Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette Blogs

The adorable Nia Vardalos makes an obvious choice for a movie she hopes will recapture a bit of her “Big Fat Greek Wedding” mojo from 2002.

“Obvious” is the perfect word for “My Life in Ruins.” She didn’t write it, but it is tailor-made for her. This wan romantic comedy built around a lovelorn tour guide, the annoying people she works for and the annoying tourists she is forced to take around Greece plays like a laugh-starved companion piece to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

So the other evening I was at the grocery store watching the person in front of me un-cart approximately 40 items in what was pretty clearly labeled the 10 Items or Less line — there is an especially delicious realm of hell reserved for you, sir, and your multitude of luncheon meats — when it hit me, straight out of the air, like a bolt of lightning or a falling horse: There are still Archie comics!

There it was, right there, the new issue of Archie Comics, or Archie Adventures, or Archie vs. Wolverine or whatever (I didn’t look that closely, jeez), a little TV Guide-sized thing splattered zealously with primary colors and unpleasant pop-art lettering, with an aggressively unfunny joke on the cover, looking like this weird well-scrubbed nerd kid wandering through a high-school hallway populated entirely by dog-stupid rags concerned with the impending death of Patrick Swayze and highly zoomed-in photos of celebrity cellulite. Also, there were Kit Kats.

Oddly, it heartened me: Newspapers are folding left and right, magazines are soliciting couch change from their readers just to live month-to-month, the Boston Globe is now printed entirely on old Bazooka Joe wrappers and everyone is scrambling like mad cats to get on Twitter to make sure they ruin it like they did Facebook, and here are Archie comics, steadfast, never-changing, reassuring, sitting right there in the grocery mart aisle as they have since they were first printed in 1495, enviably oblivious to trends, culture, the flailing economy, printing and shipping costs and the ice-cold fact that no one on the planet reads Archie comics anymore.

Then things got weird.

As mentioned in today's paper, The Knot magazine named Signe's Heaven Bound Bakery and Cafe one of the top cake bakers in its annual "Best of Weddings" issue.

Billy Keyserling kisses Hamlet the Pig during the American Diabetes Association's Kiss a Pig Campaign gala Saturday at the Hyatt Regency Savannah.

The numbers are in.

Beaufort Mayor Billy Keyserling trampled his Kiss a Pig Campaign competition, raking in more than $25,000 for the American Diabetes Association.

Coming in second was Earl Yarbrough, president of Savannah State University, who raised $14,218. Sidney Smith of the Georgia Skin and Cancer Clinic followed with $13,305, according to Maria Center, director of the Southeast Georgia and Coastal South Carolina American Diabetes Association.

“It is an unbelievable achievement to think that he topped a university president and physician,” Center wrote in an e-mail. “Billy did this completely with the support of the people of Beaufort and area businesses.”