Privateye strikes again. Ha! Ha! Jokes about Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie are the best!

TechCrunch startup-blogger Michael Arrington poses with Bill Gates after a well-blogged lunch. I can't pick the best caption:

Man, everything's gotta be superlative in British journalism. It's not a surprise that London's Observer says Craig Newmark's Craigslist will kill the newspapers — every newspaper says that. What's shocking is this line: "Newmark, a man so nerdish he makes Gates look like a flamboyant playboy..."

Slate published its 2005 Slate 60, the leaderboard for "competitive philanthropy." As always, the list of the top charitable donations and pledges includes a good showing from the tech industry.

Scott McNealy made a few good jabs at his frenemy Microsoft. The Sun CEO's best gag was implying he wants to shoot Bill Gates in the face. Ha! Ha! Such friendly jests!

Bill Gates went to a school way down in San Diego to tape a show with Oprah Winfrey. (Cheatsheet: Bill is the richer one, Oprah's the thinner one. Today, anyway.)

Rule 1 in snarky media coverage of Microsoft: Always symbolize money in the headline.

Larry Ellison isn't the only one with multi-million-dollar real estate and a pleasure-dome on the sea. The billionaires of the tech industry have a proud tradition of ringing up ridiculous bills.

"My tax return in the United States has to be kept on a special computer because their normal computers can't deal with the numbers," said Bill Gates in Lisbon.

Time announced its Persons of the Year early yesterday morning, and the winners were Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates, "[f]or being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow." This is good news for things like philanthropy and poverty reduction and debt elimination, but it also very bad news for Mother Nature, previously thought to be the leading contender for this year's honor. It's also, perhaps, a harbinger of a very bad 2006: If the tsunami, the earthquakes, and Katrina weren't quite enough to put Nature over the top in 2005, we hate to think what she's now planning for next year.