"Ilana Loses To The Curse"

Richard: Do you have the dynamite?

Ilana: (Nodding) Four sticks.

In the game of Universal Rochambeau (i.e. metaphysical rock, paper, scissors) it looks like the Curse of the Four Sticks (as my friend Wayne Allen Sallee calls it) must trump the will of the island. I didn't catch what Ilana replied to Richard on my initial watch, but the second time around it really stuck out. "Four sticks" is the phrase for any sighting of the numbers "1111", which presents itself in many forms, but usually as 11:11 on a digital clock, message machine, timer, etc. In numerology, repeated numbers like 1111 are considered a sign of synchronicitous portent -- that is, bad luck, good luck, omens, or whatever scares ya.

To tell you the truth, when Ilana was yanking that bag of unstable C3H5N3O9 around, I would have been disappointed if she hadn't blown up since we've been programmed to expect it now. And sure enough there she went into the ether! So the disappointment I'm left with is that she did die...without telling us the things that we needed to learn from her. This is getting to be a pattern here, Jacob the man with all the answers dies, Dogen who knew island secrets dies, Ilana who knew Jacob's secrets dies, dangitt everyone who knows the secrets of the island is dying!

I wonder what time it was when Ilana was jostling around that dynamite?!

Led Zeppelin wrote a song called "Four Sticks", where the story has it that John Bonham used two pairs of drum sticks to record the song. Just another brick in the wall of the legendary curses of Led Zeppelin?

Here's a Freaky Factoid about Nitroglycerin for ya: (Wiki)"Infrequent exposure to high doses of nitroglycerin can cause severe headaches known as "NG head". These headaches can be severe enough to incapacitate some people...for workers in nitroglycerin (NTG) manufacturing facilities, this can result in a "Monday morning headache" phenomenon for those who experience regular nitroglycerin exposure in the workplace...over the weekend the workers lose the tolerance to NTG and when they are re-exposed on Monday the prominent vasodilation produces tachycardia, dizziness, and a headache."

I think that Lost is giving me NG-Head! Kidding aside, I don't think that TPTB were using the Four Sticks curse on the show, but it is a weird coincidence. And I've run out of steam for analyzing or critiquing the show this week, so weird thoughts like this are all I've got for now.