By happy coincidence, I watched season three's "The Man Behind the Curtain" right before I watched last night's episode of Lost, "Cabin Fever." The two rhyme beautifully. The two darkest characters on the show - Ben and Locke - are both born in relatively horrible circumstances at the head of each episode; the mass Dharma grave (and resident corpse Horace Goodspeed) feature prominently in both; and let's face it, both episodes are creepy as fuck. (It's not every TV show that can actually make me nervous, but walking toward that fucking cabin is now shaking loose collywobbles born of every childhood nightmare about the woods behind the cottage.) But really, the most important thing about both episodes is that they kick us square in the face of the obvious: all this time, we really should have been paying closer attention to Guyliner. "Doctor" Richard Alpert, and his perennially boyish girl-eyes, has done some serious traveling of note, hasn't he? Come next season, mightn't we be saying things similar regarding one Matthew Abaddon, keeper of the greatest name in the history of great names? Who exactly was behind the wheel of the truck that hit young Swoosie Kurtz, anyway? Time will tell, and be damn wooshy about it in the meanwhile.

Regardless, last night's was indeed the balls-out goodness. The grounds shifted.

Grounds shifting further: I'll be stepping up to manage my team at work for the coming year. It's been in the works a while but only finally got announced today, so I guess I can actually talk about it. I'm excited. A lot of things that I had been working on since the day I started with the company came to a thrilling conclusion about six weeks ago, and at almost exactly the same time, this next major sequence of events got started moving forward. When I look at the sheer distance I've traveled in my two and a halfish years here, well... I sorta get vertigo. I owe one Old Man a cookie, that's for sure. Big tackle and mysterious ways. Came on like old leather.

All week I've kept having this weird dream that I buy The Golden Compass on blu-ray because I can't resist the foil wrapping, and another one that Indiana Jones is as strange and unsettling as the green M&Ms they've tied in - I mean, they're not really bad, but who looked at the silhouette of Indiana Jones in the prison of their dripping, subconscious mind and thought "mint"? What if his shadow in our eyes was wrong all along?