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Jon Stewart’s on Fresh Air today. He’s not as good a guest as he is an interviewer, but it’s still worth a listen.

Every time I hear him speak “off air,” I’m reminded that The Daily Show is intended to not only skewer the news, but also the major networks’ coverage of the news. Now, this is probably obvious to anyone who actually watches any of the major news networks (either in 24 hour or 30 minute form). But thanks to the glory that is Tivo, the interweb and the grueling 880 commute, my news intake these days consists of wsj.com, nytimes.com, news.yahoo.com, NPR and, of course, The Daily Show.

The thought that I’m missing half the joke is somewhat stressful. Are there Paula Zahn jokes I’m not getting? Are they inserting sly references to Wolf Blitzer’s beard? Is Steven Colbert supposed to be imitating any one of those trench coated, tough jawed correspondents in particular? Heck, for all I know the entire show could be some kind of underhanded parody of Anderson Cooper, and I’d be none the wiser.

All it takes is one goddamned story about Cat Stevens and I’ve got Moon Shadow stuck in my head. Quick, someone bring me something cleansing and astringent – like the new Green Day, perhaps – before this ear worm eats its way through my brain.

Taking inspiration from Merlin Mann’s fantastic 43 Folders, here’s a quick hint for those of you who are just dying to use John Gruber’s Markdown (the script version, not the MT plugin version, though use of it there is obviously encouraged) on Windows.

I assume, of course, that if you’re looking to use Markdown on Windows, you’ve taken the first important step and installed Cygwin in order to afford yourself a proper bash environment and a local install of Perl. (If not, well, go do that first and come back here later.) If you’re already there, then all you need to do is…

1. Download Markdown and unzip it to a directory of your choice. Mine is dumped into ~/stuff/bin.

2. Launch your Cygwin shell. Make sure that your Cygwin install has getclip and putclip installed (they should be in your /usr/bin). These little utilities give Cygwin access to the Windows clipboard.

3. Open up a text editor, write some text in Markdown syntax. Copy it to your clipboard.

4. Alt-tab over to your Cygwin shell and type the command _getclip

   /path/to/your/Markdown.pl

   putclip_. This should (silently) get the contents of your Windows clipboard, pipe it through Markdown, and put it back out to your clipboard.

5. Alt-tab over to your text editor, hit CTRL-V, and enjoy properly marked-down text.

For speed, edit your .bashrc (or equivalent) to create an alias for that command up there to something easier to remember, and faster to type.

Enjoy.