Has “Lost” Lost it? And other great Mysteries of our Time

After Thursday’s episode, I’m not so sure that “Lost” still deserves to be reckoned as one of the greatest shows on TV. Don’t get me wrong, the episode was still good, the acting still crisp and the story still intriguing, but things aren’t quite the same over on the main, non-Hydra Island. The “Lost” that we fell in love with is gone. Gone is the focus on character and exploration of personal redemption; in its place, mystery and obscurity for the sake of obscurity, the introduction of ever more and more organizations for the sake of further narrative complications, and the transformation of Walt into a spiritual Ghost Walt because of the producer’s inability to stop the effects of aging. For shame, Carlton Cuse, for shame.

I’ll say right off the bat that it is without a doubt too soon to write off “Lost.” The third season got off to a slow start, with the show turning into a bizarre version of Cool Hand Luke as Sawyer and Freckles went to work on a chain gang for the others.

He Just Bugs the Establishment!

Still, things righted themselves in the end, and season 3 turned out to be incredibly entertaining. If not quite as good as season 1, the show was certainly better than in season 2, and the season 3 finale introduced wonderful new storytelling opportunities that had the show poised for greatness. Unfortunately, that potential is currently being squandered. The creators have unleashed a torrent of new characters rather than working them in gradually; instead of a flash(back/forward) focusing on an individual castaway or other, we received a jumbled flashback of multiple characters. It’s as if the show started to listen to its critics, started to listen to those who said everything was moving too slowly and that nothing was being revealed (legitimate criticisms), only the creators didn’t know what to do and decided just too move everything really fast and to have characters ask direct questions (yet without answers).

Although past experience has told me that the show will probably recover, there are more than a few reasons for concern. To adumbrate but a few:

1) Poor track record with new characters. There have only been two unmitigated successful additions to the main cast: Ben and Desmond. Now think about just how many characters they’ve introduced. Every other one, including Juliet and Ekko, has had a problematic relationship with the show. All the (new) tailies were killed off, casting a pall over the entirety of season 2. Only Bernard is escaped alone to tell thee, and he was a preexisting character. Why were so many new faces introduced only to be killed-off? Were there stories necessary? Why does no-one ever grieve? Each new character presents new challenges, and the show rarely rises to the task, leaving a mess of unsolved problems. We’re still waiting on the Desmond-Odysseus connection and any number of other mysteries.

Catching Up With…Ourselves

With all the movie coverage, football prognostications, and unscheduled breaks, I’ve gotten away from some of my favorite features here at Yesterday’s Salad. And while I know that word of the day columns and mass transit news are of absolutely no interest to most of our readers, herewith are a few tidbits for those whose eyes are brightened with nary a word.

Actually, our WORD OF THE DAY comes to us from the lede to The New York Times article about the Giant’s superbowl victory:

“The Giants were not even supposed to be here, taking an unlikely playoff path through the behemoths of their conference and regarded, once they alighted on Super Bowl XLII, as little more than charming foils for the New England Patriots’ assault on immortality.”

Certainly more playful than your average sports recap (where else are the Giants referred to as “charming foils”?), the lede features one truly bizarre stylistic use, the word “alight.” According to the OED, “alight” primarily refers to landing from above or dismounting from a horse, whence the obsolete definition, “To stop in a course or journey, to arrive.” [There's also another obsolete verb alight meaning, natch, to make light, and another to lighten up or set fire.] But if it can’t actually be said that the Giants fell from the sky, how did they alight upon the Superbowl?

Another definition of “alight” is “To land, fall, or come upon anything without design,” as in this quote from The Great Gatsby: “I realized that so far his suspicions hadn’t alighted on Tom.” If so, can it really be said that the Giants came upon the Superbowl without design? Did no-one in the front office divine plans to make the Superbowl? Someone in the organization must have had a plan to make the Superbowl, didn’t they?

The Times‘ usage is in fitting with the general archaic sense of the word given by Merriam Webster, to come by chance. Though not as intricate as some of the others we’ve seen, it’ll serve us uncouth Americans quite well. Either way, it’s great to see an archaic sense of an obscure word making the lede to the cover article.

