The rumor is that this is Owen Wilson. “My life is boring and not worth writing about, except for my knowledge of one thing. So this blog will focus on that thing. It is, for lack of a better word, celebrity. I stumbled onto it by a series of chance events. Suffice it to say, I can tell you what it’s like to see your picture on the magazine rack every now and again when you pay for groceries. And that’ll have to suffice. I’d like this to be the sort of account afforded only by anonymity. And it that happens, if my identity were revealed, I’d quickly be selling grapefruits — instead of paying $14 a pop to eat them — on Sunset Blvd.” ...

Excellent second to last episode of The Apprentice tonight. I’m already looking forward to the next season, when competitors will know the format better. There wasn’t a lot of metagaming in this season, and that’s got to be partially due to the lack of information about the full rules. Next year, contestants will know that they’ll see their fired peers again, and they’ll know that they can keep allies on their team safe even when it gets down to three people per team. More important, they’ll be more confident about the twists. ...

Glenn Reynolds finds the differences between the popular reaction to Senator Chris Dodd’s statements and the popular reaction to Senator Trent Lott’s statements " particularly disturbing." I’m not entirely sure why, as the two cases aren’t all that similar beyond the initial foolhardy statements. OK, OK, I am sure why. There’s a rapidly spreading meme which makes Lott look a lot better, and it goes like this: “Lott suffered for saying nice things about Strom Thurmond.” There’re also a lot of right-wingers who don’t know why Senator Robert Byrd, former KKK member, gets a free pass for his history. There are times when I’m not sure either, just like I wasn’t sure why Strom Thurmond got a free pass. ...

Well, this is an (original) alarming new trend. That’s a total of thirteen foreigners kidnapped in Iraq in the last week or so. Hopefully it’s coincidence rather than a concerted effort, and hopefully everyone kidnapped will make it through the ordeal. The victims include Christian evangelists, journalists, and human-rights workers. Doesn’t look like any common thread except that they’re foreign.

Ten years ago, the Rwandan genocide began. On April 6th, 1994, Juvenal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda, was killed when his plane was shot down. On April 7th, the Hutu militia began slaughtering Tutsis. Over the course of the next three months, approximately 800,000 Tutsis were killed. The West, including the United States, did very little to prevent this.

Things I know to be true: Kip Manley can write, and City of Roses looks like it might be a really good textual equivalent of the webcomic form. Which is to say we’re getting back to serial literature, a la Dickens, except that Kip’s madly promised to post an installement every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so it’ll be a tad more frequent than Dickens. No standing on the docks waiting for the next installment for us. ...

Yeah, so Hellboy. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a great adaptation of the comics. It’s by no means a great action movie — it’s a good one, but not great. But the comics aren’t great comics, either; they’re just (just?) very very entertaining pulp. Hellboy is exactly that. Also, del Toro infuses the movie with some of the best Lovecraftian feel since Dagon. The monster design is great, the villain design is great, it’s all great. I loved the tentacles. The movie looks just about perfect. Likewise, Ron Perlman is ideal for his role. ...

Our mashup subject today comes to us care of Ginger, whose own gaming meme I have shamefully neglected. She put forth the divine M — not Bette Midler, but Madonna. You can use any incarnation, or you can use her ever-changing nature to concoct a rich gaming stew. Don’t think too hard about that last metaphor.

Dave Winer on journalists: Journalists do all that they think bloggers do, with an extra added bonus of arrogance. There’s no accountability. No equivalent of the ABA or AMA. No malpractice suits to worry about. Well, no equivalent except the SPJ. And while it’s true that journalists don’t have to worry about malpractice suits, I hear libel suits are still in vogue. It’s such a silly question anyhow. Blogs are a medium, like television and newspapers. Journalists can blog; blogs are not inherently journalism.

Water Margin rocks out, as expected. I got a particular kick out of it because I know Ti Lung from A Better Tomorrow, and it’s funky watching a younger version. Others may recognize Tiger Tanaka from You Only Live Twice as Master Lu, the focus of the plot. But probably not cause he’s decked out in full old master regalia. Anyway, it’s all kinds of epic but a little disjointed, which is not surprising considering that it’s just a few chapters of the vast novel Outlaws of the Water Margin. It’s easy enough to follow if you don’t mind all the seemingly marginal characters running around — it’s not that they’re unimportant to the saga, it’s that they don’t do as much in this segment. In some ways this was an excuse to put all the Shaw Brothers stars together in one movie. ...