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).

Alcohol.edu needs to add a new section because music has now been linked to alcohol intake. Results from a new study show that bar-going, loud-music-listening drinkers could be more likely to hug the toilet the next morning. Research done on the effect of music and alcohol consumption found that loud music leads to more alcohol consumption in less time.

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.

As my friend and I pulled up to the Bonnaroo security checkpoint, I heard a whistle and was confronted by a guy in a neon concert shirt apologetically telling me that my “number had come up.” Evidently, I had won a chance to have my car searched, not by concert security, but by Tennessee’s finest. By entering the festival grounds, I had consented to the agenda of sunburned cops with nothing better to do than to harass music enthusiasts. I didn’t receive one of the 124 citations the police handed out throughout the weekend; I just got manhandled a little bit before I went to see Stephen Marley.

July 2, 1979: the day that Funk died. According to the legend (courtesy of The Mighty Boosh), Funk is actually a living creature, fallen to Earth from another planet. Discovered by Bootsy Collins, the Funk was milked, which was turned into a Funky milkshake and consumed by Bootsy, bringing himself some Funk transforming him into the funk-master he became. Funk’s death was a tragic accident — while Parliament was touring, George Clinton knocked it off the mothership.

Hey y’all, how’ve you been? We’ve missed you. Welcome to The Sun’s Arts and Entertainment Blog, which we have oh-so-cleverly titled (f)Artsy, out of both (what we hope is) a healthy ability to laugh at our own pretensions (listen to us, telling you what you should and shouldn’t like in the art/entertainment world!) and our humor that resembles that of pre-adolescent boys, which means farting is funny.