Category Archives: Mysteries are wonderful things

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, part 4: “It only ends once, everything else is just progress”

Posted by Benjamin Light on

If you haven’t already, you might want to check out:

But before you do, make sure you put on some trash bag diapers, you know, like the astronauts wear.

We have already been taking a wonderful ride down memory lane, and at this point, every scene on this list is one of those “fuck me, I don’t believe what I just saw” moments. That reminds me, nowhere in this whole list did we find time to recall one of my favorite lines of the series. “Boone was a sacrifice that the Island demanded,” should go into the Dialog Hall of Fame. We love you, John Locke, and we left off with John in a mass grave, mortally wounded by Ben for being Jacob’s pet. And now let’s look back at a classic encounter with Ol’ Smokey…

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!

PART FOUR

25. Kate and Juliet face the Smoke Monster at the sonic fence in “Left Behind.” I think we all learned a lot from this scene. One of the A-team finally sees the Smoke Monster in all its glory. We know the monster will attack an Other. We know the sonic fence is a defense against it, perhaps the only reason for the fence. And we also learned that Kate + Juliet + handcuffs + rain & mud + popping shoulder joints back into sockets = hot!

24. The Frozen Donkey Wheel. Ben will help John move the island by blowing a hole in the Orchid’s containment chamber, climbing down a ladder, through a tunnel and then turning an ancient-looking ice-covered wheel. Millions of theories about the Polar Bears being trained to turn the wheel are born.

23. Sayid confronting ‘Henry Gale’ in Lockdown. “It was all there, your whole story, your alibi, it was all true. But still, I did not believe it to be true. So I dug up that grave. And found that there was not a woman inside, there was a man. a man named Henry Gale.” Fuck Yeah, Sayid! This is possibly my favorite Sayid line in the whole series. Marco and I often joke that the writers must continuously contrive ways to separate Sayid from the other Castaways, because if he was there for a lot of these other moments, the show would have only lasted a season, he’s that fucking competent.

22. Keamy executes Alex. You never saw this coming. There are tons of action and drama shows where somebody’s got a gun to a family member’s head, and the relative always relents rather than let the other person die. Always. Except on Lost. Not only did Ben not relent, he disavows Alex as she pleads for mercy, and Keamy actually pulls the trigger, killing a teenage girl on primetime TV. Shocking, tragic, riveting.

21. The hidden map. “Lockdown” was one of Lost’s classic game-changer episodes, and nothing got more buzz than the map. Entertainment Weekly did a whole spread on it in their next issue, enhancing and translating all the tantalizing latin clues, references to Cerberus, the Sickness and other hatches painted all over the blast door.

20. Sawyer slaps Faraday in “Because You Left.” Not only do we get a passible scientific explanation of the time-jumping from Faraday, we get: “Shut it, Ginger, or you’re getting one too!” Nobody talks down to Sawyer. Plus, there’s just something hypnotic about Jeremy Davies’s stilted, hazy delivery as Faraday explaining Science.

19. The Incident. We heard about it way back in Season2, and it didn’t disappoint. Jack had a bomb…

and Juliet was determined to set it off, leaving us with the most wide-open cliffhanger ever. Literally anything could happen in Season 6 at this point.

18. Walt is kidnapped from the raft in Exodus, pt 3. A classic “out of the frying pan and into the fire” moment. Just when the raft folks think they’ve found rescue, they get Mr. Friendly and “Only the thing is, we gonna have to take the boy.” WALLLLLTT!!!

17. It’s Locke in the casket. This secret was so big the producers filmed a fake take with Desmond in the casket, just in case. After seeing everything that happened in between, it makes perfect sense for Jack to attempt suicide after learning of John’s death. They were philosophical opposites, but they needed each other.

16. Sayid shoots little Ben. I bought Marco a shirt that says “Guns don’t kill children, Sayid does!” This was the ultimate question, can they really change the timeline? Apparently not in this way. Sayid is faced with the decision you often hear about in hypothetical: “if you could go back in time to kill someone evil when they were still a child and innocent, in order to prevent future suffering, would you? Should you?” Sayid makes the choice only men like he are capable of making. But as Faraday warned, “whatever happened, happened.”

