Lost and Durians

I finished Season 4 of “24” and had to take a break. Honestly, I had become pretty gun shy and was incessantly plagued with the conviction that if I didn’t whirl around every minute or so then Agent Tony Almeida would jump out of the shadows behind me and shoot me several times in the back.

He has a habit of doing that and I don’t know why the bad guys don’t realize it. For you bad guys out there: when you’re going to shoot someone don’t hold the gun, for no apparent reason, to the intended victim’s head for five seconds waiting to do it. I’m tellin’ ya, pull that blasted trigger! If you don’t, the chances are better than excellent that Tony’s about to fill your backside with painful hollow point bullets.

So maybe I was a little paranoid, but when I turned those tapes in I started looking around the video shop for something a little lighter. I eventually found one dusty bottom shelf and, through cobwebs, saw the following title: “Lost.” I was puzzled. Why didn’t the clerk realize these tapes weren’t lost but were just badly neglected?

“Baboo,” I said, “These tapes aren’t lost. Look, here they are.”

Baboo waggled his head at me, as only Indians with lifetime training can do, and explained that the tapes weren’t literally lost, but that was the name of an ongoing TV series. Not wishing to appear ignorant, I replied, “I knew that.” He waggled his head in response and I rented Season 1.

As I was leaving, I said, “You know, I knew Lost wasn’t lost. It was right there on the shelf, wasn’t it?” Baboo waggled his head. At home, I started watching the tapes.

The story is all about these varied people that have met each other before or are brother and sister or maybe father and son without realizing it, and they catch a flight out of Australia and head to L.A. Well, the darn aircraft gets all zonky and the next thing the passengers know they’re falling 30,000 feet, either onto a beach or into the Pacific Ocean. And this one guy gets sucked into a jet engine and never speaks even a single line after that.

As it, amazingly, transpires it doesn’t hurt all that bad to crash from high altitudes and most passengers sort of shrug it off. Others, however, are dead and play no further part in the saga. Some of the survivors need medical attention and receive it from Doctor Jack, who just moments earlier was boozing it up in the cabin in order to get even with his father for being a boozehound. Soon he’s attending to the injured, especially this U.S. Marshal who has the fuselage protruding from his stomach and is in great pain.

Well, Sawyer, this con man hillbilly with big dimples and a ready wit takes care of the pain problem by shooting the guy but Dr. Jack gets mad cuz it was a botched job. But John Locke, lying nearby, doesn’t pay too much attention because he’s busy wiggling his toes.

We learn later than John, inexplicably, has no sense of humor despite the fact that his dad was a great charmer, as well as practical jokester. He did little things to John like thieving one of his kidneys, causing him to be a party to Grand Larceny, wrecking his relationship with his girl friend, and finally throwing him out of an eighth story apartment building. It turns out to be worse to fall from 80 feet than from 30,000, because John’s back was broken in the fall and then he couldn’t go on a “Walkabout” in Australia because he couldn’t walk about. As the travel agent explained to him, “This isn’t a Wheelchairabout.”

So John was ticked. Until he realized that this strange island had cured him and his legs were no longer paralyzed. So he began to teach this little black kid how to play backgammon. But the kid’s father, who hadn’t seen the kid in like nine years, screams to the kid, “Stay away from him!” Yes, dad’s from New York City.

Meanwhile, Kate was proving to be incredibly compassionate in helping those in need. That compassion hadn’t necessarily been in evidence to her stepfather whom she burned to crisp while he was enjoying an alcohol-induced snooze from which he never awoke. Which made the marshal chase Kate to Australia where a widowed farmer turned her in for the bounty. Because he was having trouble with his mortgage.

So Kate was handcuffed to the marshal but she craftily got the cuffs off after the crash and pretended to be not a criminal but a prom queen. Which made both Sawyer and Dr. Jack ogle her and want to kiss her.

Well, there’s also other characters and some of them want to live on the beach while others want to live in a cave near a waterfall and this creates some tension. Also, certain eerie things keep happening. Like the guy found mangled high in a tree, and whispering noises in the jungle, and polar bears roaming about. And strange radio transmissions which even the group’s Iraqi torturer can’t quite understand.

Although this Iraqi guy, Saeed, knows an awful lot about things like martial arts and electronics. He also has an English vocabulary slightly superior to that of Queen Elizabeth. At one point he uses a wire coat hanger and a coconut to make a satellite that they hope will help them get rescued or at least provide entertaining views of outer space, but then these “Other” people on the island start pulling mischievous pranks. Like killing some of them and kidnapping a pregnant woman for sinister reasons best known only to themselves.

And then the sky turns purple and the island starts vibrating. And everything is real mysterious because they can’t figure out where they are and no one else knows either. Which I don’t understand, cuz they’re obviously on Hilo. Hadn’t even a single one of them ever been on the Road to Hana?

I’ll keep you appraised of how things progress.
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Last nite we had a hard game against Hala. Midway through the second quarter I was just about to pronounce myself a coaching genius, as we were ahead 34-17 and playing very well. Six minutes later I was preparing to defend myself against possible sandal peltings just before we moped off to the locker room with a five point halftime lead.

In the second half we upped the lead to near a dozen and then it went up and down until, late, it was down—way down. We led by one with a minute to play. A lot of scary things happened before we prevailed, 90-85, while my eyebrows (the shaved one has grown back in) turned white. Or maybe gray.

So now we have two top teams remaining to play in this Cup, as it’s called. We have to win them both to qualify for a place in the finals, which will be a best of three affair.
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Remember last time when I asked if you wanted Fadl to send you a durian from Thailand? And you didn’t know how to respond, because you didn’t know what a durian is…? Here’s the answer.

The durian is what Chinese call the King of Fruits. How they love them. I first became acquainted with them when we lived in Malaysia a number of years ago. To my surprise, I found out that Southeast Asia boasts a goodly number of fruits that most Westerners don’t even know exist. And they’re all good. The only iffy one in the bunch is the durian and I was told that it’s an acquired taste. My Chinese cohorts (Chinese make up 40% of Malaysia’s population and comprise the whole of the basketball community there) told me that the third time you try it you will be hooked for life.

I’ve had it twice and the jury's still out. I can best describe it as tasting like sweetish, mushy onions.

The durian looks like a giant hand grenade. It grows on large trees in the rain forests and is especially liked by the elephant. Elephants will butt the trunk of the durian tree until they get one to fall. Then they will use their mighty feet and weight to get the thing open. They’re really hard to open. You need something like a hammer and screwdriver to get at the insides of the things if you’re a mere human.

There’s another distinctive trait of the durian: its smell. Those rascals smell like giant limburger cheeses. Or, put another way, like poopoo. In Malaysia it’s against the law to transport them in taxis, on trains, buses, or airplanes. I mean, these things seriously stink.

Typically, you would see someone with a a big pile of durians for sale by the side of a road. And right next to them, invariably, a giant pile of mangosteens. The Chinese insist that to be enjoyed optimally the durian must be eaten in concert with the wily mangosteen. The mangosteen (looking nothing like a mango) is delicious. About the size of a small orange, it has four quarters inside that taste like sweet rhubarb. I love them and see them in markets here but they’re outrageously priced.

I love rhubarb pie. Don’t you?