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The Onion’s AV Club has an interview with Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report and the man who coined the American Dialect Society’s 2005 Word of the Year: truthiness.

“There are no televisions behind me, like the way [NBC Nightly News anchor] Brian Williams has, or even [Daily Show host] Jon [Stewart]. At certain angles, there are monitors behind Jon that have the world going on, which implies that that’s where the news is, and that’s where the information is, and the person in front of it is the conduit through which this information is given to you. But on my set, I said, ‘I don’t want anything behind me, because I am the sun. It all comes from me. I’m not channeling anything. I am the source.’”

Bloomberg reports that four Winston-Salem, NC Waffle Houses are turning non-smoking next week. Going smoke free in the heart of tobacco country is a bold move for any restaurant, and for Waffle House to try this sounds like a suicidal move. Next time I’m in North Carolina, I’ll be going to IHOP instead.

So you resolved to lose all the weight you packed on over the holidays. Now it’s almost February, and you’re still fat. What’s an average American to do?

I suggest you try the internet451 diet.

Guaranteed weight loss!

The headline sort of speaks for itself:

BBC Sport: Scudamore announces bung inquiry

Scudamore said that it was the ongoing rumours of a culture of bungs that had provoked the Premier League to take action.

So what is Scudamore going to do about these bungs?

“We’re going to clean this thing up one way or the other, in terms of perception and in terms of turning it into reality.”

Even after reading the whole article, I’ve been unable to infer what “bung” means in this context. Either it’s just really funny to Americans, or proof that there’s homoerotic subtext to sports worldwide.

As if Nikon’s retreat from the film market wasn’t shocking enough, Konica Minolta has announced their own withdrawl from the photography market. Sony is purchasing what’s left of their camera business, and the company will stop manufacturing film and paper by March 2007.

I don’t think too many people will miss Konica Minolta’s film and paper offerings, but no more Minolta cameras is kind of shocking. Too bad Sony didn’t get the Minolta name along with the camera hardware. The Sony brand probably does carry more weight with consumers, but there was a time when Minolta was at least worthy of consideration for pros and serious amateurs. With all the shocking photography announcements this month, I’m expecting announcements of Kodak-Nikon and Fuji-Canon merger announcements within the next month.

If you’ve gotten bored with creating your own South Park characters, The Simpsomaker will help you mix things up a bit. The current version offers extensive options, but as yet no Apu or Chief Wiggam, not to mention Krusty and Sideshow Bob! Oh well, maybe in version 2.0! Even so, this thing rocks. Well worth 5 minutes of your short attention span.

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting the US Justice Department has asked a Federal court to force Google to provide them with search data for one million random IP addresses, and all search data for a one week period. Think about that…if you use Google once a week, your data will be going to the Feds. Why do they need this information? To protect the children! More specifically, to defend the Child Online Protection Act, a law which was struck down in 2004 when a Federal court ruled it “too broad”. Won’t someone please think of the children?

The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.

So if you search with Yahoo, MSN, or one of the myriad also-ran engines, you may already be a winner! And don’t forget, every search engine out there plants a cookie in your browser. Unless you clear out cookies on a regular basis, some of them will persist for 30+ years. So if you’ve been searching for anything the Feds might find interesting, it would be trivial for them to subpoena all searchees associated with the cookie on your machine. But that should only worry those with something to hide…

Day 1–Ackme-Our Man on the Ground

Ackme is on the Space Coast of Florida to witness the launching of the New Horizons Mission. Continuing Story on Alien Jesus Command

The first Intel iMacs have made their way from Apple Store shelves into the hands of early adopters, and some of those users have submitted Xbench benchmarks. There are also some anecdotal benchmarks available in the MacAddict Forums. Comparing the iMac Intel to the Powermac G5 (both at 2.0Ghz) yields a very mixed bag of results. In a few categories, the Intel CPU is twice as fast as the G5. In most others, the G5 is a bit faster. Obviously we’ll need more than a few submissions to make a real judgement, but if the MacBook performance is pretty close to the iMac at similar clock speeds it’ll be pretty close to having a Dual 2.0 G5 sitting on your legs. Close enough to replace that G5 tower with a MacBook? I’ll let you know when I figure that out for myself.