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Vowing not to leave the house this past weekend after several near-brushes with death via heat-related decapitation (a real medical condition, so I hear), I didn't get to see the Buddy Movie at the Columbus. Tsk, bad Bil. Instead, as I sit here wearing my Free Buddy shirt (really!), I have but a link or two and an interesting aside. First, the ProJo stories (and the other), then Sheila Lennon's personal experience. Now I'm really sad I missed it, since no one seems to know when we'll get another chance to see it. One person who did see it, though, was my aunt Marina, who wisely arrived 45 minutes early for the 10am Sunday show and nabbed a seat to the hottest movie ticket in town. Afterwards, she called me excitedly because, as I understand it, a clip from the garbage workers' strike era featured her mom, my wonderful Nana, quite prominently. Nana, as anyone who's met her (and could decipher her words through the thick Italian accent) is one of the biggest Buddy boosters around. She's not much for getting out to Broadway these days, but I hope she gets a chance to somehow see the film. (In another "it's a small state" kinda thing, the ProJo article above quotes an old co-worker of mine, Liz D'Uva. Crazy.) So here's hoping Cherry Arnold's work gets picked up more widely and this Buddy watcher gets to see the flick, preferably at the Cable Car in the shadow of the (former) mayah's Power Street (former) home. And, to end, let me dust off a variation on this old chestnut from the days when I was accused of hating America: Buddy deserves to be exactly where he is, in federal prison. For someone who loved his town so much, he sure screwed its citizens while taking a lot of credit for things he had no hand in. Charming guy, yes, and what a character. But still a crook.

Like our friend the hermit crab, it seems it's time to shed both my home (hosting) and exoskeleton (Movable Type). So I'm in the process of importing, styling, coding, updating, gellin' and, um, styling. If things start looking weird or terrifying, that's why. Thanks for your time, back to the usual drivel.

Em pointed me to the ProJo beer blog a while back, but I just recently got around to checking it out (it's a bit of a pain to navigate, sadly). So, in the beer blogging vein, and since a Sunday night is as good a time as any to kick back with a good beer, I thought I'd post glowing recommendations for two brews that knocked my socks off this week. The first is the Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema from the Anderson Valley Brewing Company in California. If the word cerveza makes you think only of Corona (as it did for me), clear your mind now. This beer is a beautiful copper color, but very light-bodied. In fact, the first swig is completely unremarkable until a few seconds later when the cream-soda-ish flavor develops like the gum that did in poor Veruca Salt. It's a great summer beer, as the name might suggest. Highly recommended if you can find it (I picked up mine at Thorpe's in East Greenwich, which has a beer selection that rivals the Mews*) The other fermented inhabitant of my fridge this week (besides the way-too-old strawberries I found way in the back) was Landmark Brewing Company's India Red Ale*, a mix of my two favorite beer styles (India Pale Ales and Red Ales). As you might guess, I loved this stuff. Very hoppy (bitter) but clean tasting and refreshing. If you like IPAs, definitely give this one a try. Anyone else a fan of good beer? * good beer, crappy website

Sorry for missing my daily post yesterday, I had a nice streak going, too. I have a good excuse, though, as I was trying to recapture fond memories of my childhood. It didn't really go as well as it could have. What childhood memories, you may be asking? For years my parents, cousins and/or aunts and uncles would spend time camping at Burlingame State Park in Charlestown, RI. My uncle had one of those pop-up campers with a stove and a table and surprisingly stable cantilevered beds. Fun times. My dad, who has an... interesting... array of friends, called me the other day saying that he had traded a recently acquired canoe for a almost unused pop-up camper, and he was reserving the week at good old Burlingame. Cool, I said. I took Friday off of work to go down with Em, hang out, and, you know, just "camp." As it turns out, though, when I told my dad "cool," nothing could have been further from the truth (unless, perhaps, I said "oh, cool and dry!) So after a nice fire and many attempts at tuning in the Sox, we called it a night and came back to sleep in air conditioned goodness. My 11 year old boyscout self would hate me. And speaking of my 11-year-old self, and to finally get to this post's title, we made a stop at the Fantastic Umbrella Factory, as magical place a place as there is in Rhode Island (especially for the pre-teen crowd). If you've never been, I recommend the trip (preferably on the way to the beach).

