scene that a unicorn was driving, she said.

Holliday, 42, pleaded not guilty Tuesday to felony charges of criminal endangerment and drunken driving.

A pickup truck drove through a red light and nearly struck another truck in the intersection, according to court documents. The driver then made an erratic U-turn through a gas station, crossed the street and crashed into a light pole. Nobody was injured.

Holliday has five drunken-driving convictions. District Judge Gregory Todd kept his bail at $100,000 despite his lawyer arguing that Holliday's last such conviction was 14 years ago.

From Salon: “Chris Rock thinks the country may be ready for Barack Obama to move into the Oval Office, telling Life magazine, ‘It's ready for a retarded president, why wouldn't it be ready for an African American president?’ (Life via Drudge)”

That about sums it up, doesn't it?

—March 14 2007

S.KRAUSE

Some days it's just about the news