Do you remember that movie A Christmas Story? Of course you do. EVERYONE knows it. EVERYONE has seen it, many many times. TBS plays it back to back for 24 straight hours every year on the 24th/25th of December. The title of the post is obviously the most quoted and most remembered line of the movie, but something else stands out, too.

Ralphie eats his Ovaltine dutifully every morning, trying to save up enough box tops to send away for his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring. Finally after eating it for months (I don't know, was it even any good or was it one of those 'good FOR you' cereals that yuo hated, but your parents made you ate, even though ALL the other kids were eating Count Chocula?) and then sending away for it (snail mail... how quaint) he gets his decoder ring.

He parks himself in front of the radio and listens to the show, and then at the end, they read out the "Secret Code" (which was a simple substitution cipher) and then he locks himself into the bathroom and the narrator and the camera make a big deal out of translating what the secret message was, and then, the music rises to a crescendo and... "Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine!?" A CRUMMY AD? All that work to get SOLD to? haha dumb kid, that would NEVER happen in THIS day and age, we're too SMART for that...

Have you seen this TV show called Lost? I admit I was late to the party. I watched season one on DVD over the Easter long weekend, and caught up with season two just in time to catch the season finale last wednesday. What a great suspenseful, cliffhanging suck-in... I had heard that there was a big online community that were discussing things and throwing theories around and stuff like that. I stayed away from that because I wasn't 'caught up' and didn't want to read any spoilers, but last night after watching the end of season two and getting as caught up as anyone else on the planet I went to ABCs official site and there was a blog post there with a few THOUSAND comments on it in a little over 24 hours. Unbelievable. I read for an hour or so before getting too tired to keep on, keep on, keep on readin all through the night. I learned that ABC has set up "real" websites as fronts for imaginary companies that are part of the Lost storyline, as well as Jimmy Kimmel having a guest on who was supposedly an exec with one of those companies. Brilliant cross-platform marketing. One of the sites referenced in that discussion was letyourcompassguideyou... dotcom. I went to the site and it was a flash animation of a compass that's spinning around and there were some characteristics to the graphics that tied it in to the show and the storyline... but Let Your Compass Guide you was also a tagline for Jeep commercials this year... hmmmm.

Here's MY theory: The whole of Lost is going to be a huge suck-in on the same level of "be sure to drink your ovaltine", except on much larger scale. Now that that's out of the way, I can get back to waiting for season 3 to start just like everyone else :)