Buddy the elf, what's your favorite color?

I've noticed that a lot of guys (myself included) refer to their friends as "my buddy" when they're talking to someone unfamiliar with the buddy about the buddy. I noticed it at dinner tonight, though have been aware that I say it for some time now. I get the feeling that it's more of a New England thing, if not primarily Massachusetts. I guess we feel like it conveys an intimacy that us men try to refrain from showing, but in such a way that doesn't make us feel like we're baring our hearts for the world to see and stomp on. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it and it's just a word.

I've been trying to set up a Hotmail account so that I can send out emails about my painting business, but Hotmail seems to have something against me and is hellbent on making my job as difficult as it can. I guess that since I just made the account and am sending the same message to large amounts of people, Hotmail thinks that I am spamming and deserve to be shut down and executed, but it also doesn't provide the me with a way to prove that I am a real person and am not spamming but am merely trying to get an early start on my summer job. I think the problem is that Hotmail is only able to find and stop other computers, and lacks the compassion and ability to reason that (most) humans have.

Explanation of title: Pretty self-explanatory, it's just a line from the movie Elf that has the word buddy in it and is relatively recognizable.