If you've picked up the paper today, you may have run across The Guide, a revamped, inflated, re-font-ed, gussied-up, extremely new-smelling upgrade of the entertainment sections in The Beaufort Gazette and The Island Packet. I'm the editor, Jeff Vrabel. Luckily, on the blog portion of the site here, you cannot see my picture.

The Guide is our new Friday entertainment section, part ouf the the redesigns of the Gazette and the Packet, which we’ve been rolling out here all week. Such a thing can sound like not that big of a deal, but these projects take organizing, calibrating, and three to eight thousand meetings per day, and that doesn’t even count the giant new press that a small army of people has managed to install. It has been, to say the least, a little hectic in here. The guy who does the fonts, for instance, hasn’t slept in two weeks, and no longer even pretends to be friendly to you, unless you bribe him with muffins.

The Guide, then, is the weekend component of the redesign, a one-stop center for your needs as they pertain to entertainment, events, festivals, shows and tips for questionably legal online gambling. Sorry. Just seeing if you were still paying attention there.

As such, here’s a quick walk through the section. Feel free to print this column out and use it as your road map, your compass if you will, as you navigate:

Movies: Reviews of the latest films north and south of the Broad, including “Critical Mass,” a section wherein you, the informed and opinionated Reader, can furnish your very own reviews for us to publish and others to judge. Check out the Guide for details, but here's the short version: E-mail your reviews of movies, CDs, video games and TV shows to

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DVDs: From the extremely knowledgable Joshua Klein, a veteran of the Chicago Tribune and The Onion, a weekly look at ways to watch movies without having to drive anywhere.

Music: We realize that Billy Joel might not play the island as often as we might like, but we also realize that a really killer show will compel people to do impulsive and crazy things, such as get in a car and drive through Bluffton. We’ll spotlight and interview bands playing anywhere within a reasonable road trip: from Jacksonville to Charleston to Columbia, all with ticket information and directions and helpful not-at-all-music-snobby suggestions. Why, just today Michael Edenfield talks with Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, and I point you to three albums’ worth of free music from college rockers Big Head Todd and the Monsters, who are playing in Charleston next week. See, the thing pays for itself.

Arts/Stage: The area retains a large and lively arts scene; here’s where you can find out what’s what from Beaufort down to the island.

Gaming: Full disclosure: It’s been a long time since I could boast any kind of skill at any kind of video game — the last one pretty much involved Q-Bert — but we have a staff full of devoted gamers, all dedicated to pointing you in the best and most efficient way to, say, clean out a mall full of zombies with a shotgun. Which is not something you could really do in Q-Bert.

Comics: We have shiny new bonus comics that don’t appear in the big papers, including “Life In Hell” by Matt Groening — whose other major project “The Simpsons” is showing promise — as well as “Frazz,” “Candorville,” the web-based gem “Tiny Sepuku” and “Pearls Before Swine,” whose publication was actually one of my requirements for taking this job. All of these are in magnificent color, except “Life In Hell,” which is funnier in black and white.

I’m running out of room, so let’s speed this up: We’ll have features on the upcoming week in TV. We’ll have features on things to do with your wee children, things to explore outside, races, museums, day trips, overnight trips. We’ll have columns, comedy and reader interaction. And we’ll have a stuffed, comprehensive Calendar, which will direct to you to just about everything else. Welcome to the Guide. Let us know what you think; drop an e-mail to

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