15. The sky turns purple in “Live Together, Die Alone.” We all wondered what would happen if the button didn’t get pushed. The answer: it’s not just a psychological experiment. Desmond finally finds his courage and turns the failsafe key, turning the sky purple and imploding the hatch. Des would never be the same afterward, communication was apparently cut-off from the mainland at this point, and the magnetic disturbance was enough to point Penny’s search team in the right direction.

14. Ben summons the monster. How epic was “The Shape of Things to Come?” It’s all over this list. Among the many, many shocking moments was the reveal that Benjamin Linus apparently has the power to summon the monster. Smoky shows up in all it’s terrifying glory and makes quick work of Keamy and his men. The monster, much like Enoch Root, remains a mystery, but it’s always awesome when he makes an appearance.

13. The Island disappears in “There’s No Place Like Home.” When Ben said he’d move the Island, he wasn’t kidding. With a flash of light, boom, it’s gone, nothing but a ripple in the ocean where it used to be. The writing in this episode was so crafty, not only was the disappearance amazing, it took away the only land mass for Lapidus to land the helicopter on, causing them to crash.

12. Jacob and the dark man have a chat on the beach in “The Incident, pt 1.” The music is excellent in this scene, so foreboding and mysterious. Unlooked for, the season 5 finale stuns us by starting off with an introduction to Jacob and his dark opposite. The scene crackles with hidden allegorical meaning. “It always ends the same.” ”It only ends once. Everything else is… just progress.” Not often you get a primetime network TV show that encourages its viewers to contemplate the great mysteries of life. We’re all better for it.

11. Locke in the wheelchair in “Walkabout.” This reveal was so good we took it out of the flashback moments. Lost’s Pilot episode was perhaps the best pilot ever, but it was “Walkabout,” and the revelation that Locke was paralyzed before the crash, that took the show to the next level. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” shouts John, nicely establishing his key character trait: the belief that his is destined to do great things. When we saw John in his wheelchair, we knew this show was something special.

Up next, the top 10 greatest moments of Lost (though we suspect Season 6 will have something to say about this before it’s all over with.)

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, part 2: “You knew… and you sent me anyway.”

Posted by Benjamin Light on

Awwwwwww yeeeaahhhh. We are just getting started.

The best part of making this list has been that, after me and Marco locked down the top 100, I’d go back and watch an episode and it was like, “fuck, I totally forgot about this moment! It’s not top 100, but it’s still fucking awesome.”

For example, In an early Season 2 episode, Sun loses her wedding ring. Jack tries to make her feel better by telling her a story about how he lost his ring once and had to fake a replacement. Then Yunjin Kim delivers the slightest of glances down at Jack’s left hand. Pregnant Pause. Jack looks down at his empty ring finger too and shrinks a little.

It’s a perfect snapshot of a character who’s both the calm, reassuring hero and also a manic, damaged failure. And it didn’t even make the list.

Continuing on with Counterforce’s list of Epic Lost Moments, we find ourselves at the electric encounter between the mysterious one-eyed man and Motherfucking Sayid.

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!

PART TWO

75. Cut to “Enter 77,” with Mikhail and Sayid taking turns tightening the screws on each other. Sayid sez: “At least we were able TO KILL one of them.” and then Mikhail tosses off this immortal, badass line: “Why are we continuing to play this little game… when it all know it has moved to THE NEXT STAGE!” Fight!

74. Charlie gives Kate her shirt back after they ran from the broken hive and delivers what might be his best and nearly only good line of the series. Kate: “It was full of bees.” Charlie: “I’d have thought C’s, actually.” Even Jack laughs, so you know it was a good joke.

73. Faraday meets the young Ellie, stares at her enough to lay the creep on her (must be weird to meet your mom back when she was a young hottie), and then gets a look at jughead, the massive Chekov’s Gun of Season 5.

72. Jack’s first fistfight with Ethan, where he gets his ass handed to him, then discovers Charlie left hanging in “All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues.” Unfortunately, Jack is able to revive Charlie.

