Like most of us, I was overjoyed when the Chronicle‘s Joel Selvin “retired” a few years back. And yet he keeps popping up with disturbing regularity. Recently, he wrote a profile of local music mogul Will Bronson where he managed to misspell the subject’s name every time it appeared.

Then yesterday he wrote a piece about T-Bone Burnett. I’m not sure what Selvin is calling himself these days, but “writer” is surely one of them, and yet the following sentence appears in his article, describing the difficulty that Reese Witherspoon had recording the soundtrack for Ring of Fire:

Burnett watched one afternoon as she literally exploded in frustration, pounding her way through doors out of the house.

That’s right: Reese Witherspoon literally exploded at T-Bone Burnett’s house in Brentwood. Selvin doesn’t address any of the questions raised by this revelation, such as: Was anyone showered with gristle when the lovely young actress spontaneously combusted? Why was it not reported in the mainstream press? And who was that collecting Witherspoon’s Oscar?