Ok so I watched the “Hugo catches his flight” sequence rather closely and tried to pick out things of numerical significance, and pretty much anything that has anything to do with numbers:

Hurley’s room number is 2342.

8 People in the elevator that couldn’t Hurley couldn’t board (last shot with Charley clarifies that there are two children.)

Liscense plate on Hurley’s auto at the airport was TX 327. I guess it would have been too obvious to have the numbers there … but wait, there’s some kind of odd thing here .. T and X are letters 20 and 24 in the alphabet. Or, from the back, letters 3 and 7. Well, I’m sure there’s something there. TX is an abbreviation of Texas, which, as it turns out is not in Australia.

When hurley’s tire blows it shows that his gas tank is half full, he is going less than 10 killometers per hour, his RPMs are at 2000, his temperature gauge is exactly half-way between cool and hot, his travel odometer reads 42 KM, the temperature gauge reads a nice 23 degrees celcius and it says in the dash that he’s going 15 Kph … which differs from the actual spedometer, but whatever. Suddenly, the car dies – everything appears to die, his gas tank says it needs gas and all the other emergency lights are on. The gas tank one was unusual IMHO – some car’s gas gauges need the car to be on, but do they say you need gas as the car shuts off/dies? As it dies we look back down at the speed, it goes from 15 to 8 to 4 Kph. Gee whiz.

When Hugo gets to the airport we are shown the check-in screen on the computer, which, strangely enough, does not show his DOB – where it should be it says DD/MM/YYYY. Odd. His flight info (Oceanic 815) shows that his flight leaves from Sydney – SYD at 14:26, his carrier is OCA, his seat is 200. He arrives at Los Angeles-LAX at 10:42, in the International Terminal with Baggage. The screen cuts away and we are shown 4 pamphlets, the top three showing the ‘Oceanic’ logo which emphasizes the ‘O’ in some odd decor, and the 4th has a Bigger ‘O’ against a gradient blue background. 1000 in binary is actually 8 in decimal.

Hugo books it over to the international terminal to get on board the plane, but is sent to the back of the line. Hugo goes to check flights and that doesn’t work out well for him, So, Hugo tries to get
a guy’s scooter (the guy has a hat on it that says “Crazy 8’s CASINO” with two dice, the prominent sides shown are 5 (not so prominent sides appear to be 2 and 1, sum is and 6 (not so prominent sides appear to be 3 and 2, sum is 11.) He gets the scooter and races to the gate. Oh yeah, he gave the guy 1600 bucks for the scooter. As he races you can count the dots around the ‘O’ in the Oceanic logo – 15. He races by a women’s sports team, wearring their jerseys, each of them wearring one of the numbers, and in order, too! Wow, that’s an easy one. You can see that the number of monitors displaying flight information is 8. He cruises by 4 Japanese tourists (we can assume so by the language they are speaking.) Next we see that he is headed to the section “Gates 14 thru 23″ – great. When he rolls up, just before he smacks 8 chairs in the gate area, we can see he’s boarding at Gate 23. As he stumbles off the scooter there are 8 more monitors in the background. There are 8 brochures on the Oceanic desk next to Gate 23. He is able to board, and it’s his lucky day! When we cut to him marching through the jungle, he is chanting, just like his old buddy, “15 16 23 42 4″ – why does he forget 8?

Oh well, that’s my numbers breakdown for “Hugo’s great numbers coincidence sequence.”

Ok, so you know in Episode V, where Lando is yelling at Chewie after the hyperdrive on the Falcon fails, and he’s saying “It’s not my fault, It’s not my fault!!” ?

Well, I’m saying ‘it’s not my fault’, only I’m more elated than worried that the Empire is going to catch me and kick my ass (or freeze me in carbonite and turn me over to the people with bounties on me.)

You see, when my tires blew it had nothing to do with the brake job I did. If you look closely at this picture, you might be able to spot the problem.

For those of you who don’t want to take the time to look at that, or don’t know what you’re looking at, you’re looking at a suspension spring, broken and free from the seat. The nice pointy end sticks right in to the inside of my front left tire, like a knife.

Sure, I didn’t notice it because I’ve never even heard of anyone having this problem (and, as a result, didn’t think to look for this kind of problem,) but I’m sure somebody has had a freak spring-breaking accident wherein the initial problem causes two other problems and you never thought to look for the original cause of the problem.

