Remember Daniel Brusilovsky, the 16-year-old startup CEO and TechCrunch contributor with 120,000 Twitter followers? The poor kid just threw it all away for a MacBook Air.

Karl Rove loves his iPhone. He uses it all the time! (The entire Bush administration has good reason to love the little gizmo.) The roly-poly Machiavelli also recently admitted to owning a damn MacBook Air, the laptop whose sole selling point is its ability to fit in an envelope. Drug-addled radio tyrant Rush Limbaugh had to ask Apple to help fix his own new Mac. Your favorite propagandists love the sleek design and friendly usability of Apple products. Crypto-fascists—they're just like us! Which brings us to this plea: can we please, please end the tiresome trope of Apple having any sort of hip sensibility?

If you were falling, and you had the choice between protecting your face and your Macbook Air, which one would you choose? Let's just say that Charlie Rose now has a black eye. (Why wouldn't he use makeup, though? To prove a point about how much he luvs his new computer, maybe — or to show us how badass he is!) His producers report that the Air is doin' fine post-accident. [Engadget]

Newsweek tech columnist Stephen Levy had a MacBook Air. Had — past tense. It seems Levy misplaced his über-thin notebook, losing it somewhere in his apartment. That should be easy enough to find, right? Maybe not:

Blogger Michael Nygard was flying to San Jose with his various digital accoutrements including his Blackberry and new MacBook Air when he ran into some trouble passing through the TSA security checkpoint. When Michael put his MacBook Air through the x-ray machine, a gaggle of TSA agents pulled him aside and gathered around the MacBook Air to determine how much of a threat it was to national security. "There's no drive... and no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be." A younger agent tries to explain that it's not a "device" but a fancy new laptop. Eventually, Michael gets his machine back but finds he missed his plane. Lesson? Next time you fly... pray. (Photo by AP/Ric Feld)

As many do for the Super Bowl, I find the ads on American Idol more interesting than the show. It's among the priciest prime-time real estate around. Last year, ads cost $600,000 per 30-second spot. So it raised my eyebrows to see Apple purchasing multiple spots for the MacBook Air in tonight's broadcast. I counted two in just the last half-hour. Did Apple shell out more than $1 million for a couple of ads?

Two weeks after it was introduced, the MacBook Air is now on display at the local Apple Store for you to play with. But why did it take two weeks for models to go on display? Apple has been taking preorders on the MacBook Air since moments after Steve Jobs finished his keynote at Macworld, but unless you were at the show, you couldn't actually see one until this week.

Because you're nosy about it, here's graphical proof that on the Internet, Apple is a much bigger topic than anything else we post about. Yet the video of Gizmodo's cruel CES prank drew 10 times more clicks than our biggest MacBook Air post. Hollywood still crushes all. On Gawker, Nick Denton's mirror post of Tom Cruise's Scientology promo video is closing on 1.5 million views — comparable traffic to all of Valleywag so far this month. It struck me this morning that if I wanted to maximize my Gawker Media traffic bonus pay, I'd stop writing and instead follow Tom Cruise around with a camera. Oh wait, that's what the big pubs actually do. It all makes sense now.

We stopped by the Blogger Lounge within the Microsoft booth on the Macworld Expo floor. Inside, it was rather comfortable, considerably more so than the press areas at CES — except the internet didn't work. While we were there though, we found M&M's graced with the Microsoft Office, Word and Excel logos, comfy leather couches. And a computer that everyone in the lounge was very interested in — but not the one you'd suspect.

Apple products: Designed well, marketed better. And it starts from the top. After yesterday's MacWorld keynote Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the New York Times: "I'm going to be the first one in line to buy one of these," he said. Right. Not if this guy has anything to say about it, Mr. Jobs. And besides, we have it on good authority, Mr. Jobs, that you're running Leopard on a 40-foot projection screen.

"Does it remind you of the Foleo?" Palm's never-released "smartphone companion" laptop, killed on the eve of its introduction last September, does look a bit like Apple's new MacBook Air, though the latter is thinner yet and far more powerful. Under the casings, there's little comparison. Which raises a question: Did Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple executive who's now Palm's executive chairman, get some inkling that Apple would be coming out with the MacBook Air?

A tipster writes in after seeing the MacBook Air advertisement with the uber-thin notebook removed from a manila envelope:

Yeah, yeah. The MacBook Air looks beautiful. And so does this ad. But it's missing something more than an optical drive, if you ask me. Until I get me some John Hodgman, I'm not sold.

Coming to every cafe frequented by aspiring writers, the MacBook Air, the skinniest laptop Apple has ever made. Ownership will distinguish the kids with trust funds, and those who sacrificed their rent money on this incredibly desirable toy. Harsh truth: it won't make anyone write better. Details at Gizmodo.