Buzz Bissinger, the excellent sportswriter and blog hater who made himself a very unpopular man very quickly by becoming unhinged and cussing out nice-guy Deadspin editor Will Leitch on TV last week, has had some time to think about what he did. And he's sorry now. First his wife told him he looked bad. Then everybody else did. "I started reading emails sent to me. The majority were predictably vindictive — dickhead, horsefucker, douchebag, windbag, ugly, stupid, etc. But what struck me far more is that many of the emails were smart, not laced with personal invective, and made cogent points about sports blogs and the Internet." He has perhaps now learned a valuable lesson, or three!

Earlier this year, Matt Drudge saved the life of Prince Harry, the UK's adorable ginger-haired lunkheaded Nazi ruler. Harry, you see, had been deployed to Afghanistan, where there are lots of people who'd like to blow him up. But Drudge revealed the deployment, breaking a media embargo, and then they were forced to send Harry back home, where he's more or less safe. For some reason this enrages the English. So the Mayor of Windsor and Maidenhead, whose name is probably spelled "Higginbobotham" but pronounced "Higgins", has demanded an apology from Drudge. The apology is probably not forthcoming. [UPI]

New York magazine film critic David Edelstein issues a bit of a mea culpa this morning, regarding Anthony Minghella and some not-so-pleasant comments he made about the late filmmaker's oeuvre. Last week he suggested that the English writer-director was perhaps artistically bullied by former Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein. Once Miramax got a hold of Minghella, Edelstein argued, Weinstein coerced him into directing high-gloss prestige pictures, Oscar-bait that didn't exactly sync up with the ragged little edge he showed in his first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply. Now, just a few short days later, Edelstein is recanting.

After an independent investigation into yesterday's stunning report by The Smoking Gun that the LAT had managed to be duped by a federally incarcerated Turtle-like, who forged FBI documents implicated Sean "Puffy" Combs's entourage in the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur at the Quad Recording Studios in Times Square (five bullets, including one through his head and one through his scrotum), the paper has now officially issued on apology:

Poor kooky Gary Busey, who accosted celebrities like Ryan Seacrest on the Oscars red carpet, is just trying to apologize. But his crazy vapors keep muddling his mouth words so instead of just saying "I'm sorry Ryan" he calls the plastic personality "an innocent champion of honesty." He also claims that he didn't know that Ryan was in the middle of an interview. Busey, who has "an interesting odor", actually thought that he and Ryan were alone in a peaceful meadow, where truth needed championing and hugs were beautiful gifts from the gods. Video about his apology after the jump.

Marketwatch media person (and frequent target of Gawker ridicule) Jon Friedman actually wrote a thought that is sorta original and correct and interesting! According to him, MSNBC's ratings may suck, but they "stand out in one underappreciated category: embarrassing, mealy-mouthed apologies." He refers to David Shuster's suspension for his remarks about Chelsea Clinton (ably dissected down to the very last gruesome detail by Rachel Sklar here), which, along with Chris Matthews' half-hearted and partially reversed apology for being insane about Hillary, has MSNBC holding the early lead in the "apologizing to the Clintons" race. Of course, in the overall apology race, Fox did force anchor John Gibson to apologize for laughing it up at the death of Heath Ledger. But he didn't really mean it so that doesn't count. [Marketwatch]

The Freelancers Union—whose ranks include non-staff writers and photographers—issued another sincere apology this afternoon via email for badly-communicated changes to member insurance earlier this month. "The past six weeks have been some of the toughest in Freelancers Union's history," it reads. Funny, union members were just saying the same thing about the last six weeks of their lives! Email after the jump.

The New Republic has finally concluded its investigation into its "Baghdad Diarist" scandal. (The magazine ran a series of articles by a TNR staffer's friend and then husband, Scott Beauchamp, who happened to be stationed in Iraq, and who may have invented or fudged some of his stories.) Franklin Foer, the magazine's editor, pens the magazine's apology, which doesn't really sound like much of an apology in the first place. Instead, the nostra culpa comes across as petulant and bitter, which pretty effectively defeats the point of the 7,000-word piece.

An accident near Rackspace's Dallas datacenter sparked a late-night Web crisis, downing Internet service providers from Texas to California and bringing down 37signals' Web-based software suite, on which many startups depend for coordinating their work. But Rackspace worked fast to fix the cause of the outage — balky chillers which failed to start when switched to backup power, causing the datacenter to overheat — and by midnight, most of Rackspace's hosted websites were back online. Here's the apology note from Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, forwarded to us by a customer.

