"So," I imagine people might ask me, "Why the Goth House obession with dishes?"

It began in the second episode of the comic, "This is Goth House," which explained some of the major peculiarities of life in the house. This included the rotting linoleum and the neverending piles of dirty dishes in the kitchen -- in a house full of people who denied even using the kitchen for anything other than getting beer out of the fridge and occasionally making coffee. This was true of both the real-life and the fictional house.

The dishes problem seems a constant among any household of more than one person (when it's just one person, you KNOW all the dishes are yours -- and consequently, take to eating off paper plates, or, straight out of the packaging). Everyone is sure they wash their rightful share, and yet, somehow, the kitchen is always full of dirty dishes.

As an adult, I have never lived in a house with a dishwasher. When I was a kid we always had one. This makes me feel particularly aggrieved to have to do the dishes -- like the youngest son of a noble family fallen on hard times, I was never trained for it, and anyway, shouldn't there be servants to do that sort of thing?

Then again, even people who live in houses with dishwashers complain about "doing" the dishes, by which they mean things like collecting, filling, pushing a button and emptying.

I guess there's just something about washing dishes that makes everyone long for a robot maid.

I've been threatening to do a Buffy the Vampire Slayer tribute for a while now -- and here it is, inspired by my compulsive viewing of the Season 3 DVD collection (I can't help it! Season 3 has Evil Vampire Willow!)

I'm not really too upset about the demise of the show. They had seven seasons, after all. A pretty good run. Shows that run longer often start to lose what made them appealing in the first place (like, did anyone watch the last two seasons of The X-Files? I know I tried...but had a tendency to fall asleep. Or just stop paying attention, pick up a magazine or something). Buffy is now a thing that is completed, contained -- just like Sandman, serialized storytelling that became something very like a novel.

As dramatic entertainment, Buffy is a strange beast -- literate, even intellectual, but also full of oozy beasts and frothy pop-culture references; heavy on melodrama and metaphor, but with a puckish sense of humor that rarely lets an important emotional moment take itself too seriously. And, for a show that never won an Emmy, it has been highly praised by television writers, and obsessively analyzed by people who like to write scholarly papers about fiction

And also, by people who like to natter on (as if anyone cares) on the Internet.