Episode 350: Chill Out, Anonymous Folk!

So apparently I've upset someone by dissing the Backstreet Boys in my previous post. I'm pretty sure I don't even know the person who left the comment, since I expect that any of my friends reading this blog will have the decency to leave their name when they comment. Since I'm already upsetting people, I might as well carry on in a similar vein. Having seen a few episodes of Eleventh Hour, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in retrospect, Fringe is actually the lovechild of Lost and this cancelled series, since what Eleventh Hour is missing is Fringe's conspiracy theories, of which Lost has plenty. Now, I don't think I've upset too many people by this speculation, but given that an innocent lament about the premature recycling of pop culture managed to inspire ire in someone out there, who knows? On a far less controversial sidenote, I spent an hour a couple of nights ago reading Alessandro Baricco's Silk. It was one of the most beautiful works of literature that I've read, and its style kind of put me in mind of Baricco's countryman, Italo Calvino, especially the way in which Hervé Joncour's repeated journeys to Japan are described in variations of the same linguistic template. The brevity of the chapters also reminded me of Russell Hoban's haiku-like novel chapters, and the final twist at the end of the novel is wonderful. Now I'm going to watch the film version that came out in 2007.