"So Time Is Like A Street"

Wayne Allen Sallee and I have been emailing about Season 5 discussing quite a bit about the Time "thing" of course. So I thought of this: I, and my 9 yr old nephew Ian, have been getting confused about why they keep saying that they can't change the past or future, but they still keep trying to change "something". But what if TPTB are getting really clinical with the details of that, and the characters are really only changing the "present" and that's somehow allowed? Because Dan really kind of changed Desmond's "present" by giving him a memory at that moment of their Swan encounter in the "past" when the island moved there (two minutes after Dan said that they couldn't change things!).

If you use Dan's analogy of walking up or down a street and not being able to change it, perhaps you can't change the buildings or permanent aspects, but maybe you can do something like put some flowers in a window, or paint a building (or, place a memory in someone's mind like Dan did), to change how the street will look (or how the mind will remember) in the present/future from then on since the alteration? I don't know how that could be viable in relation to everything else. I'm just trying to understand why some things can be "altered" or colored if you will, when we kept being told that it can't be done. There seems to be some detail of this that I just can't define yet.

"Hawking's Computer Calculations"

Here is a screenshot from DarkUFO of the image on Mrs.H's computer screen compared to the most popular graphic of the theoretical global Vile Vortices locations on the web. Her screen shows determined locations that we don't know much about yet, but that we speculate will be either places where the island can "move" to, or locations where windows could "open up" to allow travel back to the island. There are a lot more points on her graphic than in the true vortices map, so as with everything else we'll just have to wait on more info to narrow it down. I've marked where the close matches are. I guess the one big question is, which of these points is the singular event window mentioned on the screen that is their final chance to make it back and to put the universe back in order?

UPDATE: Below the vortices map is a compiled estimate of where Guam fits into the vortex idea. Although the difference in the maps makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly (Mrs.H's computer map has an odd curvature distortion, and the vortex map is a flattened globe), on the computer Guam is either in or very near the Australian Triangle and Flight 316 would just have to fly a bit off course to hit the coordinates of the vortex there; but on the Vortex map, Guam seems to fall near Sayidsgirl's Asian Devil's Triangle and the plane would veer in that direction. By the way, the official Guam website is titled "Official Portal for the Island of Guam". :-D http://www.guam.gov/

*Thanks to Brianne at TLC for helping with a correction! :-)

"Dan's The Man In This Season"

Early reports say that Professor Dan will be fairly prominent in the 2009 season, and the TV promo ads released so far certainly seem to show this, flashing images of Dan in various acts of exploration in mysterious places. I won't say anything more, for those who choose to shun spoiler details. But hopefully that means that we are going to get a lot of provocative and delicious scientific storyline via Dan's exploits. Which of course makes me very excited. "Joyyyyyyyy!" :-)