Author Eric Mayrhofer

There's a thump in the night - in the kitchen, to be specific. It could be a rat in the walls of the old house or a squirrel. But when you're at the latest fantasy family film, "The Spiderwick Chronicles," you know it's not a squirrel. It's a brownie.

My dad used to play folk music all the time at home. I heard all of the greats: Joan Baez, Emilou Harris and tons of others. Dar Williams was among these voices that drifted across the air and into my ears. Last Friday night at the Quick Center, Williams's voice drifted across the air again, but this time from the stage.

Sitting silently as the Whirling Dervishes performed a religious ceremony was a strange thing to do on a Saturday night. As I sat in the Quick Center audience watching politely, people around me complained about the performance. "It's so insufferably boring," said one female audience member.

There and back again has been done before by short, pointy-eared, hairy-footed hobbitses (gollum, gollum). It works as a storyline because, at least in the case of "The Hobbit," the audience gets a happy ending. But as a character's arc, it's not so hot.

Everyone thinks they know what love is, until life happens and then they don't. But what is love? Is it the spark when lovers touch - a chemistry? Is it the tiny acts of affection? The act of making love? Or is love simply an abstract, truly impossible to describe but ever so easy to feel? Throughout history, films have tried surmounting the challenge of describing the essence of love, such as in 2003's "Love Actually," one of the better - if not the best - romantic comedy in recent years.

Boys Like Girls opened up their first show of their latest tour, Tourzilla, with a strong performance in front of a lively sold-out crowd of 750 people at Toad's Place in New Haven on Sunday night. The band delighted the crowd, which consisted of many screaming girls, with a variety of songs from their self-titled debut album, while throwing in a couple of covers.

Reincarnation is a big, huge, enormous double-edged sword. If we, as humans, are good, God fearing and law- abiding humans, we get to come back to the earth a little better off than when we left it, and if not-well, let's hope it's not too nasty to be a cockroach.