Too much Buffy

Original article.

In meetings yesterday with senior officials in Moscow, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton told the Russian government that "we're going ahead," whether the council agrees or not, a senior administration official said. "The council's unity is at stake here."

A senior diplomat from another council member said his government had heard a similar message and was told not to anguish over whether to vote for war. "You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not," the diplomat said U.S. officials told him. "That decision is ours, and we have already made it. It is already final. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not."

Well, we all knew that, but they could at least be polite and pretend that there's a possibility of them being swayed on this...

Nothing much has happened since last week - oh, except for me watching the whole of Buffy season 4 in six days, as I was trying to avoid revising for my mocks (which are this week). It worked, I can tell you that! And maybe in a couple of months (thanks to my friend who's lending me all the tapes) I'll have actually caught up with Buffy and Angel and I'll be able to, y'know, have conversations with people about them. Which will be strange. And I predict getting very irritated when I have caught up and I watch the latest season on BBC2 and it takes six months to complete, with a whole week in between episodes.

[For those who don't know, I only very belatedly discovered Buffy about five months ago[1], with the second half of season 2 being repeated on BBC2. I have since watched the rest of that series, and also seasons 1, 3, 4 and Angel season 1, all with borrowed boxsets. Buffy good.]

Oh, and by the way, I'm making an effort to avoid spoilers (so don't spoiler in my comments if you know what's good for you). However, I already know the two big things that happen at the end of series 5, so this effort may be a bit wasted.

I'm not going to say anything about how my mocks are going until they're over - tempting fate, and all that. On which subject, I discovered on Monday that I have another exam superstition, in addition to 'the difference between a paper being easy and being challenging is partly due to which fountain pen I choose to write with'. I have switched pens in the middle of an exam before because of this, although I'm normally not superstitious - I'm a scientist, for heaven's sake, I'm doing maths, further maths and physics A-levels, and physics with computer science at university![2] However, my new one is that I will not turn off my calculator before the end of an exam even if I've finished it 20 minutes early, ditto collecting all my papers together. It's clearly tempting fate to be metaphorically shouting, "I've FINISHED!" when you might, in fact, before the end of the exam suddenly realise a mistake that you've made.

Actually (I've just remembered) I tell a lie about nothing happening this week - I received an email from IBM telling me that they will call me for interview about their pre-university employment scheme which I applied for 4 months ago. And due to their stupid choice of subject line I almost deleted the email without reading it - the From: address was student_{something} AT uk.ib... (trailed off because the column wasn't wide enough to display it) and the subject line was: 'Your application'. This is IBM, they must know what typical junk mail looks like. And what with my email addy being a hotmail one, I get around 30 junk mails per day in my inbox.

I received one last week from YinI that was worse - the From: address read 'South admin' and the subject line was 'email address', all lowercase. I did delete that one before I read it, but I looked at it because I was curious. Lucky I did... I hope I haven't deleted any other important emails. Time will tell.

By the way, if you want to email me you can click on my name at the bottom of each post - it sends mail to a suespammers.org account, which is a valid email address.