Feeling a bit under the weather yesterday – presumably my body’s reaction to the fact that San Francisco has suddenly become sunny – I decided to take a jaunt around the Internet for column ideas. My deadline was a whole 24 hours away, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared, right?

My first find was this story about a bear who had got trapped in a Colorado skate park, presumably after breaking in to practice his Ollies, or whatever it is bears do on skateboards. The bear was finally rescued when townsfolk dropped a ladder into the park, allowing him to climb to freedom.

To any normal person, a bear trapped in a skate park would be little more than a heartwarming newsbite; a quirky story to distract from another week of war and terrorism and kidnapped children living in back yards in Antioch. But not for the lazy tech columnist looking for inspiration.

For the lazy tech columnist looking for inspiration, a bear trapped in a skate park easily becomes a metaphor for the attitudes of certain Silicon Valley types who are trapped in their little Northern California bubble and don’t realise – or care – that there’s a world outside. And the ladder, I suppose, represents the columnist whose job it is to provide escape from the ignorance. Perfect. Another Saturday box ticked. Move on, nothing to see here.

But just as I was about to shut down Firefox and start scribbling skateboard jokes in my special columnist’s notepad, another headline caught my eye, this time from CNET. It read: ‘Bill would give president emergency control of Internet‘. Wow, I thought, this Bill guy sounds like a dick…

Read on at TechCrunch…