• Must hand it to Conan. Dude knows how to make a cold open to start a series. There were many good parts of his debut, but the intro is perhaps our favorite (though the “comma Brett Favre’s penis” joke was definitely a winner, too). Will he be the new king of late night? Newsweek seems to think so. Go read the article and see if they’re full of crap or not. source

• This seems like a not-so-subtle attempt to remind people that for all those Web-centric services out there, the local news was first. Our favorite part is when they pull out the Skype. (Thanks Charles Apple for bringing this clip to our attention.)

• The creator of this new classic has earned a full-on scornful reaction from Glenn Beck, who says that it’s “some of the best well-made propaganda I have ever seen.” And it is well-made. We disagree on the propaganda part. We think it’s less an attempt to attack Beck and more an attempt to make us question the political climate as a whole. Beck is just the easiest example of how this works. There’s no reason the creator couldn’t have used Hannity or Maddow or anyone else, left or right. The point is not simply the message, but the way that one hears and instantly accepts the message. To us, all this clip is saying is to remain skeptical of and diversify your sources of information. Just for sake of contrarian value, here’s the D.C. Examiner’s take, which is essentially that we should be questioning the politicians, not the talk-radio blabbers. source

• There has to be a good story behind this decision. TechCrunch redid its logo today, but they redid it to look exactly like Twitter’s original logo, launched way back in 2006. Arrington posted an article noting how he was sort of wrong about how Twitter’s success would play out, and it’s a bit hilarious to see how off-base some of the commenters were. Blast from the past, indeed. source

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• To our friends visiting Washington on August 28th to take part in Glenn Beck’s no-longer-9/12 protests: Here’s your map. (And some guy also made a dead-serious guide, too.) Visit the monuments, but don’t you dare leave the blue zone, or you’ll be in the red zones that signify D.C. You don’t want to be caught dead in Dupont Circle. It’s the ‘hood. source

• You’d think that the Onion logo on this years-old video would hint to people that this is actually a satire. Or the fact that keeps repeating the word “classified.” Or the fact that he’s clearly talking about flesh-eating zombies. But no. In fact, this clip has been repeatedly posted on Facebook as if it’s actually real and confirming the Modern Tea Party’s greatest nightmare. Too subtle?

• Apple has a new beta of iOS 4 coming down the pipe to deal with the dropped calls angering iPhone 4 users, but the old users seem to have a legitimate beef. The guy who made this video, Adam Burtle, says that his phone only started feeling slow after he upgraded to the new iOS. “Apple’s firmware has become bloated, with respect to the processing power of the 3G iPhone,” he writes. We’re on iOS 3 still, and we’ve noticed a lot of lag lately. This guy isn’t alone.

• A couple of weeks ago, we debated on a message board with a couple of English soccer fans what the New York Post’s cover about its tie to England really meant. We thought it was brilliant commentary of the fair-weather nature of American soccer fans. This panel, which ran in today’s paper, basically confirms it. The New York Post is making fun of Americans’ anemic love of soccer.

• Let’s face it. Everyone’s known this about politics for years. It’s just a game of sanding off as much about your personality as possible in an attempt to not outwardly offend anyone. Unless you’re Alvin Greene. Then it’s a matter of getting through another interview without completely falling apart. That’s the kind of game that we like.

Weekly Address: Jobs Creation from White House Weekly Address on Vimeo.

• For people who think that avant garde music and film is completely stupid, The Onion agrees with you. They agree with you so much, in fact, that they created this spot-on parody of the avant-garde movement, using Obama’s weekly video addresses as a vector. It’s the funniest non-good-timing thing they’ve done in a while. source