all theories are just the product of my feeble brain, and they are totally spoiler-free. i am uninformed and naive.

UPDATE: michael ausiello says:

Words cannot express the awesomeness of this episode. There are so many twists and turns that your head will be spinning off its axis. (Note: Have some Kleenex handy. You'll need it.) And the excitement won't end with the closing credits. In tomorrow's thrilling Ask Ausiello (which goes live at midnight), I'll have an exclusive interview with Rob Thomas featuring answers to many of the big questions raised in the finale. Mr. Veronica Mars will also offer up scoop/prattle/poop on (fingers, toes crossed) next season!

UPDATE II: and here's a bit from today's chicago tribune:

The "Veronica Mars" (8 p.m., UPN-Ch. 50) season finale is a real twister. And there are twists within the twists, as the show finally resolves the season-long mystery that has occupied the young sleuth of the title and her father.

The episode came with a list as long as your arm of things that reviewers should not mention. So, here's one thing that can be said: Kristin Bell and Jason Dohring, the star-crossed friends and sometime lovers at the heart of the show, are the two finest young actors working in television.

Dohring in particular has masterfully navigated a tricky part all year; his character, Logan Echolls, could easily be a bitter, one-note quipmeister. But in this episode, and especially in the recent episode "Look Who's Stalking," he showed an enormous range of emotions, from romantic yearning to confused regret, often without saying much of anything at all.

It's acutely painful to sound like a network suit, but it might be nice if next year's ongoing mystery did not require a PhD in Veronica-ology. Even the most faithful watcher of the show had to have been confused at least a few times in the course of this season's bus-crash mystery.

Harry Hamlin, by the way, gets another juicy turn in the season finale; his parody of an over-the-hill hambone actor is dead-on and quite enjoyable. As Mac, Tina Majorino supplies steady support, as always. Even Steve Guttenberg is surprisingly good as the increasingly sleazy mayor of Neptune.

And it would be impossible to imagine "Mars" being anywhere near as great as it is without the wonderfully understated Enrico Colantoni as the young detective's grounded, fiercely protective dad.

Ah, Monday night. Broadcast wasteland. Still, there are highlights:

• David Blaine: Drowned Alive seems unlikely to be able to live up to its title. Still, I'm transfixed by the man's overpowering lack of charisma. Unfortunately Stuart Scott, a talented professional broadcaster, is on hand to emcee the whole thing, lending the proceedings an inappropriate air of competence. Right now he's interviewing Actual Yale Doctor about the horrors Blaine has faced during the past week (spent immersed in a sphere of water in Lincoln Center). Skin breakdown! Fluid loss! And, most disconcertingly, briefly elevated liver enzyme activity that began to correct itself before the big finale, but is still being used to imply that death was/is imminent. Paging Morgan Spurlock! Mr. Spurlock to the front desk! Someone's stealing your bit!

  ALSO GREAT: They're using flesh-colored wind guards on their headset mics. It makes everyone look like they've got enormous goiters on their faces. My man Stu was smart enough to say no to this idiotic scheme, however: he's got the black wind guard, so it just looks like he has a huge, cancerous mole. I told you he was a pro.

  POTENTIALLY GREATER: The discussion of how David's London fast "wreaked havoc upon his metabolism". Translation: HE TURNED INTO A BIG FAT LOAD.

  Man. I'm kind of surprised/alarmed at how much I dislike this idiot. Let's move on.



• I really enjoy commercials for gardening products. The spokesmen crack me up: they're invariably older but craggily virile men — ex-firefighters looking to spend more time weeding with their beloved wives, mostly — who confidently expound on the merits of whatever revolutionary advance in dirt technology they're peddling. I always get a kick from the recognition of another demographic's Marketing Achilles Heel. Much easier to see others' than your own, I suppose.


• Telecom commercials! First, the cable company bragging that it supplies steady jobs. Now there's a good lobbying approach: pass preferential legislation for our industry because we employ people. Of course, whoever they're going to lose their business to probably also employs people, so I'm not quite sure what they're getting at. Perhaps this is a DC-area narrowcast meant to scare politicians with cable repairguy constituents. Still, seems like a pretty lame argument.

  Next up is AT&T, which, among a series of pledges to do things like "bring us the future", let loose one or two interesting tidbits. First, a thinly-veiled appeal to network neutrality advocates — "we won't block access" was the wording, I believe (which isn't really specific enough, but it's interesting that they're addressing it). Second, they promised to observe local right-of-way. I can't remember the wording, so I can't be sure, but I believe this is tackling the municipal broadband legislative question.

  If they meant these pledges, good for AT&T. But even moreso, good for us: if the telecoms are feeling threatened enough over these issues to create commercials filled with friendly promises rather than commercials filled with self-serving lies, the EFF must be making progress.

Okay, after reading Steve Rubel's explanation, I think I get it — it's just that there's nothing much to get. Or rather, there's exactly what I thought there was: OPML sharing will be used to determine what people are interested in. Consumers can find new sources of news and marketers can pitch to them more effectively.

This seems like a much bigger win for the marketers than the users, though. RSS empowered content consumers in some obvious ways — it made it much easier to stay on top of many sources of news. OPML provides a slick, hi-tech framework for providing statistically justified blog recommendations, but to be honest I've always felt that blogrolls and interblog links work fine for that sort of thing. OPML's big advantage will be centralizing that data so that it can be more easily mined.

I suppose it may help inject some more ad revenue into the blogosphere, but that's really the only major benefit I can see. I can't imagine a scenario under which an end user would be all that interested in using OPML sharing. This is a technology that'll be implemented in the backend of RSS readers in order to provide a shiny but unnecessary recommendation engine — and, not coincidentally, a new source of marketing data. But that seems to be about it.

npr's weekend edition has a piece up where two gourmet food writers go to ben's chili bowl. it's actually kind of poorly paced and boring, but, it's ben's! and there's this great exchange:

npr lady: "i'm listening to you order, and you've ordered a substantial amount of food..."
male food writer: "...and we've only had four meals today..."
npr lady: "is there...some secret to your digestive system?"
male food writer: "oh, here come the cakes and pies."

they also address the problem they had of finding a d.c. local food speciality, and agree it's the half-smoke.

I gotta say, I don't really understand what's so exciting about this OPML business. Is it a good format for exporting lists of blogs? Sure, apparently. For note taking and compiling lists of references? I think so, based on what I've read. And could Share OPML.org provide Amazon "people who bought X also bought Y"-style recommendations to the world of blog reading (or at least bring a more accurate version of it, since I'm sure it already exists somewhere)? Sure.

But beyond that, I have to admit that I don't get what the big deal is. There's apparently a community of people really excited about OPML, so I feel pretty confident that I'm missing something. I don't remember, but I can imagine that in the past I might've foolishly said dismissive things about Dave Winer's last XML format — I certainly wasn't able to imagine its usefulness for tracking packages, finding apartments on Craigslist, or powering my screensaver. So I'm trying to be circumspect, and to bite my tongue — I really do want to understand the OPML hoopla. But right now it's lost on me.