Talk is Cheap: Rampant speculation continues over who Obama will (or will not) choose as his VP running mate.  It’s Biden! Bayh is out! Mehh.  The papers are saying the announcement will come anywhere from 10 minutes ago to Thursday.  Many in the media seem to agree that Obama-rama laid a turd in his chapel date with McCain.  It’s Bush v. Kerry all over again!  The Simpleton v. The Meanderer.  Lowest common denomiator wins.  I’m just waiting on that text from Obama telling me who it is (OMG, J-Bid 4 VP!).  Until then, I’ll be snoozing in my cone of silence.

The Bat Has Legs: The Dark Knight was finally toppled by Ben Stiller’s Hollywood send-up Tropic Thunder after surpassing Star Wars as the second highest-grossing film of all time, all while spending 5 weeks on top of the weekend box office charts.  The film’s tally stands at roughly $471 million, meaning it still has $130 million to go to catch that boat movie.  And of course, all of these feats are measured in crappy, 2008 dollars, which we all know couldn’t buy you a small fries at Mickey D’s (in Zaire).  Also, no line in Knight can hold a candle to Jack’s “This town needs an enema!”  Truer words have never been spoken, Jack.

Dem Particulates Are FINE: The buzz term when one is talking air pollution and its health impact these days is “fine particulates.”  The LA Times reported last year on the continued construction of schools near freeways, where recess and P.E. classes have been drastically scaled back to limit students’ exposure to the cancer-causing particles.  But a recent story in the UK Telegraph claims that the pollution from ships (you know, those things on the ocean) could be responsible for up to 60,000 deaths a year.  Playing dodgeball next to a freeway is one thing, but if ocean liners are jacking up the air in coastal cities, that’s a whole other beast that has yet to fall under Al Gore’s regulatory crusade.

GoogleWatch: Google is stepping up it’s presence at the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions, The Wall Street Journal reports, just as a an American Consumer Satisfaction Index study reveals that the search giant is the main catalyst behind a surge of satisfaction in online commerce.  They’re offering a whole host of branded Google and YouTube services from their “Big Tent”, making the WSJ muse that “[w]ith the potential for a blogger around almost every corner and delegates with cellphone cameras everywhere, including private parties that shut out journalists and bloggers, privacy will be hard to come by.”

Two Sides of the Same Apple: Meanwhile, the other tech behemoth that always seems to be in the news one way or another gets a series of conflicting reports.  A CNET vis Yahoo! News story says that “Apple blew away its PC industry peers in this year’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, perhaps because it was the only company that didn’t release a Windows Vista PC.”  That type of sarcasm is proof-positive of Apple’s mega-successful Mac v. PC campaign in wooing the media’s favor while painting a horrendous picture of Vista (Microsoft is responding with their Mojave Experiment ad campaign to set the record straight, a move which Slate calls “strange” and “passive aggressive”).  The always-surly Michael Arrington over at Tech Crunch goes on a little tirade that flies right in the face of the same ACSI study that hyped up Google and Apple, going over a laundry list of malfunctions from his bevy of Apple products and services.  With a host of new product launches right around the corner, my money is on the Apple mystique prevailing once again.