Monday, January 13, 2003

Wither Buffy? Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for years one of the best-written and best-acted shows on broadcast television, may be facing the business end of a stake delivered by UPN network bosses. According to stories seeping out over the entertainment wire today, Buffy's ratings are slipping in the show's seventh season and star Sarah Michelle Gellar may not want to come back in the title role. Long-time fans (like yours truly) note that the quality has slipped notably this year and even the talented cast is struggling to make some of the awful scripts seem convincing. There is some talk of a Buffy-less spin-off (the groundwork is being laid in the current "slayers in training" storyline if the producers decide to go that direction). Perhaps the threat of extinction may coax Buffy's very imaginative creator, Joss Whedon, to come up with some inventive twist to keep the franchise alive and interesting. 1:34:45 PM    Emphasize This! [] The Joy of Seks Back to the subject of neologisms resulting from high-tech communications, I've lately been getting a lot of spam messages promising depictions of various acts of "seks." Either these people can't spell (which is possible considering the general level of sophistication of their materials), or they are using a novel phonetic approach to circumvent network-level spam filters programmed to zap anything with the word "sex" in the header. In either case, it's annoying, but in the latter case it's also diabolical. Think about this one and then try to make an argument that this is not a sign of the impending linguistic apocalypse. 12:15:19 PM    Emphasize This! [] Matters of Life and Death  On Saturday, I posted a brief article praising outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan for his courageous decision to commute the sentences of every convicted death row inmate in the state, ostensibly because of questions raised by the criminal justice process, but more fundamentally because of problems inherent in the State's role as executioner. Here are some of my further thoughts on this emotional and difficult issue. 11:05:59 AM    Emphasize This! []

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