Behind the Times, Behind the Salad

Every blog has its day in the sun. Every blog also has its day in the shade, and for us that day was yesterday. After being the darling of the New New Media for a few fortnights, YS’ traffic has suddenly become more like the darjeeling limited: a lot of primping, a lot of quirkiness, and the occasional mark of genius. I can only posit a few reasons for our sudden decline:

1) The Oscars hypothesis: We’d picked up a lot of readers looking for semi-literate film reviews and oscar odds, but with Dash out campaigning for the Biden-Thompson unity ticket, we’ve recently become negligent in our duties as source. So, to correct: YS went 4/5 on picture nominees missing Michael Clayton (we picked Into the Wild). What happened?

a) Into the Wild was not that good. As with Dreamgirls last year, academy voters will ultimately recognize that a movie is not that good (I hope). Then again, these are the same people who nominated Titanic, Return of the King, The Accidental Tourist, and The English Patient. I really don’t know what captivated America about that movie. In the years since, everyone has become Elaine.

b) Never believe the buzz. Atonement (which we picked) seemed down for the count about a week and a half ago, and Juno also seemed on the ropes. In their place: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (review to come) and, yes, Into the Wild. When push comes to shove, go with the movie your mom and dad told you you had to see.

c) Never pet against the Clooney. Not when the movie is really good.

d) And the best movies the academy probably never considered nominating were: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Superbad, Knocked Up, Meduzot, and King of Kong.

2) The Heath Ledger hypothesis: I’m not going to say much about the death of Mr. Ledger, who really was quite an excellent actor. In fact, the only person upon whose death we have given comment is Jean Baudrillard. I actually think that Mr. Baudrillard would be rather pleased with the way people are responding to Mr. Ledger’s death. A woman in the times claimed that she felt she knew him. Celebrities really are that close to us these days. But Baudrillard would probably be most interested in this: emails from the dead!

3) The Mandrake hypothesis: with America divided, Americans want to know whom to vote for, and who won’t be president. One man gave them answers. Whither?

Note to the Reader

You may have noticed that there have been a lot of movie posts recently. We didn’t set out to become a movie blog, but, for better or worse, reviewing movies is a lot of fun and there will be (BLOOD!) more of them in the near future. We’re trying hard to post reviews for almost all of the year’s notable films (Check out The Year in Pictures page). But I know that many of you turn to the Salad for the variety of verisimilitude. Fear not, there are still plenty of things to piss off ibiteyoureyes, and with a transit doomsday coming to Chicago, how can the transit quill remain muted?

More Maniacal Words of the Year

When last we left the word of the year dispute, YS had successfully slain the dragon of “locavore” and invalidated the standing of the Webster’s New World College Dictionary to rule on such a matter after their nonsensical choice of the equally nonsensical “grass station.” I was going to leave the matter at that (or at least wait until the American Dialect Society announced its choice), but the New York Times decided to pull me back in. The Times article basically summarizes YS’ findings, and ends with this quote from the Boston Globe language columnist: “I can’t help thinking that 10 weeks of WOTY fever is about eight weeks more than anyone wants.” Clearly she hasn’t spent much time at the Hammerskjold household.
[Note: the rest of this will be quite dry, but there is a cool word coming up, a possible value judgement on the OED's part, and a betting tip.]

The Times also mentions this Merriam-Webster contest for WOTY which opened the process up to the masses. Here’s how they described it:

Below you’ll find an alphabetical list of twenty words culled from frequent hits to Merriam-Webster OnLine and some popular submissions to Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. We thought this would be an excellent way to cover the waterfront, since many great candidates for the 2007 Word of the Year are still in their infancy and haven’t quite proven themselves worthy of being entered in the dictionary

This description, however, shows the two biggest problems with the methodology: many of the new words do not meet the snuff of professional lexicographers, and many words are well established, really too established for such a contest. My dream is a system both open and closed; I’m not really sure if any of the contests come close.

Still one of the Merriam-Webster candidates is truly a terrific word: sardoodledum. I won’t reproduce the definition as their entry is really quite great; I will, however, add that the OED definition is in the same vein, but different: “A fanciful word used to describe well-wrought, but trivial or morally objectionable, plays considered collectively; the characteristic milieu in which such work is admired.” I’m partial to the OED’s definition, but only because I take “fanciful” to be someone’s qualitative judgement of the word.

For what it’s worth “facebook” will probably be the winner.

Fashion (Turn to the Left!)

As a fan of four-year lettermen from solid midwestern universities where continental philosophy is surely not on the syllabi, I’ve always supported that symbolic exemplar of alliteration, the Machiavelli of marksman, Kyle Korver. Based on “values” alone, he probably would have been my first choice in the 2003 draft (yet another reason why neither Deconstruction nor post-Colonialism have any place in NBA front offices). But even I can admit that LeBron James should have gone first in the 2003 fashion festivities. From draft night on, when LeBron wore all white whilst everyone else went conservative, LeBron James has led the pack of NBA dressers.

