I hope this is the most clever of clever pranks . . . because it’s much, much better that way.

“The JL421 Badonkadonk is a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank.
[snip]
Standard drive is an air-cooled, 6hp Tecumseh gasoline (unleaded only) engine, with centrifugal clutch, giving the Donk a top speed of 40 mph. This vehicle is not licensed for use on public roads, and is intended as a recreational vehicle only.
1 person recommended Star Wars A New Hope 12″ Figure: Obi-Wan Kenobi Tatooine Encounter instead of JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank”
Be sure to read the user reviews, for maximum enjoyment.

Backstage West has a review of ACME Love Machine!

Acme Love Machine
Reviewed By Jenelle Riley
BACKSTAGE WEST
JAN. 19, 2005
Acme Love Machine
presented by and at the Acme Comedy Theatre, 135 N. La Brea Ave., L.A. Fri. 8 pm through Jan. 28, Sat. 8 pm through Feb. 26. $15. (323) 525-0202.
When watching sketch comedy, most of us inevitably finds ourselves hoping the percentages work in our favor. In other words, there’s probably bound to be a few groaners, but we hope there will be more good than bad. In the Acme Comedy Theatre’s latest offering, it’s a pleasant surprise to say the good far outweighs the bad. There’s a tendency for a few strong segments to run a little too long, and we can count on standard sketch fallbacks–funny voices, some easy bathroom humor–but overall this production packs triple the laughs of a typical episode of Saturday Night Live in roughly the same amount of time.
Director Travis Oates confidently helms a flawless ensemble of eight talented and distinctive actors in sketches that run the gamut of humor both high- and low-brow. It’s hard to miss with a great physical bit about three football fans (Kevin Small, Chris MacKenzie, and Greg Benson) shaking their groove with goofy choreography to hit songs, or the sight of a underwear inspector (MacKenzie) personally testing his product, but these bits are balanced with several moments of clever wordplay. In “Your Witness,” an undeservedly confident attorney (Matt Knudsen) is prone to spewing hilarious misinformation. And in the witty “Word Up,” the stellar Wil Wheaton plays a slow-witted suitor who manages to seduce a crisp and efficient accountant (Kimberly Lewis) with sweet talk provided by a thesaurus. Still, it’s the nonverbal “Untitled Office Sketch #9”–in which the most mundane activities turn into a beautifully staged musical number–that achieves a sublime absurdity.
It’s also worth mentioning the trio of female actors (Lewis, Kim Evey, and Jodi Miller) who prove that women don’t have to be relegated to the background in comedy. Although the cast is uniformly excellent, standouts include MacKenzie and Small, who can garner huge laughs with the simplest delivery or expression. Lighting and sound by Mike Cernicky are outstanding, with a production value far higher than any sketch show I’ve seen. And musical director Jonathan Green and drummer Christian Malmin keep the energy high with live musical accompaniment.

Okay, first off: I’ve got a massive MacWorld / Borders / Trip to SF and back report to write up. It’s coming, and I hope it will be worth the wait. Until I can get it done, there are some wonderful links in the comments for my previous entry, from other bloggers who came to MacWorld, Borders, or both.
My short version? It was awesome. It was everything I’d hoped it would be, and more than I could have ever expected. The drive up was great, and the drive home (without Anne, because she went over to Tahoe to spend the weekend with her friend) was lonely, but enjoyable because I listened to Jay Mohr’s book Gasping for Airtime most of the way. It’s a interesting story . . . but you have to hear him read it. It’s the difference between listening to Dark Side of the Moon and reading the sheet music.
Okay. Enough about the trip report that’s coming. Here’s the thing that made me fire up this nifty browser called “Epiphany,” and write these words: I totally, completely, utterly b0rked my Debian machine before I left for MacWorld. I don’t know what I did, exactly, but somehow it completely lost my mouse. modprobe psmouse and modprobe mousedev did nothing, and I couldn’t find anything in a single online forum that would help me make my goddamn mouse work again. I tried dpkg-reconfigure gpm. I tried mouseconfig I tried cursing in lots of different languages, and making Faustian bargains with gods I’m pretty sure I just made up . . . I even taught myself how to recompile a linux kernel (the debian way and the other way) . . . but no dice.
Finally, I gave up, and decided to just start over with a clean partition and a new install. So I did mv /home/wil /mnt/hda1/backedup/, did a diff to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and burned myself a copy of the latest Debian (Sarge) Network installer.
Oh. My. God. Becky. It was so easy.
Okay. Seriously. Back in the old days of 1999, everyone told me how easy it was to set Red Hat up, but how much cooler Debian was if you could just get past the nightmare install . . . well, this was about as easy an install of anything I’ve ever done. It was literally a handful of commands, and then a bunch of waiting while it grabbed a ton of packages and set them up.
I’m now sitting here with a honest-to-goodness Debian system, running kernel 2.6.8!
Check it out:

