LOST: continent?

Somehow during spring semester my schedule allowed me just enough leisure time on Wednesday evenings to get hooked on season 2 of "LOST." Not so caught up that I'll waste any brain power on chasing Dharma Initiative websites or Hanso Foundation commercials, as much as I appreciate that level of deviousness.

Truth be told, I'll put up with a lot of ambiguity, misdirection, and allusion. That's a lot of value added to the entertainment. But I need one thing cleared up about the finale:

Are the castaways stuck on the last of Lemuria?

It's this big four-toed monumental foot that got me thinking. Can't be Atlantean, since they're in the Pacific. (Though it wouldn't be the first big goof by screenwriters if that was their intention.) Gotta be Mu.

Actually it tickles me to consider that J.J. Abrams and his staff are trying surreptitously to feed their viewers some Churchward or Blavatsky. Such may not be the case. And yet, given that one of the two characters struggling most obviously with weighty existential issues is named "John Locke," and another character who went feral in the jungle is called "Rousseau," I'm really tempted to think so.

Dare I hope for a hatch to lead to Agharta? Or the lair of the Deros?

Satan's Scrotum

In an era where increasingly anything goes in civil society, swearing imaginatively is - I am sad to say - a lost art. (That "Ron Burgundy" stands out in this respect only proves my point.)

Nerd that I was, I tried to cultivate creative cussing in high school. My favorite was the titular epithet; I wrote it backwards on my notebooks. (This jackass claims he created it for his measly band back in 2001. I was saying it in 1991, at the latest. Bite it.)

I'm not talking some return to "Zounds!" or "Odd's bodkins" or anything, rather alternatives to Carlin's scatological 7...which is down to 2 or 3 by now. Far be it from me to reliquish any good old Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Just read my posts. Nor would I support any efforts to outlaw them, even if it made them all the more effective.

No, I say add more weapons to the arsenal of oaths and imprecations! Let a thousand foul flowers bloom!

Here are some well-tested contenders; feel free to send others.

• "Satan!" (why not take his name in vain?)
• "Great googly moogly!" (loved that Snickers ad)
• "Ohhhh...floppy disks!" (Neal from "The Young Ones")
• "Dagnabbit!" "Dadgummit!" "Galdurnit!" (or anything else you hear on Gunsmoke--curse you MeTV)
• "Dirt!" or "Dirty __!" (you provide the noun)
• "Cow flop!" (from my farming forebears)
• "Bloody poop!" (another of my originals)
• "Caca-pants!" (thanks, Helgie, wherever you are)

Heteroglossolalia 6

In honor of finals week:

"Research" is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
Wernher von Braun

Hope you'll bear with my silence but a few days longer. Those 130-odd pieces of "research" aren't gonna grade themselves.