CNN International included this amusing caption to the feed of Tony Blair’s resignation call….close enough I guess…

So Conan did his first San Francisco roadshow last night downtown at The Orpheum. And we loved it. And of course by “we”, I mean those bastards that actually got tickets for the show. Not me. I dutifully filled out the form at NBC weeks ago when he made the announcement. I got my friends to fill out the form. Near as I can tell, nobody I know scored a ticket.

I decided early on to put together an Oscars pool for my new co-workers. Most of them are serious cinematics. So I picked a dozen categories and went in search of a Web 2.0 solution for running the pool. Googling “office pool” brought me piles of links to betting sites. There seemed to be several sites hardwired for NFL weekly pools. But I had a really tough time finding a service that would give me some flexibility to do something besides a sports pool.

Are you sick of reading about the iPhone yet? I’m planning on trekking into The City tomorrow and hope to get a first hand look, but spent plenty of time last night reading the specs, watching the keynote video and going through the flash presentation that Apple posted. After the first blush of excitement several questions popped up that will require some answers between now and June when this puppy actually goes on sale.

Here’s my short list:

Steve walks out onto the auditorium stage, set just as the Moscone Hall will be on Tuesday, though the crowd today is only 2 people instead of thousands. He walks over to the stool in midstage and cracks open the water bottle sitting there. He takes a drink while he imagines the cheers from the crowd on Tuesday.

“Welcome!” The crowd cheers in his mind are still so deafeningly loud that he is sure nobody heard him. He raises his hands to quiet the crowd, waits a moment, and then again says, “Welcome!”

Do you know which superhero you are? I am spiderman, dude. It must be that redheads fetish….take the quiz and see if you’re more Green Lantern or Wonder Woman….

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

I’ve been struggling here for a bit trying to decide which of two posts to leave for ya’ll on Christmas Day. I had planned to go with the feel-good YouTube video of the Apollo 8 Astronauts reading the creation story from Genesis in the Bible during their trip to the moon. Can you imagine the screams about that today? The Festivus celebrators along would have shut down NASA’a switchboard.

Some fun for us music geeks…

Hey, I played a bass when I was kid and couldn’t stop laughing. A Merry Christmas to all!

Dick in a Box from Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg

Andy is the highlight of SNL these days for me…and if you want to see the uncensored version you can find it on NBC’s site.

Stephen Colbert, as the rightwing blowhard fake anchor on the Midterm Midtacular election coverage on Comedy Central…

Tomorrow you’re all going to wake up in a brave new world - a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody’s high!

If you are old enough, then you remember this video. From back when Michael was still Michael, the full 14 minute original John Landis’ Michael Jackson’s Thriller! Happy Halloween!

My kids are living an asynchronous life. This dawned on me on the way to school the other morning. A song was playing on Radio Disney that both my 5 and 8 year old were singing along with. As it ended, my son yelled, “Play it again, daddy.”

“Ummm, I can’t,” I said, “that was on the radio.”

In a struggle to maintain some patience with my clearly nonsensical response, he said, “Daddy, just hit the backwards button.”

Tim Goodman is the best TV critic in the world, writing for the SF Chronicle and his The Bastard Machine blog. Well, OK. He’s actually the only TV critic I remember ever actually reading. But still the best, right? Its his fault I’m wasting time in front of Life on Mars, Minor Accomplishments and Battlestar Galactica, among others.

He was looking for a word to describe those shows that you TiVo and then never actually get around to watching. He couldn’t find one so he made one up–TiNo. Masterful. Read his whole take here.