In Roy Rivenburg's previous life as a respectable journalist (before he stopped taking his medication), he was an award-winning feature writer for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining The Times in 1992, he was a reporter at the Times Advocate in Escondido, Calif.; a copy editor at the Orange County Register and the Riverside Press-Enterprise; editor of a weekly paper in Dana Point, Calif.; and a free-lance writer for Travel & Leisure magazine, L.A. Weekly, the Hartford Courant and other publications that are now embarrassed to have ever been associated with him.

Thanks to the skilled use of hypnosis, he has procured first-place awards for investigative reporting (Society of Professional Journalists, San Diego County chapter, 1989), feature writing (Penney-Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards, 2003 and 1995), religion coverage (Wilbur Awards, 1996), humor writing (Orange County Press Club, 2000) and writing about polyester (Atrium Awards, 1994).

Originally from Arizona, Rivenburg lives with his wife and three children in Southern California. No, wait. That's someone else's biography. Rivenburg has no wife, no kids and no pets. Just those hostages we mentioned earlier. He also has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in communications from California State University, Fullerton. But both schools blame that on "clerical error."