I've got a soft spot in my comedy heart for The Daily Show's Wyatt Cenac, one of the newer correspondents on the program; he often manages to give interview subjects just enough Colbertian leeway to wander into the danger zone, then lets them blunder about, bumping into the awkward silences to excellent effect.

That's exactly what Cenac did this week when he interviewed the creators of iPhone fart apps Pull My Finger and iFart, who have a long-simmering feud over who gassed whom on the fart-app frontier. The whole thing is fine and funny... right up until the point that Pull My Finger developer Eric Stratton compares his app's struggle against injustice to Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in baseball. That's when it becomes deliciously, painfully hilarious. For the record, Stratton claims he was joking.

You can check out the video in the second half of the post. Nice work, Wyatt.

[via Mac OS Ken and AllThingsD]

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, a division of Enderle Global Enterprises, represented by Enderle, Enderle & Enderle, and a block south of Enderle Toyota*, says Apple has made mistakes with its marketing that mirror those of the Republican party in this year's presidential race.

In a meandering article (littered with mild expletives) that very thinly connects the election with Apple and Microsoft, Enderle says a winner for either contest will benefit from its opponent's negative advertising.

"In the U.S. election, the negative campaigning probably has done more to motivate the Democratic base and get moderate Republicans to switch sides than anything the Democrats could have done alone. Apple's campaign has truly pissed off Microsoft, and Windows 7 is that company's way of saying, 'Steve Jobs can kiss my a**,' or more simply, 'enough,'" he wrote.

Enderle continued, "Apple would have been better off to fix its crappy laptop keyboards" than to focus on marketing.

Enderle was famous for predicting an early demise for the iPhone, and is routinely (perhaps inaccurately) identified as an independent analyst when giving his opinion.

[Via MacDailyNews.]

*Joke shamelessly ripped from this episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. (About 2:40)

The Daily Show, recently returned to full writer strength, apparently decided that the best way to say "high tech" for its March 5 Election Center feature was by getting a bunch of MacBook Airs on the set. Five of them, to be precise, arrayed before correspondents like Aasif Mandvi, Samantha Bee and Rob Riggle.

Does putting an Air onscreen automatically make these fake journalists more credible and authoritative? Maybe not... but that isn't stopping some other jokers from using them in slightly more official newsrooms.

Thanks to Kevin for the screen capture and Jesse for the Karl Rove tip.

Ryan from Cybernet (thanks!) dropped a note about his find of a new Apple patent. These things spring up faster than mushrooms (or rabbits, depending on your preference for down home expressions), but sometimes they are a good indication of what Apple is at least considering producing in the future.

This one's all about the iPod, by the looks of it, and giving it the ability to "wirelessly control and access a media server." Ryan speculates that means iTunes, which would mean that you could listen to streaming music from your iTunes install, through your iPod. But I think he's thinking small on this one-- what if Apple wanted to create an iPod that actually hooked up to AppleTV. You could sit in your bedroom watching the latest Daily Show, streaming from the AppleTV in the other room, while someone else watched the latest episode of Lost on the television. The possibilities there are very interesting-- combine a widescreen iPod with a wireless function like this (and we might as well throw in MobileSafari, right?), and you're looking at a very droolworthy multimedia gadget.

Of course, as with all Apple patents, this is total and complete speculation-- this patent may never actually be built, and even if it is, we might be looking at something planned years from now. But it's always fun to guess at what Apple's doing next.

Nothing's funnier than geek humor, I suppose. Tonight's episode of The Daily Show featured a segment with correspondent Rob Riggle on a mission to get himself an iPhone. When he discovered that the onsale date was tomorrow, he interviewed (and came close to beating up) Gizmodo's Brian Lam (of the Cisco iPhone fracas) to try and get a piece of the action. Riggle eventually admitted to Jon Stewart that he'd been out selling his body, working to earn the scratch for his iPhone fix. Classy.

Initially I found those Get a Mac commercials charming, but after a while I started to wonder why Apple chose to make the intellectual and funny guy represent the PC and the annoying dork represent the Mac. What twisted logic was used there? Anyway, I'm a fan of John Hodgman's work on The Daily Show, while I find Justin Long's snide arrogance to be perfect for sitcoms like Ed and movies like Dodgeball, but counter-productive for a pro-Mac marketing campaign. So it's with great pleasure that I read Engadget's interview with Hodgman and learned (as I had suspected but never truly cared enough to find out) that he's a Mac user in real life and has been for 20+ years, excepting "...a brief period in the wilderness between 1997 and 2003," which he'd rather not speak of. You can see more of the interview over at Engadget... don't worry, it's a short read.

John Hodgman, the fellow who plays the PC in Apple's recent commercial blitz, is a regular Daily Show guest. This clip features Hodgman discussing Net Neutrality by way of pretending that he is a computer of some sort. I wonder what kind of computer he would be. Watch the video and find out.