IE, because my weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

With extra notes as I actually attended the taping this week, as you are well aware.

Allie and Miles: samba and Afro-jazz. (What happened to calling it “African jazz”? Is dance the last place where using “Afro-” as a prefix can still be acceptable?)

Anyway, the samba was both hot and good. The tricks were definitely on the “holy shit” level of difficulty, seeing as how the crowd repeatedly gasped out “holy shit” for several of them, and the dancing outside of the tricks was very solid (although they did give Allie a bit of help by having the samba be barefoot rather than in heels – not that she hasn’t danced ballroom in heels quite decently already, but this was a whole new level of difficulty). Allie and Miles have good chemistry, too, which doesn’t hurt. They only juuuuuust landed a couple of the tricks, but landed them they did and neither is a ballroom dancer, and those really were top-tier tricks, so I mark this one down as a huge success.

The A-jazz (hah! I will shorten the prefix even further!) was excellent. It was relaxed and joyful, and served as a welcome counterbalance to the intense routines that preceeded it, and the two of them danced it really, really well, with that combination of abandon and control you only get when the dancers are really in the groove. Excellent performance.

Arassay and Izaak: Lindy hop and smooth tango. Benji Schwimmer continues his one-man crusade to modernize ballroom dance by setting routines to whatever song he had on repeat on his iPod this week continues as he sets a Lindy hop to, of all things, “Welcome To The Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance, tossing in a few pirouettes and so forth for variety’s sake. It actually more or less worked. Because it was Benji’s piece you knew in advance the tricks were going to be insane (and they were). Because Izaak was dancing you knew in advance the judges were going to, at best, dismiss him with faint praise (and they did).

The tango was the worst dance of the night, and it was only average at worst. Arassay was fantastic – Izaak was tolerable. Really, Izaak’s problem isn’t that he’s a bad dancer – he isn’t – but he’s far behind just about everybody else remaining (and for that matter, most of the last two weeks’ eliminees) in terms of skill. He’s trying to get by on raw talent and a young fanbase and can’t quite manage it when everybody else is raising the level for this show on an international level. Much like Daario, I get the feeling he came to this show too young and unseasoned.

Vincent and Natalli: krump and contemporary. Natalli is disgustingly lucky that she forgot the steps halfway through the krump routine, because krump, more than any other form of dance on this show, plays to Natalli’s strengths (passion and charismatic dance). If you weren’t watching carefully you would have missed the part where she just stood for half a second in panic before she started improvising herself back into the routine. (I speak from experience, because watching live I didn’t realize she’d fucked up until the judges mentioned it.) She covered brilliantly – but if it hadn’t been krump, where hitting hard is more important than hitting right, she’d be dead in the water. Vincent was fine, in his nonchalant good-at-everything way.

The contemporary was fantastic and there’s nothing more to say there.

Lisa and Nico: “jazz/funk” and hip-hop. The “jazz/funk” (what?) was just a polite excuse for Blake McGrath to do his dirtiest routine possible, and believe me when I say the audience was fine with it and the audio team must have gone overboard trying to de-intensify the girls screaming in the audience – I literally couldn’t hear myself think. (I could hear Colin Mochrie complaining about the screaming.) Anyway, the dance itself was excellent.

The hip-hop was a little more muted in terms of screaming, mostly because the routine itself was kind of bad – the bits with the suitcases were overwrought and clumsy and detracted from the flow of the thing. That having been said Nico and Lisa danced the actual dancing parts of it near-perfectly, as you would expect, and with an interesting kind of restraint given the form. I liked it despite the choreo, I guess. (And then, when they were done, oh my god the screaming.)

Should go home: Natalli and Izaak.
Will go home: Natalli and Izaak.

Thanks to being a member of the Internet Media Conspiracy, I was invited to attend this week’s tapings of So You Think You Can Dance Canada, and I wrote an article about it, with which I am quite happy and which requires little to no interest in the show to read and enjoy, so go do that.

Not included in article: the bit where I nearly trampled Benji Schwimmer by accident. (It wasn’t my fault, because I’m taller and heavier than he is and physics more or less demands that I trample him should I get the opportunity.)

That my weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

…because I only just finished watching it about half an hour ago.

Firstly, WTF is up with the top ten episode only being one hour long? Yes, I know the ratings have dropped since the show’s impressive debut, but A) it is competing against the major network fall lineup and B) guess what, CTV, the ratings will drop if you replay the fucking show twenty times on Muchmusic because people won’t feel the same need to watch the original performance. Now Muchmusic’s retarded “play ten shows twenty times per week” policy is killing shows on OTHER channels. Way to go, CTV and Muchmusic! You’re retards.

As to dances:

Izaak and Natalli: hip-hop. Izaak floats through the routine all airy-fairy like always; it’s just his style, his melding of contemporary and hip-hop, which would not be a problem except that he can’t stop doing that which is why the judges keep ragging on him, and rightfully. Natalli is her usual mix of intensity and not being quite on time, and since Izaak is his usual kind of boring the judges slobber over her. Unfortunately, the judges were so harsh on Izaak that I’m betting we see the backlash support vote show up and he stays around to make the show suck for another week.

Nico and Allie: waltz. Very showy and theatrical waltz, but entertaining despite some remarkably crap footwork at times (but only times). Nico is at this point the favorite to win the whole thing and everybody knows it; Allie is probably a ninety percent chance right now to make top four because she is cute and adorable and from the Maritimes, where their only claim to fame is producing reality show winners these days. Nothing here to hurt either of their chances.

Kaitlyn and Danny: mambo. This was a lot of fun and it was good to see Kaitlyn get a chance to dance with somebody who wasn’t Izaak. Danny, unfortunately, may have made a bad choice by doing a boring, slow-paced solo.

Arassay and Vincent: disco. Thoroughly entertaining, although we do get disco-level choppiness at times and the routine didn’t quite flow. But the two of them performed the fuck out of it and they both looked really good. I think both are safe.

Lisa and Miles: contemporary. First off, Sean Cheesman yelling at the judges from the audience at how Miles killed his routine was hilarious (“SYTYCD Canada: Where Everybody Gets Their Say”). I am of course not entirely skilled at judging contemporary dance but I thought Miles did fine and Lisa was excellent. The routine itself was also pretty good.

Should go home: Izaak and Natalli.
Will go home: Danny and Natalli.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

…I was still writing elsewhere. So here is my weekly TV column (although it is mostly obsolete at this point), as well as my article about the World Rock Paper Scissors Championships.

(An aside: I did not mention it in the article because I did not want to be a concern troll, but seriously: calling it the WORLD Rock Paper Scissor Championships when the only foreigners attending are from rich countries still kind of smacks of privilege in a way, doesn’t it? After all, in most of the world when they play rock-paper-scissors, it is A trying to beat in B’s head with a Rock while B attempts to stab A with Scissors, and the winner gets a wad of small green Papers.)

My TV column this week now features extra Kang and Kodos. ‘Tis the season, pathetic Earthlings!