wil@bender:~$ uname -a
Linux bender 2.6.8-1-386 #1 Thu Nov 11 12:18:43 EST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux

Okay, this is probably not as exciting to anyone else as it is to me . . . but the fact that I got this working, and took all the HAM radio and isdn stuff out of the kernel, and still got it to work . . . it’s a pretty big deal to me.
I’m logged into Gnome right now,( which I usually don’t use — I’m a KDE or Enlightenment kind of guy — but it looks beautiful) and I’ve got apt installing Firefox and Thunderbird in a terminal, and then I’ve got to restore some of the backups, but I’m very proud of myself. Until I totally screw something else up, I feel like I can put on my propeller hat and give it a mighty spin. *snort*
I’ve got an audition tomorrow morning, then I’m working on the audio book of Just A Geek in the afternoon. Check back around Friday for the full SF trip report, and some other cool news.
Oh, man! And if this moment needed to get any better . . . They Might Be Giants just started singing Ana Ng on the radio behind me.

For the past week or so, I’ve been furiously working on my MacWorld presentation, trying to find exactly what I want to say, and just the right way to say it. It’s been a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. This is going to be a very different type of experience than what people are used to at keynotes. I’m not going to talk about the future of anything, or pontificate about how Apple is doing this or not doing that . . . I’m strictly there to entertain the audience. I’m a little nervous about how they’ll respond, so I’ve thrown out everything and started over too many times to count. The entire time, I’ve watched the clock get closer and closer to 9:30 Thursday morning.
When I least expected it (around seven this morning as I packed lunches for Ryan and Nolan), the whole thing sprung into my head fully formed. What a relief! This is my favorite way to write: I can see the entire thing in my mind, like I’m looking down on a huge map. Because I know how the general landscape looks, I can zoom in on some areas and discover really interesting and unexpected details, then pull back to see the whole thing. The entire time, I know where I’m headed, so I’m not afraid to take some side trips as I transcribe what my brain’s come up with when I wasn’t paying attention.
I’m not going to publish all my remarks ahead of time like I usually do, because I think there will be a webcast, and I don’t want to give it all away . . . but it’s been so much fun to develop, I don’t want to wait two whole days to share it with an audience, so I’m going to preview a little bit of it right now:

