The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Two Joan Hickson (she's the best) Miss Marples: The Moving Finger and A Caribbean Mystery. The Moving Finger, by the way, was one of my early lessons in the mutability of memory: the first time I saw it the only thing I remembered from the book was that Joanna would end up with the doctor... (the other was my vivid memory of a scene from Snow White that isn't actually there - the crow turning pink and blue from magic clouds going up the chimney. Weird thing, memory.)

TV: YAYAYAYAY! Psych is back! I'm glad they didn't ignore Juliet's experience, but I'm also glad they're not dwelling on it. I love the little things about this show, like the way they play with the credits (in Chinese this time). Nature's Andes: Spine of the Dragon - the footage of Humboldt penguins crossing a sea lion colony to get to the ocean, clambering over the huge predators' backs and jumping off and on, was hysterical. Twice the Leverage (I love DVRs) - Nate is on the edge. I was relieved that Parker was supposed to set off the motion detectors, and laughed out loud at the expression on her face while she was doing it. zAnd the second one - well, I saw Angel; I know Christian Kane can sing. He can also act. The scene where Eliot is fighting the Busey in the sound-proof studio while Hardison and Parker are watching the equipment and not seeing it, and he keeps waving at their backs ... priceless. And I love the line at the end: "There are some roads, when you start down them you can't go back. And I'm about a hundred miles down one of those roads." Nice episode. Dr Who - man. If I'd realized what a cliff-hanger they had prepared, I would have waited. But Rory's back! Kind of. Damn, they're mean to Companions nowadays.

Read: Several YAs: The Magic Thief trilogy (Sarah Prineas), which was excellent; Ashes (Kathryn Lasky), a spare but moving look at 1932-33 in Weimar Germany; Turtle in Paradise (Jennifer L. Holm), not as good for adults but interesting. Also finished In Other Rooms, Other Wonders - a series of linked stories set in contemporary Pakistan, truly fascinating. What is Left the Daughter, a very, very good Canadian novel (Howard Norman) about a tragic incident in a small Nova Scotia town in the early days of WWII... we Americans forget (if we ever knew) what that time was like for our northern neighbors; the protagonist is well drawn and story is compelling. Norman can certainly write.