Ultimately, this is going to cost me more than I want to pay.

So this morning I woke up to Jabba, my son, at the foot of my bed.

“Dad, I have a bloody nose,” he said, with a small red glob of toilet paper held up to his nose.

“Ok, I’m up, let’s get it fixed.” My feet hit the floor and I ushered the little man towards the bathroom.

As I held his head back I looked at the clock in my bathroom that sits on the toilet – 10:00am. Crap, I slept in a bit too much. The day before I’d got a flat tire that still sat in my driveway. I’d called theorb77 to see if I could borrow a tire-iron again, but no dice, he was going to see Episode III. So me and Daxero were going to fix it this morning.

I called Daxero and got the boy ready for school and did his homework, too. We were just a little late for school, like 5 minutes, but Jabba is a little too obedient so he wants an excuse note from the front office. I get him in to class and walk home again.

Ok, I call up Daxero again to make sure he’s coming (he sounded sleepy) and there wasn’t any answer. Ok. Daxero and my father showed up. My plan was to pick up my paycheck with Daxero, and then buy a tire-iron with my paycheck. Well, I wasn’t keen on dragging both Daxero and my father all over to run my stupid little errands, so it ended up that my father bought my a tire-iron, which I was going to pay him back for (but now it’s just an early birthday present – yay!)

Ok kids, now pay real close attention to this next part, because it’s important: Daxero pulls the tire off and we look at the rip in the tire and say, “Gee, that’s a manufacturer defect,” because there was apparently a large circular cut around the inside wall of the tire. Of course it is, that’s great. Just great.

Sukie and I go to the Tire Place, to get a tire. As it turns out, we bought the tires used, and have absolutely no warranty at all on them. Just great.

Fine, how much for a tire? $110 you say? Brain freeze, I say! You’ll check at a different store then? Ok then! Just great.

So we ended up going to yet another Tire Place to get a used tire (for like $30, mind you.) We get it home, me and Dax get the tire put on, and Dax and my father head home. The tire looks good, the car looks good, all looks good.

I get ready for work, and get in the car In the car, I take off the emergency brake and put the car in Drive. I sense a disturbance in the force. Or something. Oh yeah, the car seemed like it was lowering. I roll down my windows and kill the radio. I move the car forward a little … I hear a scraping sound … I feel a scraping sound …

Something is wrong. Just great.

At this point I have used my perfectly good tire for about 5 feet. Then it pops, and the front left section of my car is once again lowered to the ground, kneeling to the God of Auto Maintenance.

Did I mention that last week I worked on my front brakes? I did it to save money. I bought used tires to save money. I have had 2 flat tires and had to get a tire-iron to save money. All this saving … has it been worth the hassle? Well, I suppose so.

Tomorrow morning I’ll take off the tires and have a lookie at what I broke, and I’ll fix it up proper like. I should have taken my time and made sure all was well, and maybe I should have let a professional do it.

Just great.

Well, I’m out here, and in the open.

Sure, it’s WordPress’ default layout, but I’ll change that … eventually.

Well, I’m off to aid theorb in what should be a terrific catastrophe.

Ok kids, I’m coming out of blog-tirement, to bring you a special message.

In a recent blog entry, theorb77 expressed his secret hope that maybe if he expelled some of his orb juices he’d be able to make time stand still, and we’d be able to stay in the happy moments.

Well, this brings me back to why I’ve been absent in the first place. For one, I said something on Meryl’s little journal and from what I’ve heard, it didn’t go over well.

I said, “Marriage, and change, are like chinese finger traps – the more you struggle with it, the harder it becomes.

We are creatures of before and after – you need to pause, and look at now. Now you are married, now you have a mess, now you can do something about it.”

Now, from what I can understand, this was taken as ‘your marriage is your problem, deal with it.’ That’s great. I churn out poetry and it gets taken for shit.

So, what was the point? There’s nothing that says, “I’m a loser and I’m going to stay that way,” like constantly complaining about your situation, isn’t there? Did complaining ever help anybody?

The point is, you can’t really change the fact that you are where you are – but you are where you are, and right here, right now is the only place and time you can do anything about it.