There’s a new Bruce Banner in town, and now there’s a new Betty Ross.

The new Banner is Ed Norton, whose name I can never hear without thinking of The Honeymooners. Sorry. I just can’t. And the new Betty is familiar to us all: It’s Liv Tyler. (And may I say: Yay. Jennifer Connelly may have talent, but you never would have guessed it had you only seen her in The Hulk.)

Fanboy-friendly Liv Tyler has been signed to play opposite Edward Norton (and a whole lot of CGI) in Louis Leterrier’s “The Incredible Hulk,” which promises a lot more action than the previous entry — and a lot less poodles.

Souces indicate that Bruce Banner and Betty Ross will be sort of estranged at the beginning of the movie, but get back together when all the chases and explosions and giant green transformations become a factor.

Of course, I could not present this without asking a special guest poster, who, ah, told me what to write. (If you’ve never read his review of the Hulk movie, it’s here.)

‘Bout time Hulk got new movie. Stupid orange rock-man have new moving coming out. Hulk beat stupid Thing lots of times. Um, Hulk try to count: One time. One more time. One more time. See? Lots of times. Hulk always beat Rock-man. Hulk is the strongest one there is! Puny humans should make movie about Hulk beating up Thing! Hulk would like to see that! Girl says she would, too.

Hulk does not care about puny Banner. Hulk better have more time in movie than last time. Stupid Banner. Banner is boring. Hulk want to see Hulk on screen. And pretty Betty. But not boring one. Last Betty boring. Girl says new Betty will not be boring. Girl better be right, or Hulk sit on sofa again. Break door, too.

I was going to write a post on the benchmarks proposal (my view, of course, is that it’s absurd because the benchmarks are there with no assurance of quid pro quo, thus giving the Palestinians yet another chance to prove that Israel must obey an agreement, but they may not), but Khaled Mashaal has made things very easy for me. He says NFW will Hamas agree to the plan.

The benchmark document, recently submitted to Israel and the Palestinians, calls on Israel to remove many West Bank roadblocks and improve operations at Gaza’s crossings. The Palestinians are asked to halt rocket fire from Gaza and weapons smuggling into the coastal strip.

Mashaal told the Al Jazeera satellite TV station that Palestinians should not agree to halt rocket fire in exchange for an easing of travel restrictions.

“I swear it’s a joke … The equation has now become: dismantling the checkpoints, in exchange for (giving up) resistance,” he said. “This has become the Palestinian cause”.

So why, exactly, doesn’t he want to implement the plan? Because Hamas is busy firing kassam rockets into Sderot.

Since Friday Palestinian Qassam cells in Gaza have fired at least five rockets towards Israel, one of which directly hit a Sderot residence.

You know, sometimes it pays to sit on a story. Because then you no longer have to write it.

Regal.

Classy.

Definitely worthy of sitting on a throne.

While researching the things that I wrote around the time of the Iraqi invasion, I came across a post from March of 2003 that linked to this disturbing news article from the same time:

Assaults, vandalism and other anti-Jewish attacks in the Bay Area rose to an all-time high in 2002, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Anti- Defamation League.

The report found not just a troubling spike in the number of anti- Semitic incidents in Northern California — from 13 to 118, more than half of which reportedly took place in San Francisco and Alameda counties — but also in the severity of some of the attacks.

In May, Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland was set afire in an arson attack, sustaining an estimated $10,000 in damage. Two other synagogues, in San Francisco and Berkeley, reported suspected arson attempts, while individuals reported being physically assaulted in Berkeley, San Francisco and Sacramento, according to the report.

More than two-thirds of the incidents involved assaults or acts of vandalism, according to the report.

So, how many hundreds of percent is it to go from 13 to 118? A little over a 900% increase?

Nationwide, there were 1,559 anti-Semitic acts reported in 2002, from graffiti and harassing phone calls to more serious incidents such as an attempted bombing and seven cemetery desecrations, according to the Anti- Defamation League report. The 2002 total was an increase from 1,432 incidents in 2001 but still well below the peak of 2,066 incidents in 1994. The group has been tracking such incidents since 1982.

California, particularly San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area, helped to drive the national increase last year, Bernstein said. In California, the number of incidents nearly doubled, from 122 last year to 223 this year, he said, while San Francisco hit an all-time high with 35 anti-Semitic incidents reported in 2002.

As always, whenever there are attacks on Jews, the news is minimized by the media. Sure, it’s a huge increase, and sure, attacks on Jews are up nationwide, but hey, it’s not nearly as bad as it was eight years previously.

Like that effing matters.

The story is still on the Chronicle’s website. And I find myself just as outraged today as when I wrote about it more than four years ago.