71. Pierre Chang questions a helpless Hurley on 1977 to out him as a time traveler. “So you fought in the Korean War?” snarks Chang, “There’s no such thing?” Hurley flails. Also during this moment we finally see Miles and Pierre acknowledging their connection.

70. Sayid kills a guy with a dishwasher in the safehouse/hotel room in “Because You Left.” Not only was this move awesome, but it resulted in an entire episode where and unconscious Sayid gets toted around “Weekend at Bernies”-style.

69. Team Jack finds the dump of forgotten tube canisters sent from the Pearl Station in “Live Together, Die Alone.” A kind of haunting image of futility, and a seeming answer to the question of whether or not the hatch was just a psychological experiment.

68. Richard Alpert walks into Dharmaville in ’74, slams the torch into the grass. This is where Richard was officially elevated to “This guy could walk into any scene in any timeline and I won’t bat an eyelash” status. It’s not often we get to see him display the kind of authority he levels at Horace here. “That fence may keep other things out, but… not us.” Nobody sticks torches into dirt like Nestor Carbonell.

67. Sayid meets Rousseau, and we finally get a face to the mysterious French Woman on the radio distress loop.

66. Locke blows the Hatch door. I love the way John just ignore’s Hurley’s plea to stop. What a way to end the season: a long shaft into the darkness.

65. The monster kills the pilot in the “Pilot.” Our first taste of the mysterious Island security system.

64. Sawyer and Jack meet Mr. Friendly in the jungle, “Light ‘em up!” from “The Hunting Party.” Just when Jack is feeling cocky enough to call bullshit on Tom Friendly, the Others call bullshit on Jack and we finally get to hear a little about their point of view. “This is not your island.”

63. Montand loses the arm in “This Place is Death.” It was teased so long ago, and finally seeing how Montand lost his arm in the Dark Territory, as Rousseau mentions in “Exodus” was extremely fulfilling and satisfying.

62. Sawyer puts down the US Marshall in “Tabula Rasa.” Or, tries to. Wonderful that Sawyer does what no one else has the guts to. And fucks it up. So Jack goes in and finishes it, bare-handed.

61. Teams Jack and Locke form and split at the cockpit in “The Beginning of the End.” Marco and I love quoting the Jackface standard, “Are you INSANE!?!?” at each other. Later in the series, Locke would softly comment, “You put a gun to my head, and you pulled the trigger.”

60. Ben confronts Jacob, and stabs him. I didn’t make the connection for months, but the “What about me?” “What about you?” exchange is basically an allegory for Man confronting his God. Ben wants validation, but to Jacob, he’s just not important in the grand scheme. Even Ben killing him means nothing to Jacob. It’s as though you were given a chance to ask the Supreme Being about your purpose in life, and God responded, “I really don’t care, fuck off.”

59. Ellie shoots Faraday in “The Variable.” I love the stunned realization on Daniel’s face. “You knew. You always knew… And you sent me anyway.” Only at the end, does the last puzzle piece for Faraday fall into place. He neglected to consider the one threat that would kill him: his own mother.

58. “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” The one who will save us all.

57. If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be MY constant. And we begin to grasp just how deep into the rabbit hole of time Lost is about to take us.

56. Locke says “I was wrong” to Mr. Eko right before the Swan implodes in “Live Together, Die Alone.” Terry O’Quinn does such an excellent job revealing the shame and fear of Locke’s failure. Despite the wonderful, fantastical elements of the show, it’s these kinds of raw, honest character moments that make Lost the amazing drama that it is.

55. The return to the Island in the opening of “316.” We all thought it would take a whole season to get back to the Island, and then BAM, six episodes in and they’re back.

54. Meeting the tail section of Oceanic 815 in “The Other 48 Days” Really the whole episode was excellent, but getting to relive the crash, from the spinning tail fuselage falling out of the sky, to the desperate panic to rescue survivors on the beach, was the perfect less-hopeful mirror to the same scenes from the Pilot. You just kinda knew from the start that these tailies were fucked.