But not everyone is in agreement on the matter of Mr. James’ fashion sense. His decision to wear a Yankees cap to game one of the New York-Cleveland ALDS caused quite the uproar around the blogosphere, even reaching the hallowed pages rss of Esquire (though the author took the “betrayed fan” angle, and did not provide style commentary). But the most egregious of all this sartorial player hating is this claim that LeBron James is a poor dresser. As our fellow wordpress blogger put it, “Heal fast, Lebron. If you had to dig in your closet for that velour mess after only 2 games, I’d hate to see what you show up in next.” [see the photo at right.]

I actually attended the game in question, and, courtesy of devoted reader Jennifer (she thought she was taking ibiteyoureyes), I had seats right by the Cleveland bench, perfect for viewing the injured Mr. James hobble past. In person, LeBron’s jacket was spellbinding, the gold buttons radiant. ( It also appeared to be more suede than velour as cited in the report. ) I wasn’t the only one transfixed by James’ attire; several fans shouted out non-ironic words of encouragement, and the ever stylish Jennifer also loved the jacket. Of course, I’m hardly the first to notice the difference between first-hand experiences and photographic representations. Indeed, the world would probably be a better place if fashion bloggers everywhere read Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (full text!) before jumping to ever snarkier conclusions.

And for those who like their sports commentary with even more literary analyses than Free Darko provides, consider In Praise of Athletic Beauty by Hans Ulrech Gumbrecht. This quote sums up his central argument quite nicely:

His central thesis, to round it out a little crudely, is that we watch sports not out of identification with the players but out of a kind of happy absorption in someone else’s ability…In other words, when we watch Joe Namath or Chad Pennington or even Eli complete a pass what we feel isn’t pathetic and vicarious but generous and authentic: we give up a bit of ourselves in order to admire another. [source]

The real fun isn’t to be found in Gumbrecht’s argument, but his excellent readings of sports and literature and his bizarre epigram thanking the Stanford Cardinal Football team, 197?-2048. Prophecies of the end abound!

What’s the Matter with Webster?

Perhaps because of my Anglophilia, or perhaps because I spend most of my life in an Ivory Tower slaving over illuminated manuscripts by the faint, flickering light of whale oil (being a dual citizen of Norway and Japan, I’m safe from perse-/prosecution–many thanks go to Rabbi Dr. Professor Jurgen Haverstam, DHL for pointing out the loopholes in international treaties), I somehow missed the fact that Webster’s New World College Dictionary had already named their word of the year. In fact, this happened back before it all began, way back on the cusp of November.

But since the winning entry, “Grass Station,” was so terrible, I have decided to speak against; not only contra the word, but also Webster’s standing in adjudicating the contest itself.

After all, what does “New World” college dictionary mean? Whence “New World?” The phrase presupposes at the very least one of, but possibly several, terrible things. One need not be a post-Colonial critic to see that the phrase is overly Eurocentric, the “New World” existing only in opposition to the old. That this continues after Mel Gibson has taught us that there was indeed a world here at the same time there was one there, is simply unconscionable. There can be no “New World” because the phrase can easily be destabilized, fall to the forces of cultural relativism. The other major culprit is the Hegelian system of Dialectics. But with the end of History no more, have we really entered into a New World?

This is, of course, to say nothing of the overtones of fascism and totalitarianism that abound in the name; “New World” being remarkably close to New World Order [On that note, another objection: Joy Division was superior]. Or perhaps it is a question of Messianism, with its new world of a kingdom on Earth. Or the world could refer to economic development, with the “New World” relating somehow to the transition from the 3rd world to the 1st. When all is said and done, the phrase “New World” is so indefinite as to render their very project, their very essence, null and void.

Salad: for all needs public and private

Though we are often criticized for negligence in our salad duties, this has more to do with Dash’s conversion to locavism (locavity? locavorainity? locavoriousness? locavdom?) and the lack of suitable produce than it does to any pahn-shahn for destruction, or proclivities towards other uber foods such as pizza, or gummy products. But with fall’s arrival comes carrots and rutabagas, and plenty of opportunities to more (obs. trans. To augment, to cause to increase, to exaggerate cf. German mehren/ Yiddish mern) love, joy, and lexical abilities.