I was twelve going on thirteen the first time I saw a Macintosh computer. It happened in the summer of 1984 — a long time ago; even longer if you measure according to Moore’s Law.
I was in a bookstore in the San Fernando Valley, looking for a magazine (I think it was called “Byte.”) My friend Brian told me that this magazine was filled with playable arcade games — all I had to do was copy the programs, written in BASIC, to my TI 99/4a.
“Wil, we’re late for dinner. We have to leave now.” It was my father. He held my brother’s hand, and my six year-old sister sat atop his shoulders.
I looked at the rack in front of me: the magazine I had hoped to find wasn’t there, and now I would have to leave empty-handed. I tried to stall him.
“Hey, did you see this, dad?” I took a book off the shelf. The picture on the cover showed that someone had written “hello” in cursive on a computer’s built-in monitor.
He took it from me and looked at it.
“That should keep him occupied for a minute, and I can find this maga—”
“Jeremy,” he said to my kid brother, “take this to mommy and tell her we’re ready to leave.”
Before I could protest, my brother ran the book across the store, my mother paid for it, and we were on our way to The Jolly Roger restaurant to celebrate my being cast in a movie called “The Body.”
In 1984, my family had almost achieved escape velocity from our white trash roots, but we were still poor. It was a big deal to go out to dinner, it was a big deal to buy a book, and I didn’t want to tell my dad that he’d paid for something I didn’t want. So I masked my disappointment and began to read.
“This is made by Apple? Oh, man! Kevin has that Apple ][, and it’s totally lame! It doesn’t play Pac Man like the arcade, and you can’t even hook it up to the television!”
To give this thought some context: in 1984 I thought that Thriller was “awesome” and letting my boxers hang out the bottom of my corduroy OP shorts was “rad,” so perhaps I wasn’t the best judge of what was and wasn’t lame.
It took less than fifteen minutes to drive from the bookstore to the restaurant, and I read that book the entire way. By the time we got out of the car, I had completely forgotten about my silly TI 99/4a. This “Macintosh” computer, I had decided, was the future.
“Dad! This is so cool!” I said as we got out of the car. “You use this thing called a ‘mouse’ to tell the computer what to do!”
My dad nodded politely while he helped my mom get my sister out of her car seat.
“Oh really?”
“Yeah! And it’s got this puzzle game built right into it, and you can use this mouse thing to draw pictures, and it’s got something called ‘MacWrite’ that I could use to write stories, and there’s a clock, and it makes a happy face when you turn it on, and . . .”
I took the book with me into the restaurant, and by the end of the meal I had convinced myself that I had to own one of these machines.
“Mom,” I said, in my most grown-up voice, as we finished dinner, “a lot of other kids at school have computers, and they use them for homework, and to learn math and stuff.”
“What about your Texas Instruments thing?” She said.
“Pish!” I said, “That thing? All that can do is play games! And it doesn’t have a mouse. I hear that all the new computers will have mouses. They’re very important.”
My parents looked at each other.
“We’ll think about it,” they said, in unison.
“Oh? Good. Because, you know, it has a built-in monitor, so I wouldn’t have to hook it up to the television when you guys want to watch TV.”
“Thank you for thinking of us,” my father said, dryly.
I beamed. This was going very well.
“And it’s portable, too! See?” I opened the book, and showed them a picture of the handle that was built into the top. “I could get a carrying case, and take it with me to Aunt Val’s when we go to visit. I could totally entertain myself, and I wouldn’t bother you guys at all.”
“That’s very thoughtful,” my mother said.
“Have you thought about selling cars?” my father asked.
“No. Why?”

After I tell the story of how I got my first Mac, and give a quick synopsis of my history from then until now:

“In 1988, I attended my first MacWorld, and after about an hour here, I realized that, even though I’d upgraded it to four megabytes of RAM, my MacPlus was woefully out of date. I was flush with cash from my weekly gig on Star Trek, so I went nuts: I bought a Macintosh IIx, a 30MB SCSI hard drive, a 2400 baud modem, and eight 1MB SIMMS. When I booted it the first time, I experienced a rush of excitement that I hadn’t felt since I first completed that cool built-in puzzle back in 1984: two hundred and fifty-six fabulous, vibrant, living colors splashed across my screen.”

Then, I plan to segue into Just A Geek. I’ll talk a bit about how I wrote my entire final draft on my iBook, and then I have this thing that I hope Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak will maybe hear someday: “Steve and Woz? Thank you for being such a big part of my life. Thank you for showing people like me that if you dream it, you can do it, even — especially — when nobody else believes in you.”
I’ll read two stories that I hope have a little bit of a universal appeal: The Trade, and Fireworks. If everything goes well, I’ll come in at just under an hour, and everyone will enjoy themselves.
And remember, if you’re in the area and are not coming to MacWorld, you can still come out to Borders in Union Square on Friday night, where I’ll be reading from and signing Just A Geek. I start at 7pm.