Guardian Unlimited Books: Hoax love letter fools Betjeman biographer

Nicely done: fake letter contains coded insult to A.N. Wilson. (Update: warring biographers.)

Boing Boing: Animation historians blast SF Chron movie critic

And on the subject of Monster House: the Chron's Mick LaSalle doesn’t understand animation; animators respond eloquently. (via Boing Boing)

By Ken Levine: Pirates of the Caribbean

Ken on the what-the-hell-was-all-that Pirates sequel: “If only the movie was six minutes and the ride took two and a half hours.” (Monster House was a much better cartoon…)

Workbench: Finding Good Soundbites in Bad Podcasts

Rogers neatly sums up why I dislike podcasts: “Content that sucks in two dimensions. A bad podcast suffers both in quality and in the amount of time required to find this out. I could’ve back-buttoned 60 bad blog entries in the time I listened to one Gillmor Gang.” The comments and correction also identify another problem: sometimes it's hard to tell who’s speaking...

SFGate.com: 'Hybrid' Creature Is Just a Dog

Somehow this story strongly reminds me of The League Of Gentlemen: “Some form of monstrous basilisk, the like of which the world has never seen.” / “You haven’t seen a goat, a pig and a chimp anywhere?”

SFGate.com: RICE-A-REDUX / After a 7-year hiatus, it's billed once again as the San Francisco treat

Rice-A-Roni was traditionally “The San Francisco Treat”: why? The Chronicle on the possible return of the slogan; and asks “when was Rice-A-Roni ever the civic pride of San Francisco?”

Bay Area Bites: It's It: The San Francisco Treat

Bay Area Bites on the It’s It. Yes, it really is that good. (Andronico’s now sell the mint ones as well as the traditional vanilla; both very good.) (Google has custom It’s-Its.)

SFGate.com: Cougars rattle Rossmoor by going about their lives

Old news, but I like the self-directed humor of one interviewee in this piece: “Half the people here can’t see, the other half can’t hear, the rest can’t think.” (Somewhat sobering: most of the results returned from a Chronicle search for “rossmoor” are obituaries.)

BBC NEWS: MP sorry for 'inbreeding' remarks

Norfolk MP suggests constituents are inbred; an Alan Partridge moment?