This has to be a coincidence, or perhaps an artifact of neural pattern recognition gone awry, but I swear that my spam is way down since that Russian Spam King (Tsar?) was murdered a few weeks ago. Anyone else notice a reduction in their personal struggles with the bane of the interweb?

Happy Birthday to our favorite screenwriting hack, Rob Bentley. While I couldn't make it to dinner, I'm hoping someone gives me a call to meet up for late drinks or something. Today's birthday link is about Spongerock Roundplanet. Oh yes.

As promised, scientific proof of the cause of global warming: declining pirate populations (like old Capt. Sparrow, they are, literally, cool). Graph courtesy of the brilliantly satirical Open Letter to the Kansas School Board. If you haven't seen it yet, go now and laugh at the sadness of it all. Seriously, though, that link caught my eye on the same day that someone from a RI Politics listserv, commenting on the President's la-la land endorsement of teaching Intelligent Design in our nation's science classes. The (usually very astute) emailer trotted out some insidious misstatements about evolution (likening it to "a tornado hitting a junkyard and creating a 747," words supposedly uttered by a "respected scientist"). That's a very real misunderstanding of the complex but widely accepted (by biologists) theory of evolution. Don't let the malinformed sway you. So that leaves me in the unfortunate position of asking everyone, very seriously, to be ready to defend the fundamental basis of all biology if the occasion arises in your life. Because before you know it, the US Parks service will be saying the Grand Canyon is only a couple thousand years old... On a happier note, go forth now and be touched by His noodly appendage.

Or, how hot is Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean? (or so I'm told, not that there's anything wrong with that) So Ultra Laser and I were discussing global warming and privateers (if that seems odd, please reserve judgement for part 1. If that doesn't seem odd, congrats on being down with the interweb) and it reminded me to report the very cool fact that RI's official flagship, the Sloop Providence, is going to be appearing in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. This is old news, and I can't find the ProJo link to the story, but it's the truth. The best thing is that due to Disney's unsolicited offer to rent the ship, we don't have to drive by the sloop in dry dock on Allens Ave anymore. Man, I wish I could find the link, it had some cool info about how they painted the two sides of the ship differently to use it in different scenes. Turkish merchant ship something or other. Cool stuff.

After Nightwing's post, I have indeed been reading the Fringe Blog from the Unexpected Company crew (and wishing I was in Scotland, too). It occurred to me that it might be a good time to remind everyone what the Unexpected mumbo-jumbo is all about. Unexpected Company is RI's Best improv comedy group, but don't take a magazine's word for it, come to Warwick and see for youself. Occasional poster Nightwing is a founding member. OK, that's about all the speed I care to bring you up to. If you want to know more, choose your own adventure over here. And ten bil.com points for anyone who can pick Nightwing out of the picture on the UC Fringe site.

Thanks to Alan Fraser's comment, I see that Sheila Lennon has put together a list of Rhode Island (and slightly beyond) bloggers. This is something I'd been thinking about doing for a while (and would be a good use for the livelyexperiment.com domain name I've been sitting on for a while), but motivation was in short supply. I'm glad she went ahead and compiled the list. Funny side note to that, part of her criteria: "If a blog hasn't updated in more than a month, it's not here." Boy, cut that one close, eh?

By now it seems everyone has raved about Netflix, but I just had a surprisingly excellent experience with them so I thought I'd share. As you can imagine, having the the US Postal Service as the major link in your logistics chain can lead to some lost packages and missed deliveries, and a potential source of a lot of customer dissatisfaction. And in fact, this past week I had one such lost dvd problem. So what happens when Spiderman 2 never arrives at your domicile? Within two clicks I had another copy on its way and that was that. Two questions (no typing!) and that was that. Very easy. Good Netflix.

I don't travel out of the country all that often. I don't blog all that often. And I have never been able to do a run of 13 shows while spending time on another continent. Follow along with the insanity (and I do mean insanity): http://www.unexpected-company.com/fringe Read, comment, and let me know that America still exists...