A few bits of Apple (AAPL) news worth noting:

Paul McCartney: “It’s all happening soon,” he told Billboard.com. “Most of us are all sort of ready. The whole thing is primed, ready to go — there’s just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it’s being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn’t be too long. It’s down to fine-tuning. I’m pretty sure it’ll be happening next year, 2008.” (link)

“Let me put that statement into American English,” says Fake Steve Jobs. “Paul wants more money.”

First Leopard Update: More than a dozen improvements in Mac OS X 10.5.1, issued three weeks after Leopard’s release, including fixes in Mail, Airport, Time Machine, Back to My Mac and some pesky Firewall issues. Not yet repaired: Among the repairs: that nasty core data bug.

iMac Anti-freeze: Apple also released a graphics firmware update that’s supposed to finally solve the freezing problem some aluminum iMac users have been suffering since September. I’ll believe it when my Dad tells me his iMac has gone more than a week without crashing.

Three New Mac Ads: The Get-a-Mac ads are back on TV (and available from Apple here) after a summer hiatus. “Same joke,” writes Michael Gartenberg. “Still as effective.” But maybe not quite as funny.

For a simple comedy sketch, the Saturday Night Live takeoff on the new “black backdrop” Apple (AAPL) iPhone ads carries an awful lot of corporate baggage.

The bit aired Nov. 3 and the video was posted the next day on YouTube — and enthusiastically linked to by TechCrunch.

It’s funny enough, with a clever set-up for the “pinch it” gesture. But by Sunday afternoon, NBC Universal (GE) had scrubbed the free version off YouTube, a site that many broadcasters see as a threat to their business model.

If you want to see the SNL sketch today, you either have to go to hulu.com, NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) invitation-only (while in beta) answer to Apple’s iTunes Music Store, or visit the official SNL page on NBC’s corporate site. Either way, you must sit through a 15-second TV-style commercial before you get to the clip — a chilling vision of what the Internet would look like if it had been invented by the folks who run broadcast television.

If that weren’t enough, the SNL team — inadvertently or not — added what Gizmodo and Cult of Mac see as one more dig at Steve Jobs, with whom NBC has been feuding these many month. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the iPhone used in the sketch has a little blue Installer icon on its face, a sure sign that the device was “jailbroken,” or hacked, to add unauthorized programs — despite Apple’s admonitions to the contrary.

NBC, of course, has bigger things to worry about right now. The Writers Guild called a strike at midnight and promised to set up picket lines in front of 30 Rock this morning, which means that unless the suits plan to write the sketches, SNL will be in reruns for the duration.

For Fake Steve Jobs’ screed on the absurdity of the Hollywood labor situation, see his Secret Diary here.

Next week, Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. the Fake Steve Jobs, steps out of character to start a three-city book tour to promote Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (A Parody) [Da Capo Press; $22.95]. That means hard-copy versions of the book — galleys of which have been floating around reviewers’ offices for more than a month — will start to arrive in bookstores, where loyal readers of FSJ’s website can see for themselves how the fake Apple (AAPL) CEO’s online persona translates into print.

The good news is that this is not just a compilation of FSJ’s online posts, although some of his best set pieces — including Hillary Clinton shaking down the Silicon Valley VCs for campaign cash and Yoko Ono insisting that iTunes list the band as “John Lennon and the Beatles” — appear in the book more or less intact. This is, by and large, an original work of fiction, with lots of new material and something resembling a plot — with a beginning, middle and end.

The bad news — which struck this reader at about page 31 — is that this is not really a novel either, with three-dimensional characters who live in a fully-realized fictional world. It was on page 31 — when Jobs, devastated by the possibility that the options backdating scandal might cost him control of his company, goes home, smokes some pot, and calls his house manager at her boyfriend’s house to come over and make him a mango smoothie — that it occurred to me that the real Steve Jobs doesn’t live alone. He lives in a real house with a real wife and real children. And he probably doesn’t have the luxury of getting stoned, dropping acid, running off to San Francisco with his friend Larry Ellison to shoot paintball guns at the homeless, or any of the other reckless things FSJ does on a whim in this book.

For whatever reason — perhaps the pressure of writing a novel on deadline on top of his regular online posts and his day job as an editor at Forbes — the challenge of bringing Fake Steve Jobs convincingly to life was too much for Lyons. Instead we get what is in effect a 248-page blog entry populated by paper-thin characters who just aren’t that funny. It’s a lesson in how literary tricks that made for truly brilliant short-form writing can grow lame when played again and again at book length

The novel also suffers from the timidness of Da Capo Press and its libel lawyers, who have shorn Lyons of one of the features that made his blog must-reading among Silicon Valley insiders: his willingness to skewer real computer industry executives, from Microsoft’s Bill (”the Beastmaster”) Gates to Sun’s Jonathan (”My Little Pony”) Schwartz, without pulling any punches. With the exception of Ellison, almost all the identities in Options have been fudged, turning what might have been a razor sharp parody into a coy roman a clef.

It’s been a tough few months for Danny Lyons, between his outing by the New York Times and the rush to get this book out on schedule. The best part is that none of it seems to have slowed his online output — or his willingness to call ‘em like he sees ‘em. His Sept. 3 rant against the TV Networks is as good as anything he’s written to date — and as smart a critique of the broadcast industry as you’re likely to read anywhere.