The Week in Entertainment

Film: Sugar - a lyrical and thought-provoking film by turns funny and ... not sad, but sobering look at the Dominican baseball factory and the way it chews up and spits out youngsters. A very good movie.

TV: Ashes to Ashes finale. Well, I didn't think she'd save her parents, but I didn't think we'd find out who the mime was - or who he was. Wow. House - Cut-throat Bitch is a perfect alter ego for House. But trying to kill Chase? The man's in deep trouble. (Nice to see Kutner's death is being taken seriously.) The Mentalist - I found an episode on my DVR that I hadn't seen, so twice the Patrick Jane this week - which made up for no Scrubs or Ted... Numb3ers 100th episode was a very nice blend of new and references back to the pilot.

Read: Although Bukhta Radosti is well-written, the plot is a bit hard to relate to (maybe if I lived in Moscow) and I dropped it like a hot potato when Zoë's Tale arrived in the mail. Scalzi's gives us Zoë's take (well, duh) on the events of The Last Colony - finishing a dropped thread and explaining away the rather deus ex machina Consu machine (he says in the afterword that he didn't want a 30,000 word digression in Colony and he's right - it would have made Colony unwieldy and double-climaxed, besides being impossible to really include it in a book told from Perry's POV... But now the story is complete, and (of course) damned good. Then I read Donna Leon's About Face which was in the same package. The Brunetti series continues to be excellent - atmospheric and thought-provoking.