Oops. I forgot that yesterday was National Blonde Day, so designated by the Blonde Legal Defense Club. The day is designed to promote respect for the intelligence and accomplishments of blondes. In reality, it's a publicity stunt for the Legally Blonde movie.

Toto's keyboard player is not going to have a sex change. It was just a joke. Personally I was more surprised to discover that Toto was still around.

Now here's an odd story. An article in the Guardian tells the tale of Takako Konishi, a Japanese girl who apparently believed that the movie Fargo was real (perhaps because it says it's a true story at the beginning, though it isn't) and went off to North Dakota to find the million dollars that one of the characters buries during the movie. Unfortunately Takako died trying to find the money. Or so everyone thought. The reporter who went to investigate finds out the real truth behind what happened to Takako.

The Unreliable Facts website, established in 1851, offers a motherlode of misinformation.

The hot new thing in extreme adventure: Fake Abductions. People are actually paying for the excitement of being abducted. Bizarre.

Elaine Dutka, writing for the LA Times, notes a minor prank that occurred on ABC's 'Good Morning America' show:

Producers of ABC's "Good Morning America" inadvertently served up a plug for a new drama-reality series airing on the network, Variety reports. As weatherman Tony Perkins was chatting with folks outside the studio, he encountered some fellows who claimed to be members of the Push, Nev., hockey team. As it happened, there is no such town--except in ABC's new series of the same name, executive-produced by Ben Affleck and Sean Bailey. The athletes in question were really actors hired by ADD--a company employed by ABC to mount a guerrilla public relations campaign for the show. No one at ABC News had been advised of the prank, and Perkins was unaware of the show. "This is a show that is very different and we are trying to market it in a different way," an ABC spokesman said. "ADD didn't take into account the kinds of questions that could arise by enacting this sort of strategy within the same company."

A short history of TV fakes from the Scottish Daily Record.

The movie SIMONE is coming out this weekend. It's about an actress who's not real, because she's just a computer simulation. But everyone thinks she's real, and so a director, who must maintain the illusion that his actress is real, gets dragged deeper and deeper into the hoax that he has created. It's getting pretty bad reviews. The New York Times calls it "tepid and vapid." So I'll probably skip it.

The LA Times tells of a good samaritan who tackled an armed man who was chasing three people down an alley. Unfortunately the armed man turned out to be an actor who was shooting a scene from the upcoming movie "Hunter." (registration required to view story).

Hoax Website: villainsupply.com

Interesting piece by Neal Gabler in the NY Times about the American love for the fake over the real, as applied to the entertainment industry. Gabler argues that at the movies and on tv we now experience only the 'illusion of entertainment,' as opposed to entertainment itself. He argues that the audience itself is to blame for this, basically because they're lazy. The 'illusion of entertainment' frees them from the burden of having to be emotionally engaged with whatever is on the screen. Entertainment becomes something like junk food for the brain, instead of being healthy. Of course, critics have been making this same accusation about the shallowness of popular forms of entertainment for hundreds of years. What I think they fail to acknowledge is that modern entertainment largely serves the purpose of relaxation. We don't always want to be emotionally engaged by it. Just diverted. The stresses of modern life emotionally engage us quite enough. We come home from work, we're exhausted, and we just want to collapse in front of the tv for a while. We don't want to have to commit ourselves to the subtleties of an elegantly produced drama. Just bright lights, laughter, and a few special effects will do just fine. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. Nor do I buy into the argument that this mindless entertainment is going to overwhelm and crush 'true art' with a flood of mediocrity. Mindless entertainment and more carefully crafted art can and will live happily side by side.

The LA Times reports that the upcoming movie Signs is renewing interest in crop circles.