• Screenwriter Tom Benedek shoots his own unproduced scripts—literally, with a .45-caliber pistol—and mounts them as art. His exhibition "Shot by the Writer - Works on Paper: 1982-2004" opens this month at the Frank Pictures gallery in Santa Monica, Sharon Waxman says in a NYT feature: "In the Hollywood hierarchy, the screenwriter is Everyman, an undervalued cog - albeit a well-paid one - in the whirring entertainment machine. Mr. Benedek's move to take control of his own work sounds like a dark fantasy for many of the movie world's ink-stained wretches."
   • KTLA news reporter and fill-in anchor Patricia Del Rio is leaving the station Thursday for a gig at WPIX in New York, says RonFineman.com. She starts there in October as lead early morning reporter and fill-in anchor. Del Rio began at KCET's "Life and Times" and has also worked for Channels 7 and 13. Fineman also posts that Kim Rouggie, a producer on KTLA's 10 p.m. Prime News, is switching over to fulltime reporter.
   • Mayor Villaraigosa activated the city's Emergency Operations Center in order to receive up to 2,000 refugees from Hurricane Katrina. The order takes effect at 7:30 this morning. Other city response, plus Mayor Sam's Sister City is blogging Valley candidate Jim Alger's self-piloted mercy mission to Mississippi.
   • The City Council approved Villaraigosa's appointees to the harbor and airport commissions, after pretending to be suitably concerned about conflicts of interest and where they live. Corina Villaraigosa also got the county's OK for her post.
   • The Orange Line busway across the Valley finally has a date to open: Oct. 29.

And in the L.A. blogosphere:

Former "Silicon Alley dream girl" Theresa Duncan, as Salon.com called her in 1998, is now "blogging Los Angeles with arrogance and an iron fist since 2005." The video game designer-turned-filmmaker who has written for Feed Magazine, Artforum, and Slate says her interests include philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume, Napoleon Bonaparte and the history of electricity—and that doesn't begin to cover the blog. Posts on The Wit of the Staircase muse on art, Margot Tenenbaum, lessons at Westwood Driving School—"the only school of higher education whose entire course of study I have ever completed"—and the initiation rites of the Los Angeles Lunar Society, which she writes will meet under the full moon on Sept. 18: "Since the new member is a male, according to Lunar Society custom he will drink a snifter of XO French cognac one teaspoonful at a time from the most recently tapped female member's navel."