53. The Others purge the Dharma Initiative in “The Man Behind the Curtain.” With bonus points for Ben killing his own father with gas. Horace sitting dead on the bench, the sad realization on his face that he would never understand the Island. Or perhaps he’s grasping that Alpert really meant it about the 15-year limit on their truce.

52. Desmond talks to the older Eloise in “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” sees the man with red shoes, and learns about “course corrections.” Just another brick in the “fate” wall that Team Eloise is building against Free Will. I love that a popular television show has been dramatizing the philosophical debate between fate and free will for 6 years.

51. Jack says “Forgive me” and almost jumps off a bridge. Another thing I love about this show is its willingness to give us characters at their absolute lowest. Jack is the hero, the lead, the protagonist, and here he is about to kill himself. But even in his darkest hour, he’s still inexorably pulled towards an emergency he can fix. Excellent direction in this scene: the off-screen car crash, the cry for help and the fire brightening Jack’s face. Some of Michael Giacchino’s best musical work as well.

See you tomorrow with PART 3!

The intimidating and impenetrable fog.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“Writers take words seriously – perhaps the last professional class that does – and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”

-John Updike

A few things for you:

1. Acoustic listening devices devised by the Dutch army…

…intended for use in air defense systems between the two World Wars.

2. Artist Lynda Barry who serialized her graphic novel ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, a work of “Autobiofictionalography,” on Salon a while back, and had a famous story in it entitled “Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend.” Anyway, the worst boyfriend of the title has finally been revealed…

…to be Ira Glass. It makes a kind of sense.

3. One of my favorite quotes about the art of words and the artists who do damage and paint portraits with it is, unsurprisingly, by this man right here…

…and it goes something like this:

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.”

-Mark Twain, in a letter to George Bainton in 1888.

4. The Man Men comic book…

…that never was.

5. There is an old, abandoned town in the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia that one can only access by the sea or the air…

…and it’s called Bechyovinka, the submariner’s town.

Anyway. Something to think about on your Sunday night. Personally, I’m in a bit of a fog, if you couldn’t already tell…

“The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!”

-Bill Watterson

Spirits and sexy singularities in the noosphere.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

So, the other day I started reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the third in the Robert Langdon series (the previous entries being Angels And Demons and The Da Vinci Code, which maybe you’ve heard of?), and I’d like to tell you it’s a quick read, but I can’t. It’s pretty much a generic airport thriller drenched into esoteric research, some of it interesting, interesting enough to be worthy of a whole shelf of nonfiction books better than this, but hey, whatever. Airport thrillers have the opposite effect on me than other people, somehow. I tend to read them slowly, needing time to pause at each cloying and trite sentence.

That said, somewhere around page 70 it starts to pick up a little, when a severed hand turned into not into a hand of glory like I originally thought, but a hand of mysteries quite literally points the plot into a more speedy direction. Prior to that it seems like every other chapter is jacking off uber-mysterioso masonry and vague notions about research into the noosphere.

from here.

It’s actually the vague mentions of the noosphere that has me most interested, to be honest, just because the noosphere fascinates me. The stuff about the architecture of the nation’s capitol and it’s surrounding areas and the hidden meanings and symbols therein are interesting too, but having lived in DC, I’m familiar with most of it already.

from here.

Also coincidentally, a few days ago I finished The Fall Of Hyperion, the second in the fantastic Hyperion cantos, a crazy sci fi take on The Canterbury Tales that I would highly recommend for a variety of reasons, but interestingly, two of the characters that recur in the book are Jesuit priests, and one of them a follower of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher, geologist, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest himself who did a lot of work with examining the idea of the noosphere and developing the concept of the Omega Point.

Transformation in utopic space, from here.

The Omega Point is essentially the idea of the maximum level of intelligence and complexity and understanding, to which the universe seems to be driving towards. And humanity, one hopes, along with it. Though, realistically, probably not.

“We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic temperature are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet as a whole.”