"Every woman in the history of the world, at one point or another, has voiced complaints to the man she's seeing—and it is our collective fantasy (something which almost always remains a fantasy) that said man actually listen to our complaints, take time to reflect upon them, and then—holy crap—maybe... evolve ?!?! This is one of those (tragically rare) instances, and all I have to say is, if every guy so freely admitted his mistakes, no one would get any work done. They'd all be busy having incredibly hot makeup sex," wrote Star editor-at-large Julia Allison about her on and off boyfriend, College Humor millionaire Jakob Lodwick. Guess he got tested for STDs after all! But what was the gallant gesture that finally got Jakob into Julia's good graces and panties? How, exactly, did he evolve?

Yet more from the ongoing custody battle between Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, which began as a shame-free environment, and has quickly degenerated from there: Richards has now employed a former nanny to make several nauseating allegations about Sheen inappropriately touching his daughters. Not that he's all bad: She also acknowledges that Charlie has made an effort at mending fences, particularly with the following retraction:

As much as we hoped it might happen, we never really anticipated Big Brother 8 breakout anti-Semite/anti-Manhattanite Amber Siyavus would be subjected to a montage of her greatest hate-mongering hits on Tuesday night's finale. Still, we assumed reporters would have jumped on the opportunity to get her to further clarify her theories about the "money-hungry" peoples, easily identifiable by their noses, surnames, and love of the Mets. Only Reality News Online, however, was successful in getting Siyavus to address her Gibsonian sentiments:

Vanessa Hudgens, the once-wholesome High School Musical star whose naked body has now been viewed by untold millions of (warning: link NSFW) depraved perverts on the internet, has just released a statement apologizing for posing for the racy photographs that have Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen head spinning in its freezer. From ABC News:

Having deemed Jerry Lewis's recent off-color remark about an "illiterate faggo" (he stopped himself before completing the final hard consonant) as being unacceptable televised-fundraising humor, self-appointed Voice of the Downtrodden Gay GLAAD demanded an apology from the comedian on their website. Lewis has since released the following statement:

Dear Brooklyn: Like a sugared-up 11-year-old, you're always claiming things. Sometimes it's "That dirty Pole touched me in a bad place." Sometimes it's "We invented electroclash and it's good!" A lot of the time your outrageous claims have to do with babies and how great life is and the joys of microbrewing beer. You know: Lies. Over the years we've started to ignore you—which meant when you came to us yodeling about a tornado yesterday, we smiled, nodded and backed away. I guess it's just hard for all of us to tell your "personal" truth, the James Frey kind of truth, from the actual truth sometimes. Maybe you should go back to your "great apartment" and think about that?

Bob Woodward says he should have been less credulous in the run up to the Iraq war but, you know, how else was he going to get all that White House access without being a patsy? [E&P]

On the occasion of the birth of her third child, we at Defamer would like to offer an apology to Julia Roberts, for we've been so consumed with one-time dabbler in biological reproduction Angelina Jolie's every orphan-collecting whim that we've allowed ourselves to fall tragically out of touch with the Most Powerful Womb in Hollywood, forgetting that Roberts was even pregnant. This oversight on our part is especially embarrassing, as Roberts, unlike Jolie, has never publicly commented on the overprivileged blobbiness of her "real" children or used the press to work through any complicated feelings about the difficult decision to choose her empty uterus over crowded Third World orphanages, a noble commitment to privacy that deserves far more media attention than it currently receives. We promise to do better with the next pregnancy, assiduously tracking it with our finest gigantic red arrows from the earliest Us Weekly baby-bump to eventual exclusive People announcement of its healthy birth weight.

A Sydney court hearing addressing the small matter of the 48 vials of banned human growth hormone discovered on prime aged USDA beefcake Sylvester Stallone has elicited a mea culpa from the sexagenarean action star, reports the Sydney Morning Herald:

We were so sad when we read Brandon Holley's editor's letter in the famous boob-containing new issue of Jane. (They took pictures of ladies' boobs!) "Unfortunately, someone on the list (yes, we know who you are) decided to circulate the names of these women — which we intended to keep anonymous — to a Web site," Brandon wrote. We're just "a Web site!" Sad already. Also, we thought it was sort of shady (but admirably deft!) the way Brandon glossed over the whole "we accidentally sent out a list of everyone's contact info, complete with phone numbers, to all boob shoot participants" aspect of events. Anyway, she continued: "The blogger bragged about having the list and threatened to print it once our issue was out. The idea was to embarrass our volunteers and make them worry about being scrutinized." Bragged! Threatened! We so did not!

• Chuck Roberts has apologized to Ned Lamont for calling him the "al Qaeda candidate." No word on the goat thing. [C&L]
• Tony Kornheiser refers to Washington Post Style reporter as "putz"; each WaPo Style reporter secretly convinced he's talking about them. And rightly so. [WP]
• Greg Lindsay just got $954.70 from the folks at Absolute. Drinks at Shannon's Bar (JFK Terminal Four, A Concourse) are on him. [NYO]