Today is ZAMBIAN HEROES' Day.

The fact that we don't actually know any Zambian heroes is no reason not to celebrate!


unfluffy Buffy
I got to see the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the much-delayed local channel tonight. It rocked! (The episode, not the channel.) The rest of the season had been pretty much ho-hum, so I'd reasoned to myself that it was because the show was ending, and the creative team had probably just lost heart. But it turns out they had simply been setting up this literal show-stopper all along!


Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying this one made up for the humdrum stuff that went before. I still think the previous episodes could and should have been better. But the ending was so fitting, it put all the past six seasons in perspective and was really the only logical conclusion to the saga of the Slayer. (Well, one of two logical conclusions: the happy one or the sad one.) I really should have had more faith in series creator Joss Whedon, considering that he's also doing a bang-up job over on Astonishing X-Men.


Speaking of comics...
Vin gave everyone in the gang a veritable mountain of comics on Free Comic Book Day, asking only that we write reviews in return. There were so many of them that even I, speed reader that I am, haven't finished up yet, and I can't imagine how I could possibly hope to review them all. So suffice it to say that most of it is actually quality stuff, and let me go on to the one that really stood out.


Brian Pulido's Back in Black reminds me of Kris Aquino's acting way back in the '80s. To those of you who don't know what that means, she was so bad that even when the smart part of your brain grabbed hold of the remote to change the channel, the treacherous brain portion would not allow you to actually push the button and get away, so mesmerizing was her sheer awfulness on screen.


In the same manner, I actually went through the entire pamphlet showcasing Pulido's upcoming projects, a cornucopia of misogyny thinly disguised as admiration, thickly encrusted with bad grammar, bad storytelling, bad dialogue, and hackneyed concepts that were old when Sean Connery still played Bond. Tips-- if you want to be an empowered female in Pulido's world, you must:


1. die (so you can come back with a hankering for Vengeance),
2. have big hair,
3. pose lasciviously while preparing to disembowel people, and
4. speak in explanatory cliches.


I may just hold on to the damn thing so I have something to refer to whenever I have doubts about my own writing ability.

TRIVIA QUIZ
How long is a light-year?


answer to Friday's question
First, thanks to Amie for clearing this up for me in the first place! Okay, England is England itself; Britain is England and Scotland; Great Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales; and the United Kingdom is England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. (In fact 'U.K.' officially stands for 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'.) So Ewan McGregor, for example, is Scottish and British but not English, while the aforementioned Amie is generally British and specifically English. Whew!


people who got it 'royte' (Hey, that's how Amie says it!): Pauline, Amie of course, and Charles (close enough)