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It’s a nice thought, that we could be heading somewhere better, almost despite ourselves, right? It’s nice to be optimistic about that kind of thing, probably. But the Omega Point, a kind of singularity, is something I think you’ll start hearing more about in the coming years as we slouch closer towards 2012, when the novelty wave winds down and the Mayan calendar runs out of time, and we’re either reborn, destroyed, or life as we know it continues on the same and everyone feels fine.

End of the world curiousity is natural, I think, especially more and more so in the past few years. Part of it being a response to cultural shifts and real world events that loom so large over our daily lives, but also there’s the curiousity/paranoia about “ancient forces” coming back to sweep us over. I think you’ll see more of a probing into some of these ideas, both the ridiculous and the stuff truly worth reexamining, possibly because of a tapping into the noosphere/collective unconciousness and shared interest, but also, and let’s be real here, just like Y2K, this kind of thing will prove to be highly marketable.

Everything that rises must converge

Posted by Benjamin Light on

So now then.

jackface

i don’t really have much to say at the moment. I still despise 95% of our culture, but at least we have Lost.

Not so much:

swine

It’s really a shame that newspapers are dying, because blogging can’t fill that gap in real journalism, and having to rely on the AP, well…

AP

…We’ll always have Yahoo! Front Page. Thanks to them, I know it’s a bad thing for a girl to call Benjamin “pal” in a flirtext.

flirsexting

I’m too lazy to link to anything today. Fuck it, it’s Friday. Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?

ENDCAT

Addendum: Benjamin Light has consumed significant amounts of generic vodka. I was attending a screening of Star Trek last week with Occam Razor when, pre lens-flare-o-rama, the theater aired the trailer for the Night at the Museum sequel. At then end of this travesty of  cinema, a girl behind and to the left of us declared: “I have to see it! I HAVE to see it! I HAVE TO SEE IT!”

… I don’t even know what to say to that. Judging by the demograph of the crowd, I can only assume she was sincere in her desire to view said movie. Is there a less significant film in the history of cinema? I don’t know. But it cements my feeling that Television (or, at least serialized narratives) is the future of motion pictures, and not film. Take one peak at the trailer to The Road and it becomes painfully clear that some stories should not be made into movies.

For instance, I would love to see certain scenes from Cryptonomicon realized on a big screen, especially the Bobby Shaftoe stuff, but you can take a step back and admit that, yes, some narratives were intended to be digested as books, not movies. And where movies fail to deliver the nuance of a novel, perhaps a serialized narrative in the format of a television show can succeed. I feel, lately, that too many properties are being converted into movies, despite the fact that the structure is incompatible: see The Watchmen. Somehow the motion picture has established itself as the high point of media saturation, so we get subpar “adaptations” of The Golden Compass and the like.

Note to hollywood: if you want to make a movie, make a movie, but not all stories should be adapted so. Most people love books not for the plot, but for the personality of the narrator, and the intimate connection between reader and storyteller. In short, if Hollywood can’t duplicate that in Script Form a la Fight Club, then it’s probably not worth the money to make a film of it. In other words: hire better screenwriters or make better tv shows. Not every property can be condensed into a 105-minute feature.

I have no doubt in my mind that the Night at the Museum sequel will make shitloads of money. I don’t fully understand it, but I know better that to vote against it. Although I’d love to see bits of The Baroque Cycle on the big screen, if only to expose the material to a wider audience, there’s a kind of comfort in the knowledge that only the truly committed will appreciate the nuances of literature.

Who knows what wonderful things lay underneath Treasure Island?

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Today we talk about one of my favorite of those curious little oddities and mysteries from out there among the world. Today we delve into the money pit on Oak Island, just off the coast of Nova Scotia, and what is possibly one of the longest running treasure hunts into the unknown.

The earliest recorded beginning of this tale starts back in 1795, when 16 year old Daniel McGinnis was wandering around Oak Island, a tiny uninhabited island a short rowboat ride away from Nova Scotia, and discovered a curious circular depression in the ground in the middle of a clearing. Investigating further, he discovered that several branches had been cut away for a tackle block to be used above the depression in the ground. Since there had been reported stories of pirates in the area, McGinnis decided to leave and come back with some friends later.

