Every week brings a new merger rumor, and just like celebrity couples (Bennifer! TomKat! Vive la diff rance!), every merger needs its portmanteau. So remember the official merger names:

• Beavis: Hey this man's computers catch fire and he's having a "Fireside Chat" in the Technology Pavilion. Butthead: Huh, huh, huh. [Consumerist]

Let's bring all this Eric Schmidt obsession to a glorious climax by citing columnist John C. Dvorak, who says the Google CEO could, as an Apple board member, finally engineer a long-rumored merger of Apple and Sun Microsystems.

We wondered why the Spectre of Eric looked familiar — then we remembered that the Google CEO (and new Apple board member) resembled someone else in the Fruit Company's past.

That naysayer Don Dodge, a member of Microsoft's Emerging Business Team, may have a whole impressive list of reasons that Google's CEO joining Apple's board of directors doesn't really change much. Sure, he's got a point about no money changing hands, and consumer demand is the key to any alliance, yadda yadda.

It's time again to check up on how the big dogs relate to each other. While blogger Om Malik chooses to say it with words, we chose fingerpaints. That was a disaster, so we made this graph.

The CEO of Google (the company trying to move your desktop to the Internet) was just elected to the board of Apple (the company trying to move the Internet to your desktop). Apple already stuck Eric Schmidt on its online Board roster, under an hour after the press release hit the wires.

• Web calendar startup Kiko sold for over $250k, which blogger Om Malik says is a great deal for a company that only took $50k in "convertible debt" (an angel investment somewhere between a loan and buying a share of the company outright). [GigaOM]

• This week, the TechCrunch blog lost its French translator, who says he was working for free. One fellow blogger thinks Marshall Kirkpatrick may be TechCrunch's only paid writer, but I know CrunchGear editor John Biggs definitely isn't working for free. [Guillaumeb.com]

• A stay-at-home-dad with no time to himself wastes what precious sleep he has debunking some theory about outhouses, TiVo, and how Google CEO Eric Schmidt relates to any of the aforementioned.[Passing Notes]

Apple couldn't deliver on the much-hyped promise of forced Chinese labor, reporting that the company found pretty decent conditions at the Foxconn factories that make its iPods. The only real problem was some excessive overtime:

We weren't aware that Justin Long was "famous" enough to inspire a backlash, but apparently the star of the Mac ads (and the forthcoming feature film Young School) has been on the receiving end of a bit of vitriol roundabout these here Internets. We find the young actor delightful and charming, and think it shows incredible commitment to craft that someone who literally looks like a penis has enough self-belief to persevere in an industry where so much is based on appearances, but even we've got to say he's not helping himself with quotes like this:

Activists are, of course, boring. But the ones who cleverly make us uncomfortable, even if they can't deliver their lines smoothly, are fun. Take, for example, this Mac ad spoof.

• Still not tired of partying at 111 Minna? Following up last night's WWDC party at the San Fran venue is, well, tonight's WWDC party at the San Fran venue. Mac developers and any and all fanfolk can skip right into this free event. [WebKit Open Source Party]

Macworld Magazine whipped together a collection of videos from yesterday's keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Cyrus Farivar hosts, diplomatically stuttering just to make Steve Jobs look slicker by comparison.

"Has Steve Jobs lost his magic?" asks Leander Kahney, the man who made a career of baiting Apple fans (which, actually, is a cottage industry). Kahney's reasoning: Jobs's WWDC keynote speech on Monday wasn't as exciting as past events.

Tech blogs went wild when blogger Robert Scoble wrote:

• Pictured: Blog cartoonist Hugh Macleod, somehow able to make fun of all his colleagues deftly enough that they link to him when he does it, this time mocked blogger Dave Winer for gushing about the "chicks" at the recent BlogHer conference. [Gaping Void]

• sv2600: The local chapter of the classic monthly hacker gathering takes place at 6 PM in San Jose. As far as cracking open your laptop there — safer than Defcon, less safe than the local Starbucks. [Friday]

• Now that you've seen cover boy Kevin Rose, check out the whole gallery of sexy young startuppers, including Yelp.com founders Russell and Jeremy, seen here about to sic their dog on some college co-eds. [BusinessWeek]