This Week in A & E
I still go through So You Think You Can Dance? withdrawal every Wednesday. For the entire summer I was glued to the TV screen watching this Fox program about young dancers from across the country competing for the title of "American's Favorite Dancer." Since the season finale, I have been counting down the days until the live tour reaches Philadelphia. Finally, this Friday night, the top 10 dancers will be performing at the Academy of Music. Why I do love this show so much? I can't think of anything more exciting than watching talented young people following their dreams and sharing their passion with the audience!
My newest piece of geekporn is my Alienware laptop. I stare at it — the technophile half of my brain admiring the nice wide screen, the semi-transparent keyboard, the fast processor, the flawless performance, the switchable integrated/external graphics cards and all of the tweaker stuff that made me consider Alienware in the first place, while the dominant half of my brain, the goofy, easily amused part, knows I bought it solely because of the glowing alien head on the cover.
With the documentary Jonestown looming, now's the time to curl up with Tim Reiterman's excellent Jim Jones biography Raven. Reiterman, who was wounded in the ill-fated attempt to rescue Jonestown "defectors" — the linchpin for the ensuing massacre — offers up a beguiling account of Jones, from his bizarre upbringing and evangelical start to his eventual descent into paranoid megalomania which ended with the death of over 900 followers in Uganda in 1978. First published in 1982, Raven is an engrossing, infuriating portrayal of not just Jones and his followers, but also the U.S. government, all the while proving that the truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction.
I have a new drink of choice: cider wine. Not Woodchucks (saccharine sweet, bubbly, cheap and full of added sugar), and not hard cider (farmyard, skanky barrel-brewed version of corn liquor) but cider wine. Made from small, old-fashioned apples like Foxwhelp Bittershop and Yellow Petit, cider wine is naturally carbonated, hinting of apple, dry yet zesty. And just as importantly, it is a way for small-scale apple farmers, suffering in the outsourced business of apple growing, to save their orchards, reintroduce older cultivars of apples and make a few extra bucks.
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