I will miss one thing about Sarah Palin…

…when she retreats back into the relative obscurity of the governor’s mansion in Juneau. And that’s Tina Fey’s impersonations on Saturday Night Live. Even the governor herself enjoys them… at least with the sound turned down.

As I was watching the vice presidential debate last week I was already thinking ahead to the skit that would inevitably be on SNL in two days. I didn’t get to watch it live but I just watched it online and it’s probably the most I’ve laughed out loud at anything on the show since “Dick in a Box.” Let’s give some credit to Jason Sudeikis; his McCain-loving, Scranton-detesting Joe Biden was on par with Tina Fey for laughs. I’m just glad I wasn’t the only one who had contemplated a “maverick” drinking game.

(I had to strip out NBC’s Internet Explorer conditional comments to get the video to show up in Safari. I could probably have taken the time to fix their code properly so it will work in all 3 major browsers but, well, I don’t really care about IE. But if you’re stuck with it, here’s a link to the video on NBC’s site.)

Vintage Google

I learned this morning from Daring Fireball that Google has temporarily restored their earliest available index from 2001, allowing you to see what was available back then for your searches.

Kind of cool. But a little depressing for me personally, to see that back then my site was the first result you’d get when searching for John Coltrane. Now it’s 7th, but I suppose I should be glad it’s still on the front page, given my lack of attention to SEO. (Of course, I think SEO is at least 75% snake oil anyway.)

OK, this is how John Gruber makes $1750 a week on Daring Fireball

I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for a while now (long enough to have noticed and be relieved at the eventual removal of the questionable tagline, “Gay for Macs”), and I’ve enjoyed John Gruber’s pithy insights and diligent distillation of the daily deluge of Mac (and other stuff he’s, apparently, “gay for”) related news into a single useful stream of relevant information.

I’ve also been reading it long enough to know that its primary source of revenue is via a single weekly sponsorship, which culminates in a post touting the greatness of whatever it is you’re promoting via the sponsorship, and a link in his sponsorship archive. And for this he charges $1750 a week. That works out to $91,000 a year. Just for hawking someone else’s wares once a week. Not bad work if you can get it. But how can you get it? Well certainly not by describing your own writing as “blather” and then justifying that description by indiscriminately posting whatever prose crawled out of the dank, cobwebbed recesses of your brain. Trust me, I know.

I get it though. His insights are often brilliant. Case in point, today’s dismantling of my dreams of Flash for the iPhone. OK, I haven’t really dreamed of it. It would be nice, I suppose, but it’s been clear for a while that Apple had reasons beyond their spurious claims of poor performance for keeping Flash off the iPhone.

If you doubt that assessment, please do yourself a favor. Read Daring Fireball and then shut the hell up. I will now heed my own advice.