GadgetNugen

According to our Silicon Valley Gossip Monger pal, TechCrunch auteur Michael Arrington is taking his feud with Palm, Leo Laporte, and “everyone else who’ll actually look at the guy,” to the next level: Arrington is out to get Keyboard Cat.

We’ll spare you the longform of this story and suffice it to say that Arrington - who’s CrunchGear gadget blog apparently was not given an early review loaner of Palm’s new Pre smartphone - accused Laporte of being bought off by tech companies with gifts of gadgets.  Laporte took execption and called Arrington a troll, amongst other things.  Blah, blah, blah, my CPU is bigger than yours, you get the idea.  TechCrunch/CrunchGear writers have since been accused of anti-Palm bias in their coverage of the Pre by commenters with weird names seemingly taken from Aaron Sorkin screenplays.

We don’t know how any tech reviewers could ever be considered Not Biased, but that’s another story for another day.  Here’s the fun stuff:

“Mikey was basically over the whole fiasco, having made nice-nice with Leo via a post/comment exchange and such,” our source tells us.  “And then the Keyboard Cat video showed up on Attack of the Show.  Mike flipped out, and now he wants to take the cat out.  I hear he’s offering a totally brand new CrunchPad to whoever commits the deed.  That’s worth like $200 - $400, depending on who you ask.  I mean, if it ever comes out.”

Take the cat out?  Wow.  Before we could get clarification on what that might mean, our source had to go.  “Oh no,” s/he said via cell phone.  “Phil Schiller just walked into the bar I’m at.  I can’t be seen by him, at least not until July 16th.”  Huh.

At any rate, here’s the Keyboard Cat video - a spoof of the Arrington/Laporte exchange in which the infamous ivory-tickling feline tries to soothe everyone’s nerves.