I bought a DVD of Kurosawa’s 生きる Ikiru, inferring from the presence of English text on the package that the show would be subtitled. Oops!

One thing that bugs me about Buffy is her habit of going under-armed. In The Prom (3:20), why did she take itty-bitty arrows rather than a dwarvish axe to hunt the hell-hounds? In Shadow (5:8), why didn’t Giles bring a couple of sabers, or a shotgun? Did he expect Buffy to pummel the cobra-monster to death? (That she did pummel it to death is beside the point.)

Some months ago I started reading Pillars of Faith, a webtoon, without being aware that it’s a fan spinoff of – you guessed it – Buffy! It brings up some interesting questions that Buffy did not address.

Jerry Ritcey is concerned for my sanity. How sweet! I’ll eat him last. — At least one reader did not notice that Jerry links to three different entries.

Meanwhile I’ve been blogrolled by a stranger with an intriguing title and an irritating format.

Slept very poorly last night; dreamt of vampires and spaceships. My ship and Spike’s ship were intangible to each other, but not so their occupants.

Flipside of the previous: at the beginning of the Buffy episode “The Initiative” (4:7), we see Spike wake up in a strange white room, and he’s translucent: the lines of the floor can be seen through his black coat. No, wait, the lines seen “through” Spike do not match those around him. It’s a reflection of the floor outside his cell.

So I wonder how many viewers, like me, jumped at the exotic interpretation because Spike is a demon.

I’ve just seen the first four episodes of Angel: what a disappointment! Didn’t I see more or less this same series twenty-odd years ago?

In the episode “I Go to Pieces” I had the solution as soon as the exposition was done: Ronald the neurosurgeon spies on Melissa through the bug he planted when he worked on her optic nerve. But no, that wasn’t flashy enough, it had to be yogi-magic.

And who the heck wrote Oz’s lines on the beach? When did he become a stoner?