Bad news for downtown diners, but fun for movie lovers: The popular Burrito Company will be closed from Wednesday until Oct. 24, to get a Hollywood makeover. It will become a coffee shop for the film, Due Date, starring Robert Downey Jr. Another in the series of cross-country epics that have passed through New Mexico lately (Paul, My One and Only, Year One), this one features Downey as an anxious father trying to get home in time for his child's birth. Michelle Monaghan stars as his pregnant wife, Zach Galifianakis as a slacker who gives him a ride, Jamie Foxx as the wife's ex-boyfriend, and even Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA. It's also filming in Southern New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Welcome!

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A recent question on the show, Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Garder?, was a stumper — host Jeff Foxworthy wanted to know the name of the oldest capital city in the United States. "There was complete amazement when the answer was Santa Fe, New Mexico," says our caller. The contestant guessed somewhere in Massachusetts.

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After the public ceremony on the Plaza last Tuesday for Spanish royalty, folks were still milling around, excited at having seen Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia of Spain.

The gifts presented by Archbishop Michael Sheehan to their royal highnesses included a straw appliqué cross by Martha Varoz Ewing and a retablo of La Conquistadora by Arlene Cisneros Sena. Both are Spanish Market stalwarts.

After the ceremony, the royal couple and invited guests ate lunch at the Hotel Santa Fe. Former state historian Estevan Rael Galvez (now director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center) had one of the coveted invitations, but before going to lunch he exchanged pleasantries with historian José Garcia and his daughter, Margaret Duran, and Spanish Market colcha artist Julia Gomez.

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Interesting Santa Fe mention in the Oct. 5 edition of The New Yorker. In a review of one of New York's new it-places, The Brooklyn Star, reviewer Mike Peed writes that, "in 2004, an out-of-work cook from Santa Fe named Joaquin Baca, tired of sleeping on his sister's couch in the West Village, applied, through Monster.com, to be the deputy to a nobody chef — the No. 2 in a two-man operation." That turned into the noted Momofuku and earlier this year, Baca opened The Brooklyn Star.

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Megan Fox and Mickey Rourke are shooting in New Mexico in their new movie, Passion Play, in which Fox plays a woman with giant wings growing out of her back. She's a veteran film-in-New Mexico star as one of the leads in the Transformers series.

She's returning for the third film in the hit franchise, although some are speculating her character could die in the film. She had been the center of controversy for her bad-mouthing of Transformers director Michael Bay — on top of that, the film crew released a statement detailing the many ways they couldn't stand her. Thus, perhaps, an early exit from the film, scheduled for release in 2011.

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