Found on Lost

For the Lost fans among you, there's an annotated screencap of the thing you probably want a screencap of here. [Edit: also here, with slightly different annotations. Thanks, irilyth!] (This is a big spoiler for the 3/29 episode, and possibly a spoiler even if you've seen it, depending on how much clue-dogging you like to do. So caveat clickor.)

[Further spoiler notes: there might be spoilers in the comments here. Also, like a dumbass I posted the URL above to Chit-Chat without realizing there was a spoiler in the actual URL text, so if you see this before you read Chat don't open that message until you've seen last night's episode.]

Mo better

A yellow-pantsed Mo Rocca lectured tonight on campus, and by "lectured" I mean "showed a PowerPoint presentation of amusing pictures and commented amusingly on them," with my favorite comment being, "The docent there agreed to pose with Millard Fillmore's noodle-roller." The first half was a scattershot look at current political events, which, I think, suffered a little in comparison to The Daily Show, or perhaps I was outside the target demographic. But he warmed up once he got into the autobiographical portion of his presentation, much of which seemed to be true; it gave him a chance to display his evidently and charmingly honest zeal for Presidential history. (He got truly fangirlish about Teddy Roosevelt.)

He closed with a couple of clips, one of which was an astonishingly funny piece of guerrilla comedy (a snippet of which aired on The Daily Show): a stuffed-shirt politician was delivering a soundbite to a reporter, and Mo very naturally added his microphone alongside the first. Slowly, very slowly, he moved it closer to the politician's face, until he was actually touching his cheek; the politician kept talking. Mo began moving the politician's jowls with his microphone. The politician kept talking. And so on, for minutes. Mo sees it as a vivid demonstration of the single-mindedness politicians have when it comes to getting their soundbite into the newsstream.

Before he scooted off, Mo took quite a few questions from the audience. I wasn't able to ask whether Stephen Colbert had ever tried to get him to play D&D, but we did learn about his experiences sampling the dishes on Iron Chef: America (fennel battle=no; bacon battle=delicious heart attack!), got to picture him leaning down to make out with Jon Stewart, and found out which period in history he most wished he'd been born in. (The answer was 1885, so he'd be a teenager for the bright optimism of fin-de-siecle America, but too old to be drafted for WWI. Mostly, I was amused that he'd worked it out in such detail. Hooray for geeks!)

An excellent way to welcome Spring, sez me. There should be more people who combine "cool" with "book-smart." It's good for the kids to see them.