A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

MY SIGNATURE MOVE IS CALLED THE INSECT: A few quick, non-incisive notes about the return of So You Think You Can Dance:

• Mary Murphy is back, and there's actually a story about her absence from the judging table. At first it was fatigue -- she was tired from back-to-back seasons, and then negotiations for last season started to drag, and then she over-committed herself, and then she agreed to be a choreographer instead of a judge, and then she got throat cancer and went on radiation treatment. I'm happy to say that she's currently in remission. I do not care to hear her scream or spout nonsensical catch phrases, but one learns more from Mary Murphy in those instances when she buckles down to give a critique than from any of the other judges. I guess I can't say I'm thrilled that she's a weekly judge, but I'm certainly thrilled that she's cancer-free.
• There are two go-to moves for the contemporary dancers that I don't think we've talked about yet. The first is The Barber Pole. Dancer makes a corkscrew motion with his/her body around an imaginary center, imitating the red stripe on a barber pole. The second is the one where the dancer gets all pixellated and you can't tell what's going on. Or maybe that's just my DirecTV having trouble with Fox.
• Was the first 45 seconds of I, Dummy's turf the best thing you ever saw? We've seen gliding, but the way that his gliding accelerated ... dang.
• Also love that the turf dancers got filmed doing their thing on Grand in West Oakland. My bike commute!
• SYTYCD did, by the way, set the world record for saying "beautiful San Francisco!" and then immediately cutting to shots of Oakland. It was kind of insulting that they pretended the Paramount Theater is in San Francisco.
• So Atlanta was a neverending stream of great dancers. Why not show us more than 0.3 seconds of them dancing? This show really doesn't grossly overdo it with the bad auditions (like Idol does), so even if they couldn't cut the 15 or so minutes (out of two hours) they spent on those, couldn't they trade some of the montage, b-roll, and up-next for a couple more 90-second auditions?