I removed the Paypal button at the bottom of this page. It was a bit embarrassing to have it there, particularly when (I feel as though) I haven’t had an original thought in months.

The rainy season is a fickle thing. As I emerged from underground this morning, the sun made me wish I had worn a hat.

Watching Harvey last night for the first time, I was pleased by the ambiguity about the rabbit’s visibility to others; the effect was somewhat spoiled by the movement of doors at the end. The production notes on the disc point out that most scenes are single shots, without closeups, imitating the stage; someday I’ll watch it again and pay attention to camera movements.

Mom’s other offspring gave her a DVD player in December; for her birthday (a bit late) I found a bargain box of movies with Alec Guinness: Kind Hearts and Coronets (a favorite of hers), The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, The Captain’s Paradise (which I first saw a week before) and The Ladykillers. I was surprised that she had seen only one of these. — As I suspected, The Captain’s Paradise is the only one of these not made by Ealing Studios, where there was a rule that crime must not go unpunished.

In two or three evenings my rentmate, the snob, has sat through four episodes of Buffy with seeming pleasure. She says season four is more endurable than the foregoing because most of the teenage angst has been more or less resolved. Or at least matured into a more grown-up angst.

I’ve now watched three whole seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I’ve also looked at various related websites. I usually don’t mind spoilers, but in retrospect the “panicking” scene would have been better somehow if I hadn’t known when to expect it. (I don’t read about specific unseen episodes, but I have read capsule biographies of most characters.)

Angel breaks it off with Buffy. Star-crossed love is touching, and my tear is jerked as readily as the next; but that story progressed hardly at all in this season, and I’ve read it before in any number of tales about interstellar time-dilation. That aside, I think better use could have been made of Angel (and was, i trust, in the spinoff); something is surely wrong if a unique character, ingeniously conceived, becomes more entertaining when he loses his uniqueness (latter part of season 2). And then in “Graduation Day” (third season finale), after Buffy risks all to save him, his role in the main event is trivial.

What makes a few vampires witty and colorful, most of the rest bovinely dull, and at least a few suicidally submissive? Does it depend more on the former human, or on the parent vampire, or on chance circumstances of the transition? (Later: a possible answer.)

And why so few female vampires?

After Willow worked the curse on Angel in “Becoming”, why not try it on other vampires? Perhaps because the obvious candidates – the only other (surviving) vampires known by name – had left the scene. Perhaps Drusilla is mad enough that even in Angel’s condition she’d be dangerous. (Oct 19: Is the orb of Thesulah destroyed in the process?)

Anyway I have an ethical problem with restoring Angel’s soul: doing so makes a human soul suffer for a demon’s actions in which it had no part. The stake is cleaner.

What did Faith’s last words mean?: “Should have been there, B. Quite a ride.”

The new human Anya is pretty funny (so far), and well played. It will be interesting to see where the writers go with her.

When Trick arrived in Sunnydale he commented on its overwhelmingly pallid population; so I was amused to see more dark faces at the Prom and Graduation than had been in the series previously.

The episode “The Zeppo” can be seen as a lesson in the principle of comparative advantage. Or as a good laugh.

When was Angel invited into Rupert’s apartment (before “Passion”)? When was he invited into Faith’s motel room (before “Consequences”)?

Most of the Latin in Buffy is genuine. “Passion” contains both good Latin (hicce verbis consensus rescissus est, though Willow mispronounced it recissus) and pseudo-Latin gibberish (formatia trans sicere educatorum).

In “Some Assembly Required”, the three girls killed in a road accident are said to have died of “natural causes”. I was reminded of a line from a Mad parody of some crime movie: “Around here, that’s natural causes.”

“Dead Man’s Party” suggests the question: Can a cat be a vampire? Can a lizard?

In “Beauty and the Beasts”, someone ought to have asked: If the wolf got out, why would he return?

Why is it safe for Willow to swap spit with a werewolf?

Continuing to catch up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I noticed in season 3 several morphing shots (transformation between vampire and human face) much smoother than I’ve seen before. Such changes, I think, never happened in close-up in previous seasons.

Today a stranger asked “Don’t I know you?”, which happens all the time; I must have a generic face — but it seemed especially funny after watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which anyone with a speaking part is likely to be Not What They Seem. This bit, at the end of the second season, came to mind:

Joyce: Have we met before?
Spike, politely: You hit me with an axe once.

A curiosity in “Whatever Happened to George Foster?”, an episode of Danger Man: Drake fans a handful of US currency, showing several tens and twenties and one single. The single (alone) is obviously fake: the cartouche in the visible corner is all wrong.