Over the next several days, McGinnis and his teenage friends worked over this mysterious hole, which they found to be quite deep. Just a few feet down into the hole, they found some flagstones and the marks of a pick into the dirt. As they continued to probe into the hole, they found a layer of logs laid out every ten feet down, but had to abandon their excavation 30 feet down due to lack of supplies or skills to push further. But what they had found had astonished, especially since it was clearly the work of human engineering.

This is just the beginning of what would later come to be known as the Money Pit.

Eight years later, McGinnis and his friends returned, along with the Onslow Company, formed with the express purpose of literally getting to the bottom of this mystery, but their efforts, if you’ll pardon the pun, only deepened the mystery of the Money Pit.

They continued to push down into the hole, all the way down to the 90 foot mark, still finding the layers of logs every 10 feet. But in addition to that, they also found at the 40 foot mark, a layer of charcoal, and at the 50 foot mark, a layer of putty, and at the 60 foot down mark, a layer of coconut fiber. But at the 90 foot mark, one of the most puzzling aspects of this mystery was found: A stone inscribed with a mysterious writing in symbols on it.

from here.

No actual pictures were taken of the stone, which has since been lost, but one translation claims that the symbols (seen above) say, “Forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.”

Naturally, that only energized the men doing the excavation and they began pulling up the layer of oak there at the 90 foot mark. In doing so, water began seeping into the hole, but they couldn’t tell from where. By the next day, the hole had been flooded up to the 33 foot mark.

Since pumping didn’t work, a new pit was dug in the following year, one that ran parallel to the original and went down to the 100 foot mark, and then went over into the original. Again, that pit flooded with water and the search was abandoned for 45 years.

What was later discovered by the attempt to get to the bottom of the Money Pit that followed the Onslow Company was that the water was part of a booby trap designed by the designers of the Money Pit. In their digging, they had unleashed a 500 foot causeway that went to the nearby Smith’s Cove. As soon as any water could be pumped out of any dug pit in the area, it would be quickly refilled the sea.

from here.

Then came the discoveries of the beach, in which those investigating Oak Island discovered had five channels laid out underneath for drawing water into the booby trap,with the five channels in the shape of fingers of a hand. In fact, the whole beach was fake it was soon learned, just made to hide the water deliver system.

The story of Oak Island and the quest to get to the bottom of the Money Pit by no means ends there, but I’ll let you do the rest of the reading on your own. It’s a fascinating tale and has quite a few celebrity enquirers (Franklin Delando Roosevelt was part of one of the dig groups and kept up with news of further excavations for the rest of his life) and has been heavily romanticized over the years (despite the six deaths in the process of the variou excavation attempts). Here’s a short list of theories as to what could be in the Money Pit or who could have been involved with it’s creation:

Vikings! That theory’s for poor people though.

Francis Bacon.

Captain Kidd.

Blackbeard.

Other various pirates of just about any kind.

The Knights Templar. Which only leads to either…

The Holy Grail. Or…

Mary Magdalene. Or…

Satan himself!

The Spanish. Perhaps there’s a stranded galleon of gold down there? Like…

The Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion.

A ghost. As in, there’s a ghost imprisoned down there.

The French!

The British, doing who knows what during the American revolution.

Shakespeare and buried below is his lost plays. Ooh. That would tie back into Francis Bacon, right?

Either Incan or Mayan treasure. Maybe the secrets to surviving 2012? (Actually, no, that’s in an upcoming Counterforce post, actually).

Aliens! Because aliens are always fucking involved, right? I sure hope it’s the lizard ones, not the grays with their anal probing of cows tendency.

But all of that good stuff right there. You just know that when you’re doing something wacky and mysterious, that if all of those gathered above could be potential theories then, well, you’re just onto a winner, right?

Come back soon and we’ll go over the third mysterious thing/place I wanted to talk about. And that one is my favorite…

The Mystery Box.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

My day got off to a nice start this morning when I got online and checked my email and discovered that my friend Lia had thrown me a link to J.J. Abrams’ appearance at the TED conference (or TED Talks, as it’s also known) from a few years ago. I’d heard about this for a while now and always wanted to see it/hear it, but for some reason just never got around to looking it up.

