It’s official: The white MacBook is now really, truly dead. Apple is said to have notified resellers that its white plastic 13-inch laptop will no longer be available to educational institutions. MacRumors first reported the news on Wednesday.

The white MacBook’s availability to the public actually ended last July, on the same day Apple introduced its new MacBook Air for just $999, but Apple had kept the distribution channel open for schools.

(Now, it seems, Apple would rather have those schools buy lots of iBooks-equipped iPads – or stripped-down MacBook Airs!)

As I sat here writing this, I realized that I have one of these relics lying unused on the desk next to me — or rather, next to my shinier, newer laptop.

First launched in 2006, the MacBook was, as AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg put it, a “low-end portable computer aimed at average consumers” — and the best-selling Macintosh in history.

I bought a 2007 model of the white plastic MacBook in early 2008, and it was the first Apple computer I’d used since my elementary-school computer classes, in which we used (I’m fairly certain) the Apple II. It had a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor! A glossy display! A built-in iSight camera! Six hours of battery life! Smooth, clean keys — and at five pounds it seemed so light (though hardly by today’s laptop standards).

But things change. And I eventually graduated to other laptops.

Oh, white MacBook: You couldn’t handle heavy video editing, and after a while, your battery wouldn’t hold a charge and your keys never, ever looked clean, no matter how hard we tried. But we did have some good times. Au revoir.

Remember when Fortune magazine wrote in September that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had reportedly bagged a bison as part of a “personal challenge” to eat only what he had killed?

Well, proof of that is hard to miss, now that the ginormous mounted head of said dead bison has been hung on the wall of a Facebook conference room used by the social networking site’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Zuckerberg placed it there recently as a prank, to surprise his top exec with the installation of the very hairy bison when she was away from Facebook’s Silicon Valley HQ.

And surprised she was when she got back and was faced with the creature, which pretty much takes up the whole room, as you can see above and below.

(And, let me just say on a personal level, like a digital version of the “Murder She Wrote” lady, solving the mystery of this geek-on-bison killing is a whole lot more satisfying than getting a pile of internal Yahoo memos.)

The bison has now been nicknamed Billy and also sports a Facebook-branded baseball cap and occasional hoodie — natch! (My suggestion if you want to use a dead beast metaphor most effectively here would be to clad it all in Google swag.)

While he never confirmed it, Zuckerberg had teased the crowd about the possibility of his hunting prowess at the f8 developers conference this fall in his keynote speech, displaying his Facebook page that had a picture of what he had tagged “Bison Burgers.”

In fact, it’s been quite a lot of bison for the famous entrepreneur since he felled the majestic beast. According to Wikipedia, bison usually weigh 700 to 2,200 pounds, but can be as much as 3,800 pounds. That’s a lot of burgers!

To get them, Zuckerberg learned the most humane approach and then shot the beast in California, after obtaining a hunting license and, presumably, a very big gun.

Clearly, he was serious when he told Fortune in May that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Among the early victims, which grew in size, were a lobster, a chicken, a pig and a goat.

At this time, the Winklevii are still roaming the plains — and it would be illegal and just plain mean on Zuckerberg’s part to frag them any more than he already has.

So, he went for the bison, the next biggest beast in his cross-hairs.

Its head will be moved to Facebook’s new headquarters today along with the rest of the company, who will now work in spacious new digs.

Which, I am told, could easily fit a herd of elephants — but let’s not go there.

Okay, this is a freaky Friday video–a trailer for the upcoming movie “Wrecked,” starring Adrien Brody. He wakes up after a car accident at the bottom of a ravine in the deep forest and has no idea how he got there. Also, there are lots of dead people with him.

Really freaky:

So are a lot of reports about the reports of his death, which pin the blame on Twitter. Or in the case of the New York Daily News, something called a “Twitter blogging service.”

The original rumor that Lightfoot was dead may or may not have originated on Twitter–his road manager seems to think it was via “a Twitter coming out of Ottawa.” But that seems both very specific and hard to prove. If anyone can, please let me know.

But say it is true. Twitter still didn’t force Canwest, the big Canadian media conglomerate, to publish a wire report that said the singer was dead. As best I can tell, it was that story, which was picked up by various Canwest newspaper sites, that convinced people Lightfoot had croaked.

