Upcoming EWWD: September 22-27ish

This week's featured entertainment within walking distance is Sweeney Todd at the Iowa State Center. Yes, the actual musical. Not one for the kids, obviously. That's Wednesday at 7. $20 for students and $40+ depending on how nice you want your seats for everyone else. Do what I'm doing and go with a group of grad students. Students can get 2 tickets per student ID.

If you don't want to spend the cash, you can still get plenty of high-class culture at Music Hall Wednesday at 7:30, where there'll be a concert featuring Cantus, a nationally known men's choir, singing with ISU's own men's a capella group, The Statesmen. That's only $5, $3 for students. Since I'll be at Sweeney Todd I'd love to hear from anyone who make it to this. The Music department also has a big concert Friday at 7 with symphonic and concert bands, followed by the Wind Ensemble; it's at the City Auditorium so not actually in walking distance for SCAN people. $4 for students, $6 for the rest of us.

In food and fundraising, there's a Greek philanthropy shindig Thursday: Sigma Phi Epsilon Sausage Fest and BBQ; Cost: $3; Proceeds to benefit: Youth AIDS. Sig Eps are at 228 Gray Ave. That's from 4-8.

ISU Lectures has another full week, with feminist icon Adrienne Rich speaking tonight at 8 in the Great Hall and tomorrow morning at 10 in the Campanile room. Tomorrow evening is a lecture on immigration (part of Hispanic heritage month). Wednesday features a talk at the auditorium in the Design Building on architecture and reducing fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions. Thursday has two lectures, one at 8 at City Hall (seems to be a theme this week; it's being catered with local foods so I'm still tempted to go) on "Can capitalism save the planet?" and one closer to home at Howe Hall at 6pm, which is a roundtable on energy security. All lectures are of course, free.

No football game whatsoever this week (the last two were away games). Athletics does have a couple of home matchups though: Soccer against Missouri at 7 on Friday and Volleyball against Nebraska at 6:30 on Saturday. Volleyball is only $1 as part of the "cram the coliseum" promotion -- and don't forget to wear gold (not cardinal, don't want to be confused with fans of the evil Big Red) if you go. If I do anything Friday night it'll probably be the concert, and I have a wedding to go to on Saturday, so this week in sports is another area where I'd appreciate my dear readers' reviews.

Wall-E is approaching a status as a permanent feature at the Varsity, and the other screen is still turning over at a weekly rate. Right now it's a French movie, Roman de Gare. Must be in their contract as an indie/foreign movie house to show 1 French film per semester. The initial plot summary -- it's about a novelist -- on IMDB made me think that it's a stereotypical French movie that only an NPR reviewer could love, but the full summary makes it sound like more of a murder mystery, which could be fun. I'll never convince Chris to go unless it's dubbed though. Can't find any information on whether it's subtitled or dubbed unfortunately.

The M-Shop has indie music on Tuesday and Friday, hip-hop on Saturday, and sketch comedy (Grandma Mojo's of course) Wednesday night late (a person could probably pull off both that and either Sweeney Todd or the men's chorus, if they were up for a full evening out.)

That's it for now -- I'll be back Thursday with my review of Sweeney Todd and hopefully a better preview for the weekend.

Entertainment within walking distance: The Onion

This is a little late, and I've got a couple more coming up but I wanted to get the backlog out before tonight's meeting. ISU Lectures hosted two writers from The Onion, "America's Finest News Source" Wednesday night. It was a fun way to spend an evening; as a regular reader of the Onion the retrospective on the articles was mostly a nostalgia trip -- a lot of the humor of the Onion loses its punch the second time around, especially since it is news satire, and funniest when it's fresh. For someone unfamiliar with the Onion itself, it's the newspaper equivalent to The Daily Show's take on the nightly news; and if you're completely unfamiliar with news satire, the lecture probably wouldn't have been for you. In my opinion the media benefits from being skewered in this fashion (and it makes for great entertainment) and The Onion does a great job of stepping outside of and then capturing the national zeitgeist.

There's no print edition for central Iowa, although I imagine we'd have enough readers to support one; I get physical copies whenever I visit family in Boulder CO so I have seen it in print. Occasionally I run into people who are faithful readers of the online edition and have no idea it started as a college humor newspaper (sort of like the Green Gander was here 50 years ago) in Madison in 1988 and print editions can be found in dozens of cities, serving not only to deliver headlines such as "Kitten thinks of nothing but murder all day" but also the "AV Club", a serious look at local entertainment with reviews and listings for live acts, comedy, and movies.

For the lecture itself: as I said, the retrospective was good for some laughs but all quite familiar territory for me. The Q&A covered some pretty generic topics, and the answers I was largely familiar with thanks to an episode of "This American Life" (weekends on NPR) which covered their creative process. There was a book signing afterward but we didn't stick around.