Okay. So maybe you still feel a little funny, and/or like a self-parody. But an Apple ad is an Apple ad, so we will dutifully catalog it here.

As many people who catalog Apple ads have noted, this is the first time that Apple has used a celebrity in one of its campaigns for a very long time. The last one that the hivemind can recall: Jeff Goldblum hawking the original candy-colored iMac, back in the late 90s — way back when Apple was still pretty much a niche company:

Here’s a new one that splits the difference: It features Patrick Warburton, best known as “Puddy” on “Seinfeld”*. A good chunk of Apple’s target audience will get a kick out of seeing a tertiary character from an iconic sitcom. And the chunk that doesn’t know or care about “Seinfeld” will be the none the wiser. Clever!

The really clever part, of course, is Apple getting the likes of me to distribute its advertising, gratis.

Oh. Speaking of those Jeff Goldblum ads, this is an old meme but I find it entertaining anyway: Someone went ahead and took all of his old Mac spots and slowed them down to half-speed. Which gives you an impression of what Jeff Goldblum might be like if he was rambling on about Apple (AAPL) products at the end of a very long night of drinking. There’s a whole set here, but this should give you a taste:

*Jerry Seinfeld himself, of course, became a Microsoft (MSFT) pitchman for a brief, largely unsuccessful  stint last year. But if you want to see him on TV this fall, check out the new season of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiam,” where he’ll be appearing with all of his old cast-mates.

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.

Except…I have this nagging concern.

Like a lot of you, I first learned about Michael Jackson’s death Thursday via Twitter. But at the time, I wasn’t convinced I was learning about it.

I saw tweet after tweet on my BlackBerry declaring the superstar dead. I was mobile, and my Web browser wasn’t working, so my Twitter stream was my only source of information, and I was grateful for it.

But in the first hour the story broke, I was never sure what the source of the information was. And so I never knew whether I should believe it.

Turns out that some of the Twitterers I followed had seen a report, first published at 5:20 Eastern time by TMZ.com, Time Warner’s (TWX) gossip powerhouse. But even if they linked to TMZ, I couldn’t tell that at a glance because they used URL-shorteners like bit.ly that obscured the Web addresses.

And many other Twitterers didn’t bother to explain where they’d heard the information at all. It was just fact. They were right, of course. But were they sure?

In some folks’ eyes, these qualms I have about accuracy and sourcing make me an old media dinosaur. So says a pal who’s worked as a reporter at three big, prestigious old media outlets. Here’s a bit of a missive he sent me via Facebook:

Twitter delivered the news first and fastest. Yes, it was from tmz; but who actually went to tmz.com? I didn’t. I read it on Twitter… and stayed there to read more. Did I turn on CNN? No. Just read the tweets.

This is really bad for old media: Twitter is the water cooler. It is the center of the conversation. Almost every media outlet wants to be the center of a conversation. They’re suddenly failing.

But I don’t think it’s that binary. Twitter and old media are complementary, and the former certainly has less value without the latter.

I eventually got to a Web browser and looked around the Web for other sources confirming Jackson’s death. When I couldn’t find them, I came back to Twitter.

At 6:15 Eastern time, the Los Angeles Times reported that Jackson was dead, citing its own sources. After that I knew that Twitter would primarily be repeating the LAT’s report and those that followed it, so I bailed.

That worked out well. Staying clear of Twitter for a while Thursday night meant I didn’t have to read about Jeff Goldblum’s death. Which never happened, of course. But that didn’t stop Twitter users from repeating the story, over and over.