Lost? No Thanks, I Prefer Wicker Baskets

Imagine Tolstoy's War & Peace, a 1200-or-so page novel, were a four-hour movie. There are very few novels longer than War & Peace, and very few movies that break the three-hour mark. But, as a novel, they say it's the best of all time. Would you watch a new four-hour version?

Most of us would, particularly if it starred someone like Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchett.

I bring this up because of the ongoing Lost fever. A couple months ago, The New York Times profiled the Texan/Missouran Gregg Nations (yes, Gregg with three Gs) who is tirelessly responsible for the show's needlessly confusing web of character myths and storylines -- he's the one to keep all the ins and outs of 100 unresolved characters issues straight in for making new plots decisions for still-undetermined future episodes, he tracks it in a well-guarded compilation the show's producers call the 'bible.'

In other words, TV's Tolstoy has had no plan.

Lost, which mercifully ends after next season, has already given us some 90 episodes (which cost $12 million each to create), or approximately a 60-hour movie.

That's equivalent, using the analogy above, to a 18,000-page novel. Have you read the greatest novel of all time, at 1200 pages? Would you read anything at 18,000 pages? I don't know. It sort of feels, to me, like going to a poetry slam and enduring a contest reading 'some old crap found on the back of a envelope'?

Anyway, just wondering if there's a better alternative for our little life space between work and sleep time, perhaps making wicker baskets?

Top 5 Wicker Basket Sites:

• PSP (not PCP) Basket tutorial
• Making a Clamshell Flower Basket
• Jon's Buschcraft woven basket
• Cleaning your basket
• Wicker Basket poem