Tough choice for the middle of your week: the release party for Keely Hyslop‘s Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You—this year’s Michael Rubin Award winner—or Mary Roach in conversation with Adam Savage as part of One City One Book.

Keely fans are numerous. I am one of them. Here I film her winning the award she will celebrate Wednesday night. I have put together a little video playlist for your enjoyment; Keely’s poems are fierce, intelligent, and make you go wow:

[youtube_video align=center width=399 height=233]Keely[/youtube_video]

In addition to Keely’s reading, there will be Liz Green: listen here. There will be a pirate costume contest. Steampunk-inspired cellist-singer-songwriter, Unwoman—who you should definitely watch here—will also be in the house, a don’t-miss as far as I’m concerned.

This event begins at 7pm at Brick & Mortar Music Hall [1710 Mission St]. $12 includes a copy of the book.

But then there’s also Mary Roach in conversation with Adam Savage! What are you going to do?

What happens when one of the funniest and smartest authors around gets interviewed by a MythBuster? Hear which space legends might be as combustible as urban ones when Mary Roach and Adam Savage chat it up about Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, San Francisco’s One City One Book selection for 2011.

We caught up with Mary during her recent night at The Booksmith, and you can see why (if you didn’t already know) she’s a perfect selection for One City One Book: her intellect and curiosity combine to form some kind of sword-sharp human-helper, and she’s sweet and… apologies, down-to-earth, too!

Before the conversation, enjoy the premiere of Rockets of Yesterday, an eye-popping video tour of 1950s and 60s rocket dreams, curated by archivist and space enthusiast Megan Prelinger.

Mary Roach is the author of the bestselling books Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. She lives in Oakland, California.

Adam Savage is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters. You can watch Adam tell a story for Porchlight.

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Evan Karp is the author of this post. He urges you to check out the rest of the calendar if you weren’t inspired by this post to watch the videos embedded and linked to herein (for which he would then apologize, if this were a realtime correspondence, because he thinks if you had done so you would be inspired to attend one of these events and maybe not check out the rest of the calendar, which you can still do and which you might find more fruitful than this post). [Cut] How was that?