Elections today in Britain, a whole lot of them: local councils, European parliament, and in London, mayor and assembly. It's all a bit of a let-down for those of us in the north though; we've been experimented upon by the government who wanted to try out all-postal voting (an ill-advised idea beset by delivery chaos, fraud, intimidation, theft of ballot papers, etc.) I posted off my votes over a week ago, and have been strangely unmoved by all the posturing and desparate political appeals ever since.

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We've been on another Buffy roll recently, this time with Season 4. Now, I thought season 3 was great, but season 4 has started to take a turn for the worst. It's all the fault of this stupid idea of "the initiative". I saw my first actually bad Buffy episode a couple of days ago (for fans, it was called "The I in Team". It's the one where Professor Walsh gets killed.) It had an entirely gratuitous sex scene between Buffy and Riley (done in a very clumsy way--this episode's director was pretty bad) and the ending was an unnecessary twist. As big baddies go in Buffy, the initiative is very poor. Then after that, they decide to bring Faith back. Can anyone say "running out of ideas"? I was so done with Faith after series 3.

Not that there isn't still good stuff in this series. There's still a lot of humour and some good episodes, but they are flailing around for plots and haven't established the same build-up towards the end that they did in previous series. We'll still keep watching, of course.