[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Alex,

With the new Star Wars movies, the spectacle has been the only saving grace. Too much merchandising, not enough storytelling.

I have also, purposefully, gone to see what I expected and sometimes even knew to be a bad movie, simply because I wanted the spectacle. Best case in point with this is "Medicine Man" with Sean Connery, a truly insipid movie with characters just this side of brain-dead who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the sciences, but this thin plot and a preachy message (which I agreed with, but that didn't make it less annoying) was strung around amazing panorama shots of the Amazon rainforest, and I saw it here in San Jose at what's one of the biggest screens in the world, our old Century 21 theatre.

On the Buffy end, Allison Hannigan has been guest starring on Veronica Mars.

With four years of the Bard, that's better than what we got in California high schools, which consisted of four years of the Bard bowdlerized (imagine "Romeo and Juliet" without Mercutio's bawdy speeches or any of the other sex jokes) mixed with unadulterated John Steinbeck every year for six years. (Plot of just about every Steinbeck novel: Somebody dies, everyone gets very depressed, life sucks.)

As for coming out of the ivory tower, while I don't mind striving amateurs, I really get creeped out by the "Everyone is beautiful, everyone is special" sites, because if everyone is special, then no one is. I think it better to just leave the door to the ivory tower open and clearly marked.

[Alexander Grace]

'I really get creeped out by the "Everyone is beautiful, everyone is special" sites, because if everyone is special, then no one is.'

Sadly, but not sadly at all, that's one of the things I think people have to accept if they are going to achieve happiness. Everyone is special, and no one is - you're just a grain of ordinary sand, but with the potential to form a crucial part of an excellent castle. We are defined by what we do, not what we are. The sites you decry define us as special by dint of our existence alone, which destroys the desire for self improvement.

Broadly we are in agreement.