-Google has launched Google Alerts, which notifies you when new mentions of things you care about are on sites you care about, or blogs, or the news, or whatever. I approve. Link

Seriously, this is one of the many excellent features that Google offers to keep you busy online while they slowly take over the world and replace your grandmas with cyborgs. Magicians call it “misdirection.” Well-played, Google. When you fight Microsoft to be The Only Company on Earth, I will definitely consider rooting for you.

Note: setting up a daily Comprehensive Google Alert for your own name is just small.

-Yay for those moments when the demagogues du jour leave their kingdoms, where they decide whose mic gets shut off and choose how the conversation is edited, and go on other people’s shows, where they are taken apart like a scarecrow surrounded by winged monkeys. Bill O’Reilly will plug his book, even if it means getting smacked in the face by David Letterman. It’s not Lincoln vs. Douglas, but as long as we have to be in the mud let’s at least make sure the right people are getting dirty.

-When I was in college, my university had a “radio” station that was broadcast over a closed-circuit cable channel. You’d turn on your TV, and there would be college DJs mumbling and fumbling while a continuing public affairs slideshow ran across the screen. (When I think of channel 22, I often chuckle and think of Strong Bad’s five-word summary of college radio, “Dead air, um, dead air.”) So imagine my surprise this week when I was doing a random spin of the YouTube dial and came across an honest-to-God news show with honest-to-God anchors now broadcast on that channel at my alma mater. (Have I said “yay for YouTube”?) Mind you, the show is not strictly competent in any real sense of the word– Todd pointed out that the weather map warns of a “freeze adversary” for the coming week– but it can always be worse. To wit, I offer up one of my favorite clips of the moment, even if it has already been linked everywhere else. Boom goes the dynamite!

-Today, apparently A-ha’s “Take on Me” video would be a lot easier to do, but no easier to do well. The addition of Spider-Man does not help. This clip cheered me up significantly after my entire day 6 post fell down a web hole. If you can’t stand the entire thing, at least fast forward to the 2:30 mark; whatever you think it is at first, it is… even more that after 2:30.

(Do you remember what a crazy rigmarole was involved in making Who Framed Roger Rabbit? How hard it was to make the things the characters interacted with move without catching the wires and whatnot on film? You could make that movie with an iBook and a baloney sandwich now.)

-It’s worth saying and yaying that I have the best wife in the world. I apologize to everyone else for taking her off the market.