Here’s Canwest’s description of what happened:

After false rumours of Lightfoot’s death initially emerged online, Hawkins [musician Ronnie Hawkins, a friend of Lightfoot] was contacted by a Canwest reporter. In that interview, Hawkins reported that Lightfoot was dead. Based on that information, Canwest News Service sent out an alert and short story on the wire which reported Lightfoot’s death. Within minutes, Canwest was contacted by a representative close to Lightfoot who said that news of his demise was untrue. That prompted another alert on the wire which said the previous story should be disregarded because there were conflicting accounts about Lightfoot’s health.

About 30 minutes later, Canwest spoke to Lightfoot’s tour manager, [Bernie] Fiedler, and immediately moved another story on the wire reporting the singer’s death was a hoax.

In Twitter time, 30 minutes is forever, of course. And it was the first Canwest story and alert, which were indeed distributed via Twitter, that really fueled this thing. But blaming Twitter for quickly spreading a mainstream news organization’s story is a stretch.

Here’s some pithy perspective from Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist who doesn’t work for Canwest. It comes to us via Twitter, naturally:

If a media snafu causes you to debate the role of Twitter, imagine it’s 90 years ago and instead of Twitter you’re saying “the telephone… Hearing some rumour and printing it as truth is unrelated to tech used to circulate that rumour. Same happened, faster, in 1780s.

If you’re itching to confirm Lightfoot’s health yourself, you can listen to an impromptu interview the singer conducted yesterday with a Toronto radio station. And I hope to see him make a Goldblumesque appearance on “The Colbert Report” very soon.

Until then, here’s the obligatory blast from the past:

And here’s that stunning footage of a real Australian morning show reporting Goldblum’s death that Colbert used in his bit. Note that they had time to assemble a b-roll montage before going on air with this.

I know that “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart does not need even more praise for his spot-on comic and very real jabs at the CNBC financial cable network and its milquetoast coverage of the financial crisis, pre and post.

The silliness that prevails too much over doing serious and rigorous reporting that Stewart takes perfect aim at is a major problem.

Taking CEO spinning at face value and letting them yammer on on air without being challenged much at all has always been excruciating to watch at best and woefully irresponsible at worst.

But, to my mind, the most important thing that he elicited out of CNBC’s most famous stock jester, Jim Cramer, was the part of the interview discussing using the malleable press to float fictional rumors about companies in order to make money on the negative news.

While Cramer at first tried to deny he did it, Stewart had the videotape of the “Mad Money” host talking about the practice, specifically in regard to Apple (AAPL).

His appalling idea to make a quick buck? Making it up that the mobile carriers did not like the iPhone right before Macworld, in this case in 2006.

“And this is very easy because the people who write about Apple want that story, and you can claim that it’s credible because you spoke to someone at Apple, because Apple doesn’t…comment,” said Cramer cavalierly, as if he was not talking about a way to essentially steal other people’s money and hurt Apple unfairly, to interviewer Aaron Task, then at Cramer’s own TheStreet.com.

“So it’s really an ideal short. And again if I were short Apple, I’d pick up the phone and I’d do that today.“

Bernie Madoff would be so proud, if he wasn’t otherwise imprisoned for life!

Kind of puts all those Steve-Jobs-Is-Dead-Right-Now rumors of a few months ago into a new light?

It’s been obvious that the legendary Apple CEO has been quite ill from his appearance alone.

But, as BoomTown has always maintained, the rumors written without any serious reporting about him were also a troublesome issue because it was that clear short-sellers played a large part in stoking the fear about his imminent demise, given how important Jobs has been to Apple.

(Although, this has not seemed to stop Apple from releasing a lot of really cool stuff of late, like the new Shuffle, which Walt Mossberg reviewed here.)

While Apple has not been adequately forthcoming, either, about the Jobs situation, that does not mean the press–as Stewart correctly points out–should not try to actually do its job and dig for what is really going on rather than just slap up unsubstantiated blather.

“It’s not a f@#*ing game,” said Stewart perfectly. Indeed not.

You can see Cramer cynically discussing the Apple stock manipulation tricks at the 6:45-minute mark of Part 2, but here is the entire Stewart well-deserved roasting of Cramer in three parts.

(And at the bottom is the Task interview with Cramer too.)

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

TheStreet.com Interview: