“I won’t be happy til the whole world hates me.” Not my words, for once, but those of Seth MacFarlane on stage last year at Carnegie Hall. The audience laughed, as well they might (“he was on the Internet and I’m in college”) , on the assumption that their hero was joking. And yet, and yet…

On November 8th at 8:30pm, viewers of Fox in the US will watch in horror as the network gives over thirty whole minutes of airtime to a Windows 7-sponsored episode of Family Guy.

Just take a moment to let the horror of that fact settle in your brain. Multi-millionaire Seth MacFarlane – who, by the way, uses a Mac – has decided to sell the soul of his flagship show to Redmond. For money.

Of course, producing art to order is always a tricky call. Back in the 16th century Michelangelo was quoted as saying “One cannot live under pressure from patrons, let alone paint,” and yet even he was forced – from time to time – to succumb to the pressures of paying the rent.

In his painting ‘The Conversion of Saul’, the face of Saul (who would have been around 30 when he took the road to Damascus) is replaced with the far more elderly face of Pope Paul III. Why? Because Pope Paul III was the pontiff who commissioned and financed the work. It was a tacky move, sure, but changing the facial features of one character (whose true appearance is conjecture anyway) is still a light year away from letting your sponsor dictate your entire storyline.

Read on at TechCrunch…