Those of you who know me know that being a Contributing Editor here at Mediaite isn’t my only job. Two days a week, I also work as an intern in the lab of a quirky yet lovable mad scientist. Usually it’s just boring office managerial stuff but, this weekend, he let me test out his new time machine! It was awesome! Anyway, while I was in the future, I ran into your Great, Great, Great, Great Grandson and he asked me to deliver a message to you. Apparently he and the rest of the family would really like you to stop talking about gay marriage now.

Yeah, it was totally crazy! I was just driving around town (Still no flying cars. Apparently they’re incredibly dangerous and impractical) when I started up a conversation with this guy at a traffic light. Noting that my clothes weren’t made of polyester and included no shoulder pads or antennae, he guessed that I was from the past. I said I was and that I was from the early 21st century. He then asked if I knew you! Isn’t that the coolest? What a small space-time continuum we live in!

>>>Full article at Mediaite.

Geekosystem’s parent company Abrams Media is looking for editors to help us launch a brand-new site — one covering titans of industry in tech, media, and other fields.

To succeed at this editorship, you must be obsessed with the lives and business dealings of the moguls who run the most important and high-profile businesses in the world. Steve Jobs,Barry Diller, Ralph Lauren, Jay-Z, the Grahams, the Murdochs — you should be able to reel off a list of dozens more that you feel are ripe for coverage.

It’s all well and good to joke about signs of the end times now and again, but seriously.  When 5,000 birds drop out of the sky New Years Night, and then elsewhere in the state 100,000 fish roll over and beach themselves, it’s time to start looking at man-made causes.

The alternatives are just too creepy.  From Mediaite:

An AP interview with an expert affiliated with the state’s Livestock and Poultry Commission suggested that the birds may have died as a result of “lightning or high-altitude hail.” Another possibility for the bird die-off? New Year’s Eve fireworks may have startled the birds so severely, that they died from stress.

But neither of these reasons would account for the massive fish die-off.

>>> Read the rest at Mediaite.

As announced by TIME Magazine’s managing editor Richard Stengel on the Today Show this morning, the founder of Facebook will be honored with their Person of the Year award.

Facebook’s 500 million user base benchmark and the general ever expanding scale of online social networking seemed to be the prime motivating factors for his claim to the title.  While Mark Zuckerberg certainly isn’t the only face of social networks, he’s got to be the only one with a movie about him.

His competition for the increasingly broadly defined title of “Person” of the Year was Steve Jobs, Hamid Karzai, Julian Assange, The Tea Party, and The Chilean Miners.

>>> Full article and video at Mediaite.

We said that we were going to stop posting every single thing Taiwan’s Next Media Animation does (they post new stuff every day and, y’know, diminishing returns and all), but this is pretty great. And it is a Friday. So, they’ve tackled the Rod Blagojevich story and, as always, we can learn new things about America when viewed through the eyes of outsiders. This time we learned that Blago’s visage can shatter mirrors, when he runs he sounds like Fred Flintstone, and, most importantly, that the state of Illinois is apparently run out of a series of nondescript tract houses. Fascinating.

When a segment on the TV show features Fallon, as Neil Young, singing a song using the lyrics from the Double Rainbow Guy, the real success won’t come on TV, but online.

Fallon has played Neil Young a couple other times (more background from the Late Night blog) but this was the first song that was generated by a purely internet creation. Either way, Fallon is amassing quite a few musical hits through Late Night sketches.

It’s one thing to hear the Double Rainbow guy ask “what does it mean?” and say “It’s starting to look like a triple rainbow,” but it’s entirely different to hear Neil Young sing it.

>>>Check out the video at Mediaite.

I’m not even going to bother with the label “this exists” because in a world where one frequently feels like the real news is straight out the The Onion it’s perhaps not all that surprising that an actual Onion story would be mistaken for the truth.

The video in question is of ‘Rep. John Haller of Pennsylvania’ reading out the “homeland terrorist preparedness bill” in which he keeps having to interrupt himself to say “classified.” A Google search quickly reveals that neither Haller nor the bill exist, though should you look closely at the video you will also see theOnion insignia on the lower right-hand corner, which probably should have tipped people off to begin with. Alas, this did not stop the video from making the rounds under the title “Martial Law Plans Revealed.”

>>>Check it out at Mediaite.

Foursquare reached a milestone this weekend – twice. On Friday, the location-based social network hit one million “checkins” from users in a single day — then followed-up on Saturday with its second million-checkin day.

Betty White’s highly anticipated stint as the host of Saturday Night Live aired last night, and the lovely young lady had some thanks for the community that put here there: Facebook.

But I really have to thank Facebook. When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host Saturday Night Live I didn’t know what Facebook was. And now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time.

I would never say the people on it are losers. But that’s only because I’m polite.

It’s uh, much more funny and endearing when she says it. Video from the folks at Mediaite after the jump.

In the past few years, viral marketing has become a huge component of the advertising. As more and more people do anything they can to avoid traditional marketing, advertisers have been forced to come up with stranger and stranger ways to get potential buyers’ attention. When 20th Century Fox is paying someone to draw a 180 ft drawing of Homer Simpson out in a British field, you know the rules have changed. However, if the new name of the game is trying to be progressively more and more outrageous, it was inevitable that someone would go to far.

That’s just what happened in Los Angeles this past week as a fan-made memorial dedicated to the late singer Elliott Smith was defaced all in the name of selling tickets to an upcoming concert. Unsurprisingly, some people aren’t too thrilled.