Father's Day

Although he's gone now, it's hard for me not to think of my dad this time of year. I was born on father's day.

My dad accomplished a lot in life so it was always true that most people were a lot more interested in him than they were in me. It never bothered me though, I was a fan too.

For a long time after my dad died, it was like living for years at the base of a mountain and then waking up one day to discover it gone.



My dad could always make me laugh and I could always make him laugh. Sometimes, he would get me to try and make his friends laugh.

I remember one Saturday, a man came to visit my dad at his office. He was something like my dad's mentor and a good friend.

Life had been really unfair to this man recently. His wife was kidnapped and murdered just two months earlier. Although her killer went to prison, her body was never found. This was a big cigar chomping, love of life, baron of business, kind of guy.

My dad asked me to tell a really dirty joke about two country spinster ladies and an orangutan. It was a funny joke. I still remember it and it made his friend laugh.

That's probably a strange thing to remember, but it's how my dad taught me what was really important in life. If I could make a guy laugh, who had just lost his wife in that horrible way, then that's a pretty worth while thing to do.

Is Locke Really Dead?

Since all my Lost friends have commented on the season finale, I thought I'd throw in my two cents plus inflation.

Last year's season finale opened several questions and we had to wait until this year's season finale to get any answers. The biggest of these was "who the hell is in the coffin?"

"I've looked into the heart of this island
and what I saw was beautiful"

If you watched this years season finale, then you know it was John Locke in the coffin. John, knife-wielding, pig hunting, button pushing, Obi-Wan, faithful believer in the island's mysteries, man of faith not science, Locke.

If you can't tell I'm a big fan of Locke.

Like a lot of people, I was pretty sure it was Ben in the coffin. Now that we know it's Locke, fans all want to know if it means he's off the show.

The thing you have to remember is that on Lost, death doesn't mean what it normally means. Dead people come back all the time. Hurley was playing chess with the beaten to death by the smoke monster Mr. Eko in the nut house and Jack's dead dad appears to people who never met him in life.

In the real world, as in the show, the difference between life and death is just a matter of time, literally.

"I hope you're happy now, Jacob."

Marcus Aurelius spoke of great gulf of time before we're born and after we're dead and the brief moment of time in-between when we're alive. Jesus spoke of an eternal life, unbound by time, constituted only of faith. The Lost island operates independently of time. By turning the frozen donkey wheel, the island hops from spot to spot on the (what is to the rest of us) unbreakable sequential progression of time.

"When I said you had to go back to the island,
I meant all of you... Him too."

Clearly, Benjamin Linus intends for drunken, bearded, Jack to steal Locke's dead body and take it back to the island. Why? Because, in a place like the island, where time doesn't matter, then life and death is really only a matter of perspective and dead-in-Los-Angeles Locke will be alive again.

Locke to Jack: Why is so hard for you to believe?

Jack to Locke: Why is it so easy for you?

Wait. Have we seen this scenario before? An innocent man gives his life for his friends, only to have his dead body seemingly stolen from its grave but appears to his friends again, very much alive.

Imagine this: Jin (who also is not dead) is fishing off the now re-located in time island, when a stranger appears on the beach. "Have any luck?" the stranger asks. "No" says Jin, in improving English. "Cast your net on the other side." says the stranger.

Sympathy for the Jews and Arabs

I've always had some sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs.

After World War I, Europeans had good news and bad news for the Palestinians. The good news was that we freed them from the oppressive Ottoman Empire. The Bad news was that the Jews were returning by the million.

How would we in the U.S. have responded if one day, millions of Native Americans showed up on our doorstep, with both the intention of taking their land back, but also the means to do it?

Displaced European Americans, crowded into concentration camps in Canada and Mexico would surely plot their revenge, including a fair amount of terrorism against the returned natives. Governments in Mexico, Canada and European countries would be tempted to support the terrorists as local sympathies go to refugees.

That would never happen, of course. Unlike the Jews, displaced Native Americans didn't flourish in foreign countries to return centuries later, much stronger than when they left.

If I were a Palestinian Arab, I would probably be a big time terrorist.

I have sympathies for the Jews too.

After nearly two thousand years in exile from their homeland, they survive as a unified culture. That's never happened in the recorded history of man. It gives some credence to the idea that they just might be God's chosen people.

It happened, in part, because they passed down the hope of returning to their homeland from generation to generation. The Jews were prepared to survive in exile by their much shorter exile in Babylon before the first century C.E.

You can't blame the Jews for wanting to return to Judea. Always an outsider and often persecuted, life in permanent exile is no walk in the park.

If I were a Jew I would probably be a big time Zionist.

It doesn't help that Jews, Christians and Muslims all hold as a key element of their religious culture that one day, God himself will put one of them in charge of Jerusalem and condemn the other two to hell.

It's amazing to me that this small spot of land, smaller than the state of Mississippi, would spawn three huge cultures. I have to believe that there is some superior force guiding the destiny of men. Perhaps that force intends that Jews, Christians and Muslims learn to live in peace and use that peace as a structure to build a true, world-wide peace.

Spam Magnet

I get a lot of spam. My Google Mail account has a folder just for spam and it stays at around twenty thousand pieces all the time.

Gmail automatically deletes items in the spam folder older than thirty days, so that means I get around twenty thousand individual pieces of spam every month.

Can you imagine? If all this junk mail were physical rather than virtual, my postman would have to deliver the mail with a fork lift.

Granted, my email address is plastered all over my website, but that's still a huge number.