• Denny's opts not to exploit the famous visit by YouTube's and Google's founders in its marketing, probably because of the Google boys' habit of sharing a grand slam and asking to hold the bacon "to cut our country's reliance on cooking oil." [MediaPost]

We came a bit late to the tech mogul scene, so we missed that whole "Bill Gates is t3h suxxors" phase. Or at least we were still young enough to say "suxxors" without irony when that phase passed. So it is with complimentary — no, congratulatory — attitude that we announce: According to Forbes, Bill Gates is $2 billion richer than he was this time last year, and he's still the richest American alive.

• Blogs: worse than the sixties. [NYT]
• Walter Scott, Walt Whitman also guilty of "sock puppetry." [NYT]
• Joe Hagan throws pretty much everything but the revelation that Bill Keller loves "The Wire" into this profile. [NYM]
• New magazine to battle Portfolio for that all-important douchebag demographic. [NYT]
• Speaking of douchebags, it's hard to identify to twattiest statement in this profile of the Flavorpill folks, but we're going to settle on, "We've been called the Cond Nast of e-mail." [NYT]
• Apparently, people wanted to see pictures of Suri Cruise. [WWD]
• Bill Gates has no iPod. Thank you, Donny Deutsch! [copyranter]

• Recognizing Paris Hilton's contributions to the field of phone hacking, famed hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow named the starlet as an honorary member of its Ninja Strike Force. [Ninja Strike Force]

• Brett Allsop, Co-Founder of YapTA, a self-described Web 3.0 Start-Up gives his take on the fundamental difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0: I have my own life and I want to go hiking and I want the Internet to do the work for me. Amen. So do we. So do we. [John Cook's Venture Blog]

• Microsoft's aging founder can bust a move. Pop star Christina Milian says about performing at a recent party, "Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, was dancing to my music and he was probably the only one boogieing." Later, he sang "My Way." I wish I was joking. [Starpulse, photo by Niall Kennedy]

OMG PLEASE BUY. Valleywag's gizmautistic brother Gizmodo found these cute toys called "Kuggs" modeled after Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and some kind of zombie (Michael Dell?).

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a hard time convincing the media that the company will do well without Bill Gates in charge. The pressure must've gotten to him, because he just compared his boss to the father of Chinese communism. Ballmer told the Wall Street Journal:

• The Wall Street Journal tries hard to find a contrarian view for Wired editor Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail. Chris Anderson, amused, topples it like a sadist at a domino exhibition. [WSJ and The Long Tail]

• Bill Gates says Vista will be ready in January. Unless it won't. [MSNBC]

Yesterday, someone sent me a seemingly spammy message to Bill Gates in Italian. Thank you to everyone who translated it. Here is one of the many stellar submissions.

"For Mr. Bill Gates," reads an e-mail from paolalicciardello@libero.it. I can't tell if it's spam — does spam come from Italy?

The defection of Microsoft's platform evangelist Vic Gundotra to Google, days after MS's Google assassin Martin Taylor slunk off, is more than a bad sign. According to Microsoft troll Chris Coulter, it's — well, picture a comically large stack of soup cans in a Disney movie. Now pull one can from the bottom layer. Chris plays war correspondent in this speed-and-liquor-fueled totally sober doomsaying guest post.

When the New York Times (and every other media outlet — good job, Buffett's PR firm!) went on and on about Warren Buffett's $31-billion donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and how Buffett and Gates are such good pals, it seemed fair to point out other tech mogul buddies like the heads of Apple, Oracle, and Google — and to diagram them in this handy guide.

While the New York Times may not always think the best of the soon-to-retire Bill Gates, it was cruel to remind him how he'll spend the rest of his life.

Almost missed this, until another blog pointed it out: Bill Gates watches illegal movies. Yes, the Microsoft chairman, whose company cracks down on software pirates, entertains himself with arguably pirated video on YouTube. He admitted it in the Wall Street Journal:

Bill Gates's Microsoft retirement memo didn't need such a fancy translation. His Valleyspeak could be summed up with a classic trick from Slate. The online magazine pulled out an archived article from its days as a Microsoft property. The schtick: use MS Word's Autosummarize feature to whittle a document down to the nitty gritty.

Another official memo, another official string of bull: After his retirement announcement, Microsoft founder Bill Gates sent an all-hands internal memo that the press passed around this weekend. The Valleyspeak dialect has a native speaker up in MS's Redmond HQ, so pay attention to what Gates says and what he means.

The Microsoft-eBay merger rumors are true. EBay has the power here, or at least Microsoft thinks so. They spun Bill Gates' (pictured, duh) retirement as his chance to fully run his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The president of a major web company tells the Wag:

President George W. Bush, asked to name a mistake he'd made since 9/11: