1. "Is Age Just a Number?": It's not just society ladies who lie about their birthday.

["As the public face of MySpace, cofounder Tom Anderson has become a celebrity since the site launched in 2003 because he's every user's first "friend": when you join MySpace, your profile is automatically linked to his. But it turns out that Tom, who, along with cofounder Chris DeWolfe, made a fortune when News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, may have a secret: his real age. ... Is it a big deal? Anderson, who has said he was 27 when MySpace launched, built an empire by tapping into the youth market. History might've unfolded differently if those first few users had known that the site's hipster co-architect was already well into his 30s. "Young people don't want someone their dad's age running a site they think is cool," says Pete Cashmore, the founder and editor of Mashable.com, a blog that covers social networking."]

["With the number of uncontained fires down to nine in Southern California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned his attention Saturday to what he called "the ugly side of human behavior" during and after the disaster. At least two of the fires were started intentionally and two more have suspicious origins, he said during a news conference, issuing a warning for the arsonists. "We will hunt down the people that are responsible for that," he said."]

["When Stu first asked me to participate in this blogathon, he hadn't picked a name yet, but in describing the concept, he used the word "fatigued"—as in, the whole point is to write about what we think about when writing about film has us fatigued. And it's probably foolish for me to admit this, but not only am I familiar with that fatigue—I actually have a back-up plan to combat it. When the days get really long and/or it starts to feel like I have nothing left to say, a little voice in the back of my head says, "Just get through today, and if it's still bad, you can always go back to selling cheese." This seems to do the trick."]

["If you've read this far, you may be interested in what the book is about. Most basically, it's predicated on the belief that we make progress in research by asking questions. Some questions are too deep to be answered—call them mysteries—but others can be answered with a fair degree of precision and reliability. We can turn mysteries into puzzles and puzzles into plausible answers. Here's a fairly common sort of composition in Hollywood cinema of the 1940s. This shot from The Killers (1946) displays the sort of steep depth I've talked about at various points on this blog and in my other books."]

["As anyone who has covered a film festival can attest, one of the unavoidable effects of seeing so many quality films in a relatively short time frame is that you begin to notice shared elements between films. These can range from the superficial—for example, hearing Blondie songs in multiple films—to the interesting-but-still-purely-coincidental fact that trains played significant roles in several titles (Paranoid Park, The Darjeeling Limited, I Just Didn't Do It, Alexandra). Yet beyond these bits of happenstance, there was something more substantial at play this year in an overwhelming numbers of films—an almost universally negative (and even cynical) view towards marriage, and a preponderance of infidelity. Does this say anything about the current state of world cinema, or is it merely a glimpse into (or measure of) an early 21st century cultural zeitgeist?"]

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.