It’s a fair bet that my readers include at least one Mutant Enemy fanatic. Got a couple of canon questions for ya.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, anyone seen smoking is either evil, under a spell or doomed. (There’s one exception: Mrs Epps in “Some Assembly Required”, who seems to spend her days watching her dead son’s football triumphs on tape.) I didn’t notice whether the second vampire to acquire a human soul then stopped smoking.

In Firefly episode “The Train Job”, the sheriff of Paradiso shares a cigarette with a prisoner. Is anyone else ever seen smoking in that universe? I can easily picture Jayne with a cigar, but that’s just stereotyping.

I’m watching a collection of Tom and Jerry cartoons, made by Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, who were later known for the much cruder animation of The Flintstones.

I’m puzzled by the opening disclaimer in which Whoopi Goldberg explains that while the ethnic stereotypes that appear in some early cartoons are wicked it would be wrong to falsify history by cutting them out. The sin, apparently, is that Tom’s owner, a woman of color known as Mammy Two Shoes (though her name is never mentioned in the toons, nor is her face shown), speaks in nonstandard grammar; she has no other stereotyped qualities that I can detect.

Whoopi makes the same disclaimer in a Looney Tunes collection, and there it makes more sense; I’ve had occasion to cringe at some early ones, though I have not seen such moments in this collection (yet).

Netflix’s list of new releases this week has five Israëli titles, ten Chinese and 55 Indian – not counting 23 collections of songs from Indian film.

A dreadful blunder in Granada Television’s version (1985) of “The Greek Interpreter”: in a non-canonical scene, Mycroft Holmes refers to a derringer as a “revolver”. Tsk!

Unqualified Offerings cites numerous comments on Serenity, which I’ll read later.

Orson Scott Card reviews Serenity

noitulovE, a quick recap (in reverse) of the last few hundred million years of life; gorgeous animation (Quicktime). Cited in povray.off-topic by Gilles Tran.