Sufficient Cynic

This should pretty much explain how I feel about my So You Think You Can Dance Nights:






And so here it is, yet again Wednesday night and the Top 16 are about to take the stage.  I'm excited to see what kind of shakeups last week's dismissals, or should I say "saves", will result in.  Without any further ado, let's plant ourselves in front of the screen and silently, or not so silently (it's your house, you can do as you wish) critique, boo, or stand in awe of the routines that either end up on the Hot Tamale Train or end up all aboard the Pack N' Go Express.
Cat's hair is amazing, she's looking all 40's noir femme fatale tonight-good on you Cat!  Oh...good...(sarcasm) the opening number is Charlie Chaplin-inspired, with Amelia starting front and center. It's set to The Here and Afterwhich makes sense when you consider it's off of the soundtrack to Wim Wenders dance documentary "Pina".  It's delightfully eccentric, which i…

The world of The Eyre Affair is an infinitely intriguing one.  It's past, present, future, speculation, fact, truth and fiction all rolled in to one. Filled with real authors, real novels with their fictional characters, and the fictional detectives in charge of both, it's a bit of a meta trip into literature, and a total joy for Victorian lit geeks like me, and book lovers in general.
In Thursday Next, Jasper Fforde has created the kind of female character that I wish there were more of: intelligent, focused, driven, resourceful and completely at ease with time travel.  Alright, that final characteristic isn't so much a personality trait as a learned necessity for coping with life in an alternate reality where air ships exist and the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to disappear, but still, it's an impressive quality to have.  Also impressive to have? Her pet dodo, Pickwick. In Fforde's reality, it's an alternate 1985, and Britain is still at war …

Good Wednesday evening all.  The middle of this week brings with it thunderstorms, heat, oppressive humidity and Cat's first bright red dress of the season (right?)  Cat looks either overly tan or possibly sunburned or perhaps the lighting is just wreaking havoc with her dress and skin tone.  Anyway, there's a lot to get done tonight, but that mostly means that it's time for the first cuts of the season.  Two guys and two girls will be going home tonight and do you know how I know that they mean business?  Adam Shankman is on the panel.  So our judges, the deciders of fate for 4 soon-to-be-employment seeking dancer dreamers, are Nigel, Mary & Adam.

Before moving forward though, let's talk a bit about that opening number.  Mostly about how Cyrus was all fancied up and the focal at the beginning and how I would have never attributed this level of creepiness to Napoleon and Tabitha.  Danced to Marilyn Manson with a Tim Burton set background and red and black costumes…

Welcome, finally, to the first dance-your-pants-off or leave episode of the season!  We've made it past the auditions and those traumatic make it or break it moments that are requisites of making the Top 20, and it should be all beautiful gliding and unbelievable arabesques as we make our way to our final destination; in other words, all aboard the Hot Tamale train, it's about to get real.  Everybody's been getting so close, I'm sure, telling each other "no YOU should win" when they're really thinking "if you actually win I'll go Tanya Harding on you so fast you won't see Jeff Gilooly coming".  Sorry, that was just the competitive spirit in me trying to claw its way out.  I'm sure all of our Top 20 are far too classy to even have a thought like that rush through their minds.  However, it is the night where we find out which partnerships have a good chance of making it, who chose poorly, and let the debating begin on the topic of who…