For those of you who observed our complete lack of broadcasts and surmised that we slacked off all Independence Day weekend, let it be known that our non-AtAT-producing hours weren't spent in idleness. On the contrary, we spent almost every waking hour watching scads of mind-numbing TV, which, in our business, qualifies as grueling professional research. In fact, we barely took enough time out away from the tube to fetch some much-needed groceries and do some very much-needed laundry. Oh, sure, we also wrested our hard-working eyeballs away from the television long enough to focus them on all them purty fireworks that went "boom" over the Charles River, as was our patriotic duty, but beyond that, you can rest assured that we were working our buns off flipping between "Before They Were Rock Stars" and "The Price Is Right."

But all work and no play makes AtAT a pack of single-phrase-retyping axe-wielding homicidal maniacs, and so we forced ourselves to pry our workaholic butts off the couch so that we could march them over to the cinema and plop them down in movie theater seats instead. The cinematic masterpiece we chose to view was one of the most eagerly-awaited titles of the decade: South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Be warned: this R-rated romp was somehow lewder, cruder, and ruder than even we were expecting. If your sensibilities are any more delicate than, say, a grizzled ex-sailor with ten years' experience in the hardcore porn biz, you're probably going to want to steer very clear of Stan and the boys' big-screen debut. That said, we loved it-- we found it to be a delightful musical distraction for a summer evening, plus lots of swearing, racial epithets, misdirected anti-Canadian sentiment, and bedroom scenes starring Saddam Hussein and the devil. It was sort of like "Bye Bye Birdie" with Tourette's Syndrome. Not for everyone, to be sure, but people who like South Park for the right reasons will love it.

So why are we mentioning this at all? Because there's a very tenuous connection to a sentiment that's shared by a great many AtAT viewers. We don't want to spoil things for anyone, but we feel compelled to note that Bill Gates himself makes a brief walk-on cameo in the movie that met with hearty audience approval; while the crowd laughed throughout the film, the Gates scene was the single instance in which everyone broke out into spontaneous applause. That's all we'll say, except that the ten seconds that Gates is on screen would have been worth the price of admission alone. So if you're a South Park fan and not easily offended, we definitely give the film a thumbs-up.