A few thoughts:

* Yes, the Phelps kid is a physical specimen and in very good shape and whatnot. But the French 100M free stud, Alain Bernard, is the scariest dude on the planet. He’s not a Frenchman so much as a Gaul–he reminds you why they were a feared people several centuries back. Here, have a look:

Vince McMahon (or Freddy Prinze Jr.) should sign him up for the WWE tomorrow. He’d be the greatest heel since the Nature Boy.

* Roger Federer lost–in straight sets–to James Blake.

Let that sink in for a minute.

I love Blake. A lot. But he’s a head-case with a terrible record against top players. He survives by beating the people he should beat but never, ever overachieving. He was 0-8 against Federer before today.

Blake played a pretty good match, but Federer looked terrible. As he has all year long, there were frame balls and mis-hits. At times he looked alternately frustrated, scared, and sad. His run as the greatest player of all-time is over, more suddenly and decisively than anyone ever could have imagined. The other players know it. None of them fear him anymore. Where they used to fear a match with Federer, they now look at it as a golden opportunity to get a big win over player who’s vastly over-ranked. Drawing Federer is now like winning the lottery.

And the worst, most tragic aspect of all of this, is that Federer seems to understand all of this.

I’m more and more convinced that he’ll never win another Slam. I now believe that it’s possible (albeit unlikely) that he’ll retire at the end of this season.

Galley Friend R.M. posits that what Federer should really do is retire from singles and commit himself totally to doubles, as an act of generosity to the sport. It would instantly create an audience for doubles, which is criminally underappreciated.

* Is it possible not to root for Misty May-Trainor and Kerri Walsh? I dare you to try.

I’m as averse to pre-packaged hype machines as anyone on the planet. But I’ve also been following beach volleyball since Karch Kiraly was still on the hardwood. I remember the halcyon Randy Stoklos-Sinjin Smith days. (Belmar AVP represent!) And May and Walsh are the real deal. Unlike Gaby Reese, they’re really fun to watch, not just to look at. Here’s hoping they get gold.

Turns out Robert Downey Jr. hates DC Comics:

“My whole thing is that that I saw The Dark Knight. I feel like I’m dumb because I feel like I don’t get how many things that are so smart. It’s like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I’m like, ‘That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.’ I loved The Prestige but didn’t understand The Dark Knight. Didn’t get it, still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so high brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ You know what? Fuck DC comics. That’s all I have to say and that’s where I’m really coming from.”

If you couldn’t get enough of the New York Observer‘s profile of Steve Guttenberg, here is the sequel by Spencer Morgan:

“You know,” he said, “what actors are, are living pieces of art, and that’s what the museum gives me, too. You being on that screen, you’re a piece of art hanging on a wall!

“That’s why I like being really nice to people—they’re not seeing me,” he said, referring to fans who approach him. “They’re seeing a piece of art that they can’t believe came to life.”

Truly compelling stuff.

The Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday dares to take on George Lucas:

Friday marks the release of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” an animated spinoff that Lucas executive produced and that looks like precisely what it is: a television show that has been puffed up into a feature-length advertisement for itself…. But it’s time to admit it: He’s not a storyteller. For all of Lucas’s command of myth, symbol and sweep, the nuances of narrative still elude him…. Once “Star Wars” became a multi-billion-dollar economy unto itself, when the movies increasingly served not “the story” but the games and the sound systems and the effects business and the lunch boxes, Lucas’s weakness became his greatest strength. Who needed story when the audience would be satisfied with spectacle? He got rich, and we got Jar Jar Binks.

Hornaday compares Lucas to Thomas Edison (and not in a good way). She goes after THX 1138 and American Graffiti. And now she and anyone related to her will never, ever, ever, ever be invited to Skywalker Ranch. Ever.

David Grann is one of the three or four best writers working today–his stuff is an unmitigated joy to read. Seriously, think of how rarely you actually get excited by a byline. His new piece is routinely brilliant.

(Don’t forget, The Lost City of Z comes out in February!)

But Galley Friend D.S. sends in a keen observation:

I was just reading David Grann’s latest essay in the New Yorker. It’s about a sort of con man named Frederic Bourdin, who, oddly enough, adopts the identities of young wayward boys. And the article quotes a notebook Bourdin keeps, in which he muses on his fate and his own chameleon-like nature. Anyway, a line from the notebook is used as a caption beneath a photo of Bourdin. “Bourdin once wrote, ‘When you fight monsters, be careful . . . you do not become one.'” He should also be careful not to become a plagiarist as that very famous line was written Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s funny that the New Yorker missed this; and it’s funny that the con man should even in his own diaries pretend he is someone he is not.

Anyway, Grann’s article is, as usual, not to be missed.

At some point in the next couple days Dark Knight is going to pass Star Wars to become the #2 grossing movie (domestic, unadjusted) of all time. There’s a font of interesting trivia about the DK’s numbers here.

The two most interesting are the most weekends at #1 charts (consecutive and non-consecutive. Now these numbers only go back to 1982, so they don’t include monsters like Snow White, Gone with the Wind, Jaws, etc. But still, if you had to guess the picture since 1982 with the most weekends at #1, what would you say? I wager that you’d get it right on the first or second or third try.

But if I asked you what two movies tied for third on the list of most #1 weekends, I bet you’d never guess, not in a million years. Don’t cheat before you click through.

This Variety story is great:

“Edwin A. Salt” is about to undergo a gender change.

Once expected to star Tom Cruise, the Columbia Pictures espionage thriller will be redrafted by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer as a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie. Philip Noyce remains attached as director and Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Sunil Perkash are producing.

Jolie is close to a deal to play the title character, a CIA officer who’s accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper spy and must elude capture long enough to establish her innocence.

At least it’s not based on a true story.

So far as I can tell, the only thing I missed from the blogosphere last week was the return of the Emo Eagles fan.

But it’s fucking awesome.

Down some dark defile of the mind, terra incognito to the blithe and bourgeois notions of normalcy, lies a swath of consciousness shrouded in a substance as dark as Kevin Curtis is light. Shawn Andrews has seen this place. So, too, have I. Indeed, I’ve felt its wintry contours and been contained within its clammy manacles.

There is no 4th and 26 in this place.