We all love South Park for its humor, satire, the vulgar words and the creative ways of saying the word "s**t" as often as possible in a single episode. Did you know that every new South Park episode is delivered right on the day it airs? Other than the sheer creative talent of the South Park production crew, the show credits its hectic production to Apple computers.

JJ Franzen, technical director at South Park Studios says, "We have very complex stuff that needs to be done very fast and we need to know that we can trust the machines to handle whatever we throw at them without crumbling. ThatÂ?s why we use Macs."

It used to be that the Studio used construction paper cutouts to play as Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny and the other characters. Such a method became too time-consuming, however; the Studio then decided to mimic the original look and feel of construction paper puppets using SGI workstations.

The animation crew uses Adobe Photoshop and Maya. They scan the original paper cutouts and backgrounds, and use these as textures in Maya. Using computers in producing episodes cut down the process from 3 months to 6 days. Recently, a new special-effects technique in producing the cartoon has been introduced: Motion, a graphics software from Apple, which allows snow to appear more naturally in South Park, Colorado.

After animation and audio, the editorial department cuts the episode for broadcast using Macs running on Avid. The team has custom-built the studio to include a 120 processor render farm, more than 30 Mac workstations, and almost 10 terabytes of Xserve RAID storage space.

Prior to using Apple, Maya was rendered on Windows workstations. But Maya would crash often, requiring the entire system to be rebooted. When Maya was released for the Mac, the team made the switch, and now, whenever the application crashes, only the application has to be rebooted - not the entire system.

South Park Studio says that their Mac workstations are fast and reliable. They're coupled with a 120-processor (AMD Athlon) Linux render farm, effectively doubling the amount of shots that the team could do. Macs could definitely keep up with the South Park crew's insane production schedule.

Frank Agnone, supervising producer at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says that Apple's quick-to-master style is very useful. "Apple is known in the industry as being very user friendly and when youÂ?re making a big switchover, that factors in ... With Apple and Mac OS X, in-house production could make the transition easily."

Tag this under general WTF-ery. During slow news days, and you need to get stuff, you start looking for the weird. This bit of "news" basically ties in with anything relating to copyright, intellectual property rights, and piracy. That means this touches upon anything you download online, from game demos to and homebrew goodies... well sort of.

Get this: Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies, music, and other material on the internet. What does the patch look like? Look at the image on the right.

The scouts will be instructed on the basics of copyright law and learn how to identify five types of copyright works and three ways copyrighted stuff can be stolen. Activities for the scouts include visiting a movie studio (to see how much money employees lose due to piracy) and creating public service announcements urging others to be good copyright observing people.

So will kids carrying PSPs that have questionable media in it or gamers with mod-chips in their consoles start saying "Run! Here comes the boy scouts!" ...or something like that?

We know, we know, there are arguments as to whether or not things like mod-chips, hacks, emulations, homebrews, and even plain YouTube videos infringe on intellectual property rights. It just came to mind that given recent news - the ones about console companies filing lawsuits left and right on grounds of infringed intellectual property rights - perhaps instead of them spending money filing law suits, they could just send creepy Boy Scouts to the offending party to "weird them into submission."

Ergh. We should stop eating bad pizza before. I'm ending this before anyone thinks I'm drunk.