November 14, 2001
We hardly knew ye:
"Examine [Kathy T.] Nguyen's life and see the reality. Not of Anthrax, but of being a simple immigrant with poor English skills, living on the margins of society, working for years in stable but low-level service jobs, eking out a place in a dead-end America and still being cheerful and optimistic, because the hell she came from was so much worse than anything she'd encounter in America."
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If you missed "Once More, With Feeling," the amazing musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you can catch it again this Friday, November 16th, at 8:00 PM on your local UPN station.
But be warned: this and all subsequent reruns of "Once More, With Feeling" have been trimmed to fit into a single hour, with commercials. (The original, uncut version ran about sixty-eight minutes.) From the horse's mouth:
...yes, the musical ep isgoing to be a few minutes longer, maybe run over by about six. So set your VCR's accordingly, particularly since Tuesday night is the ONLY TIME the show will be broadcast in its entirety. It will run again but deep cuts will have to be made -- UPN are gods for letting us run (a total of eight minutes) long, but they can't do it on the rerun too... [October 30, 2001]
The short version ... was hell to do, but we pulled out "If Were together" entirely, plus a verse from spike and a verse from "Walk through the fire". Plus a messload of dialogue, the overture and Dawn's Ballet. All gone. So tonight -- and the inevitable if very far off DVD are the real versions of the show. The rerun is kind of like highlights. Hopefully it still plays as a dramatic piece though, not a hodgepodge. [November 6, 2001]
-- Joss Whedon
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Here's a new one on me: TV Guide reports that Citizen Baines was cancelled "at the request of its own producers, since it wasn't making them any money." It's nice that they're so frank about that. Allow me to be equally frank: the show was bland, moved at a snail's pace, and wasted its talented cast.
Also euthanized: Wolf Lake. Yeah, okay, it's on "indefinite hiatus." Whatever, guys. Don't expect the fans to mount a letter-writing campaign for this one.
I'm so glad Malcolm in the Middle is back on the air.
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This Saturday, I'm not going to my 10-year high school reunion. Nope. I'll be staying at the same hotel, but I won't be attending the reunion. Instead, I've invited fellow alums to join me in my suite, where we'll hang out and watch old videotapes of our high school follies: marching band performances, plays and musicals, class projects, graduation. But we're not going to the reunion. Nope.
Sure, I'm paying an order of magnitude more for the suite than I would have for the reunion itself, but it's the principle of the thing that matters. I don't think the event, as described to me, is worth the eighty dollars per person that the reunion company is asking. In fact, the insipid pitch sounds an awful lot like prom, and that's worth nothing to me.
Maybe my standards are too high. But from where I sit, even the organizers from my class-- the people who hired the reunion company-- are tacitly admitting that the event on Saturday night is lacking. They've scheduled a separate picnic at a public park for the next day. No admission fee, plenty of space for young'uns, bring your own food that you'll actually want to eat. Why didn't they think of this first?
Just so it's clear, I'm only commenting on how this thing has been promoted. The reunion hasn't happened yet. It could turn out to be the greatest party ever, and I may later regret missing out on all the fun.
But I doubt it.
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And you can sing along:
Faded photographs
Covered now with lines and creases
Tickets torn in half
Memories in bits and pieces
Traces of love long ago
That didn't work out right
Traces...