Hiya. It's me, Jared, again, reporting about the second stop on my whirlwind Summer Music Festival Tour '08. This time, I drove over to the tiniest state in the union, Rhode Island, to catch all three days of the Newport Folk Festival. Though the last two days of the Festival on Fort Adams State Park contain the bulk of the performances take place, Friday night technically started things off with a show by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Warming up the crowd were home-grown acts Willy Mason and Kate Taylor (James' sister).

For those of you Cornellians unfortunate enough to have high-powered internships in Manhattan, D.C. or wherever you may be, let me assure you that you've been missing out on a shit-ton of fun here in sunny Ithaca (as difficult as it is to believe the words "sunny" side-by-side, it's true). The Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg was just the latest event that made me happy I've stayed up here, away from the hustle and bustle of real life. Unfortunately, your unreliable correspondent has less in the way of specific details then he would like — Grassroots is a BYOB affair and he's never been given to doing anything in half measures, particularly when it comes to bringing beer. In short, your correspondent came loaded for beer and consequently did not take comprehensive, or even comprehensible notes. That being said, some overall impressions still came through the self-induced haze of drunken bemusement.