Whilst enjoying a glass of port the other day, I began to think of the adjective “tawny,” a word I usually only encounter with regard to ports. In general, tawny is actually a description of colour (as it sort of is here) rather than a confirmation of the port’s abilities to more your merriment. Tawny refers to “a composite colour, consisting of brown with a preponderance of yellow or orange.” With regards to ports, a tawny port is actually “a port wine made from a blend of several vintages matured in wood.” Colorful adjectives are an interesting subject in their own right. Consider verdant (of a green hue). The most common use is for verdure, or greenery. One frequently reads of the verdant hills of Connecticut, but the term is seldom used in describing other green items, and the adverbial form “verdantly” is even less common (although I worry I’m treating this issue with verdancy, ” 2. fig. Innocence, inexperience; rawness, simplicity.”) I hope this has been gratuitous like nudity (1. provided without payment or return; costing nothing to the recipient; free.) and not gratuitous like 300 (Done, made, adopted, or assumed without any good ground or reason; not required or warranted by the circumstances of the case; uncalled-for; unjustifiable).

Lastly, I just want to offer a brief correction to a statement I made the other week that there were only three really good sitcoms airing on American TV. To my list (The Office, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother) I’d like to now add, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Flight of the Conchords, The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman, and in indie-cred defying embarrassment, Everybody Hates Chris. Unfortunately, the best American sitcom is not currently airing on American TV. The other day, the New York Times featured an article about Russian versions of American sitcoms. The article focused on the Russian version of Married….With Children but mentioned off-handedly that the Russian version of The Nanny was so popular that “some of the show’s original American writers were commissioned to create 25 more episodes.” 25 more episodes of The Nanny? Why aren’t these being shown to Americans? Don’t we deserve such hilarity? With harbingers of a second cold war arriving daily, I ask, why don’t Americans have the same right to know what happened to Fran, Mr. Sheffield, Niles, and CC as post-Soviet, North Pole flag planting Russians?

For shame, George W. Bush, for shame.

A Royal Update

Yesterday’s Salad, always striving to keep our readers informed, has just learned the menu for tonight’s White House State dinner will include pea soup, sole almondine and lamb, amongst, presumably, two other courses. And, while it appears that Dr. Frasier Crane will not be attending this time, surprise Superbowl champion Peyton Manning AND his BACKUP, Tim Hasselbeck will be in attendance. There is as yet no word as to whether Mr. Hasselbeck’s wife, view co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, will be attending, or if Mr. Hasselbeck is coming as Mr. Manning’s date. Either way, you have to love a social chair who invites the Colt’s back-up QB and not the President’s father.

A Correction

No, this will not be a retraction of last night’s limerick musings. Rather, I come to offer a correction (really an addendum) to a very important list: my morning’s diet of newspapers. Many of you may be confused as to how I manage to read the entirety (yes, even the offal–similar to the German abfal, “The edible parts collectively which are cut off in preparing the carcass of an animal for food” or, “Refuse in general; rubbish, garbage; a piece of this”) of ten newspapers every morning. The answer, as it is to everything, is to consume six fried eggs and a glass of laudanum ‘ere 3 every morning. It seems, however, that starting tomorrow I will have to consume my glass of laudanum at 2:45 as DH is now a loyal reader of Pravda, the Russian newspaper that used to be the mouthpiece of the communist party (thanks to world’s smartest man runner-up–behind Aaron Sorkin, natch–and lab school parent, Steven Levitt for the tip).

At first glance, Pravda seems like your standard newspaper. The current headline is about Yesterday’s Salad’s own Nicholas Sarkozy’s plans for the French parliament. But, look a little (very little) deeper, and it becomes clear that the majority of the paper’s budget is not spent investigating the weighty issues of our day. Here’s the headline of an article that appeared about a fortnight ago: “Gastrointestinal medications may break wind and result in severe gas attacks.” While this may have been published in Pravda’s communist period, being, as it were, important information to have, I doubt this next article would have been:  “Various media outlets portray breasts differently.” Mon dieu! Clearly taking a formalist bent, the article posits that different formats lead to different types of portrayals. Or, to (intentionally mis)quote the great Professor David G. Roskies, “The medium is the message.” Seeing as the communists exiled a great many formalists, including Bakhtin, to Siberia, I doubt they would have tolerated this type of analysis in their own agent of repressions. Freedom lives at Pravda.

Another recent article discusses Maria Sharapova’s dream “mixed doubles” partners. Coming in at number three (behind James Bond and John McEnroe) was Vladimir Putin. And here I thought Pravda’s foray into US Weekly territory was a clear sign of westernization and a turn away from being an authoritarian mouthpiece.

Nonetheless, with its mix of high-fallutin reportage and formalist leanings, Pravda is a welcome addition to my daily reading material.