Here’s the link (thanks again, Lia!), and it’s a pretty interesting presentation. It’s only about 20 minutes long and Abrams goes into a little about the inception of Lost and using the creative tools that are all around us and about his grandfather, the man who inspired his love of mysteries and mystery boxes and things that need to be found out and discovered and deconstructed. In fact, mysteries, as he pointed out, are just as important as knowledge, as one kind of leads to the other.

As I’ve said before, here at Counterforce, I’m a big fan of synchronicity. In fact, whatever my personal spiritual beliefs are, they’re highly based on the synchronicity and watching the Abrams talk about mysteries because Abrams also guest edits the latest issue of Wired, which I was thoroughly loving last week.

As you can clearly see up above.

The line up of stories is fascinating, with bits on the strangest places on Earth, how magic hacks your brain, mad scientists, a story on Kryptos that I have yet to read, a story on the third location I want to talk to you about (remember I said there were three mystery spots or items of surreal estate that I said I wanted to share) which I only just discovered myself prior to the magazine’s publication, and an interesting mini comic by Paul Pope that works as a prelude to Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek reboot, working as a nice marriage of the old timeline to the new. Anyway, it’s really interesting, so I’d suggest you check it out and we’ll see you back here tomorrow when I’ll be talking about another one of those odd little places I love, and one that comes with it’s own mystery box of sorts.

Wonderful Things.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

As I’ve said before, I love the weird shit (and the weird shit, well, I don’t want to brag, but it tends to love me right back), but I know it’s best to be skeptical about it as well (the best wizard is just a scientist who knows that what we call magic is really the prestige of filling in all the gaps of human perception). As much as I enjoy all the cool magical nuggets of the bizarre that the universe can offer us, I love them because they’re real. I love the truth that emerges on the crested wave of the fantastic.

So, starting today and over the course of the next few days, I’m going to share three of my favorite little mysterious oddities with you. Not the usual stuff, not the Bermuda Triangle or Stonehenge (or Avebury) or the Cerne Abbas giant (see above), though those are all fascinating, but they’re incredibly well known. And for a reason! But no, today is things that are interesting and that maybe, just maybe, you’ve not yet heard of…

First up is: Kryptos!

Kryptos is a giant sculpture, built by James Sanborn, that resides on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It derives it’s name from the Greek word for “hidden” and is one of many pieces on the location, all of which conform to the same theme: “intelligence gathering.”

The most prominent part of the sculpture is an S-shaped piece of copper, meant to resemble a scroll, with 869 characters cut out of the copper in four encrypted messages. The first three have been figured out, despite a typo in the creation of the sculpture, but the fourth has yet to be solved, though a great many mystery lovers and codebreakers have been working to figure out what it means since it’s 1990 dedication, including the NSA.

from here.

A secret code with a visible cipher, created by a man and so far unsolved by mankind, at the home of our dark masters of intelligence. Does it get any cooler than that? I would suggest that it does not. I imagine you’ll heard about it more since I believe it’s to be a part of the new Dan Brown novel, The Lost Symbol, set to come out in September.

This is the translation of the third message of Kryptos:

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?)

…which is a paraphrased (and obviously misspelled) quotation from Howard Carter‘s 1923 book, The Tomb of Tutankhamun, about the opening of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The question above is posed by Lord Carnarvon, and Carter’s infamous answer (in the book) is, “wonderful things,” even though his field notes from that moment on November 26, 1922 state that he actually replied, “Yes, it is wonderful.”

But I’d definitely recommend you go read more about Kryptos, since I’m obviously just paraphrasing everything here. It’s really very interesting. And tomorrow’s mystery… Well, there’s no new Lost tonight, so there’ll be no quick thoughts on tonight’s episode obviously, but tomorrow’s mystery will involve an island with some weird goings ons and some weird speculation involving the Knight’s Templar, Captain Kidd, and even the Holy Grail attached to it. See you then?