I just got done watching the pilot episode of Lost (ABC, Wednesday 8/7), where a plane crashes on an island and there's some thing in the woods. It's pretty good. Maybe not the sort of thing you want to watch when you're going to travel by plane in a week, but pretty freaky.

One thing that bothered me about the show (bothered in a "made me wary" sort of way, not a "this is stupid" sort of way) is how everyone assumes that they're going to be saved instantly. There's this one girl who refuses to eat a candy bar (why??) because she's going to wait until the rescue boat arrives. I think that if I had survived a fall from 40,000 feet in a plane, I wouldn't count on anyone showing up and would start making with the survival preparations. Food rationing, shelter.

And when these "rescuers" don't show up by morning, I'd be burying bodies, for sure. Especially after learning more of the nature of whatever-it-is that's lurking around in the jungle. Clearly we're venturing into sci-fi territory here, but... Freaky!

It amuses me that the Olympics people have tried to circumvent how the internet works with their archaic policies. It amuses me even more that they've got network TV to consent to not broadcast news of the games live so that local stations can cover it in their own time. This basically means that the US doesn't get to see the games as they happen, but as the network deems them ready.

So, in case you hadn't noticed, the US women's gymnastics team took the silver medal, while Romania took the gold, and Russia took the bronze. Indeed, you can't even get this news on the official web site (it was down when I last tried, but it's here now, and foreign news sites are prohibited from serving that information to anyone with an American IP address.

I don't really have these restrictions.

(By the way, there are currently more people linking to the page that I linked to above than there are people linking to the page that the Olympic committee wants them to.)