If you’d like, you can comment again. I have to assume there’s somebody out there. Reblogger didn’t work, or it worked only intermittently, and I got a little tired of it to be honest. Comments were lost, internal server errors kept showing up, and, more importantly, there was never any feedback or warning when these things might happen. Even when I e-mailed to ask for feedback. I understand that it’s free and somebody’s hobby, but if it doesn’t work, what really is the point? Blogger itself works marvelously most of the time, but then it too fails miserably in some strange way, stops working, won’t load, won’t always do what I want or need it to do. But I apparently can’t run Perl on my account (not without paying more money), so an alternative like Greymatter is out. I probably wasn’t smart enough to figure it out anyway. That’s okay. When Blogger works, I really do like it.
So anyway. It’s Wednesday. How’d that happen? Last night, because I’ve given up on Kal-El’s Creek, I watched the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (thank you again, amish!). I am such a geek for saying it, I know, but I am in awe of Joss Whedon. The man’s storytelling abilities continue to amaze me, and that he has never won an Emmy is, quite frankly, a crime. This wasn’t just a silly, throw-away episode, even if the songs and dance numbers were cute and clever. There were revelations, developments, and I realized that, fundamentally, each of these characters is now alone. They are part of a group, but that group’s dynamic has changed (perhaps irrevocably), and they are, each one of them, alone. As Stephanie Zacharek writes in Salon, it “was just a little more than an hour’s worth of television, but its gently layered tones suggest something infinitely more complicated than either your standard contemporary musical or your standard contemporary TV episode. It’s an all-singing, all-dancing full-moon fever dream. Now that’s entertainment.”
In other news, today is Claude Monet’s birthday, which I know only because Google told me with their spiffy new holiday logo. Apparently (and I only know this because somebody at Metafilter told me so), Google keeps a cache of these special logos for their users’ amusement. Clever, personal touches like this are part of the reason I like the search engine so much. But, alas, it’s not all happy days and sunshine over at Metafilter. Civil liberties are threatened in England, as they continue to all but disappear in the United States, while “Big Tobacco” buys the rights to anti-cancer drug treatments. And now I’ve got to contend with this, which seems to suggest that our war with Afghanistan was planned well in advance of September 11. Great. It’s like the Reichstag all over again.
Here are some more links along the same troubling lines, sent to me through e-mail: