I am – Hercules!!

"We just worked out a deal. A minimum of 10,” Anthony Stewart Head tells the New York Daily News.

Which means Rupert Giles will appear in at least as many episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” seventh season as he did in the sixth. Read the entire report here.

In other “Buffy” news, it looks like Spike will have neglected his dye job by the start of the season. In 7.1 he abandons the Spikecrypt and sets up shop on the hellmouth beneath the newly rebuilt Sunnydale High.

As theorized in this space earlier, the name of the Joss Whedon-penned season opener is indeed “Lessons.”

Finally, it turns out Herc wasn’t the only one inspired by the recent “Once More With Feeling” repeat to put a few words to hard drive. Offers Scott Feschuk in Canada’s National Post:

“I suspected it at the time, and a second viewing only confirmed the notion: This was a transcendent creative work, the coinage of a soul (current owner: Joss Whedon, though one can only assume that any rudimentary investigation would identify Satan as a lienholder) imbued with fanciful ambition and big plump brain tricked out with a rhapsodic imagination.”

Feschuk's is a superb article which gives due recognition also to the supergenius that attended “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and the astonishing first seven seasons of “The Simpsons.” Read the whole thing here.

I am – Hercules!!