They've quickly become my favorite Twitter expressions. The Subway tweets, or #subwaytweets if you will. If you're not following me, this is what you're missing. Okay, it's what you were missing until now.

---------------------------

Price of unleaded in Oregon (WI) dropped 6 cents while I ate my Subway sub.
5:10 PM Mar 31st from mobile web

Clearly, the combination of jalepeno chips, banana peppers, and the dopeyest sandwich artist ever was a good decision.
5:12 PM Mar 31st from mobile web

He was chided twice, each one by different coworkers, while making my footlong.
5:14 PM Mar 31st from mobile web

For the sake of his pride, I guess next time I'll only order a six-incher.
5:15 PM Mar 31st from mobile web

Thus ends another round of #subwaytweets. Are you folks enjoying them? Because I'm cracking myself up to no end.
5:22 PM Mar 31st from mobile web

Oh lord, that's not what I meant at all! Only meant that w/ a 6" sub, his criticisms would be reduced by 50%! This is Subway, not Quizno's!
5:31 PM Mar 31st from mobile web

Jeff "Doc" Jensen of Entertainment Weekly has a theory that LOST is folding back in on itself, with seasons 4, 5 and 6 mirroring seasons 3, 2 and 1. Right now, we're in the 5-to-2 paradigm.

It's a strong theory. See tonight as evidence. Sayid, imprisoned. (Young) Ben coming to visit him. A prisoner released by a representative of those holding him. An unexpected death as an immediate result of that betrayal. Instead of Ana Lucia and Libby being killed by Michael after he lets Ben go, we have STOP READING IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED TONIGHT'S EPISODE.

.
.
.
.

Young Ben letting Sayid go, then Sayid returning the favor with a bullet. Whoa. Mind = blown.

So if we're locked into a reversed replaying of Season 2, what do we have to look forward to in the season finale? How about Desmond returning to the Island?

We first saw him in the Season 2 premiere, "Man of Science, Man of Faith." Since we've been told that the Island isn't done with him, and this season appears to be mirroring Season 2, I think the finale will result in Desmond crashing on the Island once again.

What does this gain us, other than deja vu? How about the chance to finally get a proper Libby flashback? Libby gave Desmond the sailboat that originally took him to the Island. Libby showed up unexpectedly in Hurley's Santa Rosa Mental Hospital flashback, and it's presumed that those events took place after she met Desmond and gave him the boat?

What if Libby followed the race that Desmond entered with her boat, only to learn that he'd been lost at sea? There's another person who was hospitalized for grief stemming from feeling responsible for other peoples' deaths: Hurley, in Santa Rosa.

I'd be lying if I said I knew where this whole thing is taking us, but I think we're in for a pretty awesome finale this season.

~

For more of my thoughts on LOST, which are occasionally well-elucidated, click here.

A new series premiered on NBC's Sunday night lineup two weeks ago. It's called Kings, and you need to watch it.

You need to watch it because the production value is high. It looks great even on the little iPod screen on which I watched the series premiere. Explosions look big, cinematography is appropriately grand. The sets are fantastic.

You need to watch it because it's written intelligently. There's a strong religious component to this show, but it's not heavy-handed or intrusive. I never watched Deadwood, but I can see how Ian McShane (who plays King Silas) developed the following he did. Which leads me to...

You need to watch it because it's free. Deadwood. The Sopranos. Hell, The Tudors. They're all on premium cable. Even Battlestar Galactica and Burn Notice aren't on broadcast networks. Kings is on NBC. If you can't watch it on Sundays, you can watch the whole episodes on NBC.com. The premiere episode, "Goliath," is available for free in HD with no commercials on iTunes. Click. Give them lots of traffic. Because...

You need to watch it because it's struggling. The ratings have been weak, even with strong reviews from people other than me. If more people don't start tuning in, it'll go the way of innumerable other shows whose quality did not demand an early exit.

So forgive NBC its trespasses, as it once pulled all programming from iTunes. Forgive them their bad early marketing of this show as if it were The OC in Uniform. Forgive them for the stank that is Heroes of late. Watch this show now, before it gets cancelled and its best hope is to end up on Syfy (new name = ugh).

(Which, really, wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, as they could use something to replace BSG.)

Show NBC that we can appreciate good TV on the networks, and that it doesn't have to be on cable to get dedicated viewership.

Today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer folds, and not in the way it's always folded (a tired joke in the newspaper industry, I'm sure). It will be an online-only publication from now on.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune had to file for bankruptcy earlier this year. Locally, the Capital Times was pared down into a shadow of its former self. The LaCrosse Tribune and now the Wisconsin State Journal have both switched to narrow, thinner editions.

I write for a paper (had you heard? was my self-promotion not loud enough? if not, please check out the links in the upper-right hand corner of this page); I don't want the journalism industry to fail. I don't want blogger schmoes (ahem) and 24-hour cable news to be the sole purveyors of what's happening in the world. They've got tinted glasses that I don't have an interest in looking through.

So I ask this question with all the necessary sensitivity and self-interest: is it that bad if newspapers stop being newspapers?

There's the comic analysis that would tell you that there's no futuristic movie or TV show that shows people reading newspapers. They've all got tablet computers or holographic heads-up displays in their self-piloted Tom Cruise-mobiles. But why shouldn't that be a goal?

Yeah, print is nice. I'm a librarian. I know that sooner or later, I'll be the guy reciting "First they came...", and books will turn into an electronic medium only. Hello, Kindle 2.0?

Isn't that just nostalgia, though? Don't you think people said that telephone would be infinitely worse than telegraph? Touch-tone phones worse than rotary dial? Ashley Tisdale's new nose worse than her old one? You bet they did! (gotta move on past the HSM reference) But I'm sure I'm not alone in not wishing for a return to waiting 5 seconds to dial the first 1 after the 9 in 911.

Less paper will be used. You can't really argue with that. I'd like to think that bailing out the newspapers would be a better expenditure of money than bailing out the internal combustion engine industry, but the fact remains that cars maintain relevance. Newspapers...well, newspapers have been much less than relevant in recent years. Even the relevant ones publish their content online almost simultaneously with the print edition.

My sticking points are A) the loss of jobs, and B) the threat this decline poses to journalism at large. Maybe that's the bailout I want; save the jobs of good journalists around the country, so that people can continue to have solid knowledge and updates on the real world at their fingertips.

Even if their fingertips stay clean in the process. I was a paperboy too, you know, and I hated newsprint.

I've decided, out of sheer narcissism, that I'm going to offer up recaps of the very firstest season of Project Runway over the coming weeks. We're all bummed about the delays in getting the current (actually, just wrapped) season to air, even if it was going to be on Lifetime, and I've actually never seen all of Season One.

It's coming up on the Netflix queue, and now that we've finished with all of Battlestar Galactica -- MINUS THE SECOND HALF OF SEASON FOUR SO NO SPOILERS PLEASE -- we've got some TV viewing time.

They won't be full recaps, just thoughts and impressions. I've got a mind to go see Jay McCarroll's movie at the Wisconsin Film Festival next month, and if I do, you can be sure I'll have something to say about it here.

I'm being overrun with Brits clicking through to my blog post on the Estate of Horace from back in 2007. It's crazy! I've set a new single-day record for clicks.

Well, I hope you're all enjoying it, and finding some answers therein. I feel like it's still relatively on-point, even after two seasons of LOST headscratching. "LaFleur" was a hell of an episode, wasn't it?

No! It's on tap.

To be fair, it was on tap, at Brasserie V here in Madison. After tonight -- and I'd put dollars to donuts that it'll be by the time I finish writing this post -- Black Albert will be gone again.

Black Albert is brewed by De Struis in Belgium, and it is really good. It gets an A on Beer Advocate (87th overall worldwide), and gets a best-possible 100 from RateBeer (91st overall worldwide). There's a nice summation of its history at The Beer Wench.

The most important thing you need to understand is that there were only 20 kegs that arrived upon our golden shores. Green Dragon in Portland got one. So did Brasserie V (and it's moved so quickly that only on the cached version of the V's site still mentions it).

We were lucky to make it there tonight. When Kristine and I can't decide on a dinner out, we make lists. Top three. Top five. Something like that. And whatever crosses over, wins. Tonight, my list was Brasserie V and Weary Traveler. I couldn't come up with a third. Kristine, on the other hand, offered four: Cafe Porta Alba, Eldorado Grill, Monroe Street Bistro, and Brasserie V. It was settled; Brasserie V it would be.

The rest is pretty much history. Sandwiches, frites, and sweet, sweet beer. I personally took out two of the last ten or so pours of Black Albert. If you ever find yourself staring down a bottle of old Al, don't blink. You'll definitely miss it.