Number of years Pensito Review has been publishing. Thanks to all our readers.

It’s an honor to be nominated, but, hey, winning is even better, so please take a moment and vote for via the online ballot here: 2010 Florida Netroots Awards.

According to the results for my ZIP Code in West Hollywood, 55.9 percent of my neighbors are categorized “never married,” but I doubt this number counts folks like me who have California state-sanctioned domestic partnerships. Among my neighbors, a scant 24.2 percent are in dual-sex marriages.

Education-wise, we do pretty well considering the fact that movie industry types don’t always finish school: 94 percent have high school degrees and 53 percent have bachelor’s degrees or higher.

Median household income is $51k, which seems low when you consider that one-bedroom apartments rent for around $1,500 and two-bedroom homes sell for $1.5 million. Unemployment is 4.5 percent — have my doubts about this too since most everybody in the industry is self-employed and thus not considered in employment figures. The number of WeHoans living below poverty is 9.6 percent.

Our population density seems smaller than expected: 9600 people per square mile. One of the factoids that gets tossed about in these parts is that West Hollywood is the most densely populated town west of the Rockies — but this is probably an urban myth.

Another surprise: 47 percent of us have been here five years or longer. Would have thought it was more like 25 percent.

My ZIP is 82.7 percent white, 2.9 percent black and 7.3 percent latino. Multiracial is given at 2.5 percent.

The population is 59 percent male, which makes sense but the median age of the men is 39.6 years old, which means a lot of those twinks in Boys Town are lying about their ages. The median age of women is 40.6 years old.

USA Today did for the newspaper business what Kevin Federline did for rap music. OK, maybe not quite that bad, but you know what I mean.

You have to hand it to him, though, Neuharth says he still reads five or six newspapers a day, apparently with a straight face. And, it would seem from comments he made yesterday at a luncheon in his honor, that he’s an avid reader of Pensito Review:

He also reads blogs — “more than I’d care to mention” — but doesn’t have a particularly high regard for them. “Most of them, when I read them, I say, ‘This is a lot of interesting bullshit,’” he says. “But what bothers me about bloggers is there’s a growing sentiment that maybe the government should exercise some control over them. I’m totally opposed to that.” He likens today’s bloggers to the pamphleteers whose incendiary writing helped bring about the American Revolution.

That said, he has no interest in joining their ranks. “I use the internet to retrieve information, not to peddle information or gossip.”

It’s that “interesting bullshit” comment that leads me to believe Pensito Review is among the exaggerated number of blogs Neuharth reads. That’s how I usually describe my co-editors’ posts on this site, so it must be the case. And the “information or gossip” reference seals it.

I’m pretty sure Neuharth comments fairly regularly, too, as pie-chart-al@aol.com.

Hey, Al, congrats on the silver anniversary. According to a pie chart, there’s a 21.37 percent chance that you’ll continue to read Pensito Review.

And why, you might ask, would we at Pensito Review be partying on Aug. 8? To celebrate our founder’s birthday, of course! Happy birthday Jon! Love ya! Mean it!

Please add your own special birthday wishes for Jon in our comments section.

Let me just set the record straight — we here at Pensito Review did not receive Acer Ferrari computers from Microsoft. At least I know I didn’t. And I’m pretty sure that my fellow editors didn’t either. Jon would have bragged if he had received one, and Trish would have broken it within 48 hours and would have told us that via e-mail from her favorite North Florida library branch.

But the fact that we did not receive Acer Ferrari computers from Microsoft is beside the point — it’s our ethical standards that count, unlike those unscrupulous bloggers who kept their Acer Ferrari computers. Would we have sent our newly received Acer Ferrari computer back to the Microsoft public relations flack who sent it to us? You bet!

See, the only way that we here at Pensito Review can remain astride our high horses is to be living emblems of ethicality. The only way we can continue to muckrake is by staying above the muck or moral compromise. The only way we can, with clear consciences, lambaste wingnuts and Repugs with impunity is to be better than they are, which, though relatively easy, does require some effort. We have our standards, and by golly, we’re sticking to them, no matter how many Acer Ferrari computers Microsoft throws at us.

You know, this is not the first instance where Microsoft has tried to influence public opinion through a shameless public relations ploy.

In 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported that Microsoft, during its antitrust trials, hired PR companies to flood newspapers with fake letters of support, bearing ordinary individuals’ names but actually written by Microsoft PR staff.

Pensito Review did not run those fake letters, and not just because it didn’t exist in 1998. If it had existed, we still would not have run fake-o PR letters.

Later, during the antitrust trials, Microsoft attempted to prove the inseparability of Windows and Internet Explorer by playing a video for the judge. But the government’s lawyer noticed that as the tape rolled on, the number of icons on the desktop kept changing. Microsoft had spliced together footage from different computers to make its point.

We would have been too savvy for that one, too. Especially Jon, who lives in Los Angeles and thus is close to the motion picture industry.

Then in 2002, Microsoft’s Web site featured a testimonial called “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert,” a first-person account by an attractive brunette “freelance writer” about how she had fallen in love with Windows XP.

Unfortunately, a Slashdot member discovered that the identical photo was available for rent from the stock-photo libraries of GettyImages.com. Sure enough: Microsoft had hired a PR firm to write the testimonial. The “switcher” did not actually exist.

That one would never have made it past our crack fact-checking team here at Pensito Review. Besides, anyone who has ever used a Macintosh computer would be utterly incapable of “falling in love” with Windows XP.

So the point that those “stunts” were pulled by Mircosoft before Pensito Review existed is moot. The real point is, our unassailable ethical standards would have protected us — like some kind of magical shield in a movie full of elves and orcs — from the evil minions of Microsoft.

I’m sure that Microsoft has not learned the error of its ways and the next time it introduces a new operating system it might send us a laptop computer to review that operating system. But we won’t take the bait from a company trying to exploit the lax ethical standards of the so-called blogosphere. We refuse to be stoogie tools of Bill Gates.

Nope. That puppy is going to be headed back to Redmond, Wash., just as quick as United Parcel Service can take it. Of course, it might not be fully functional. Right, Trish?

In the two years we have been publishing, the site has logged over 5 million page views, according to Webalizer software on our servers.

Thanks to all of you.

The annual honor for 2006 went to each and every one of us, as Time cited the shift from institutions to individuals — citizens of the new digital democracy, as the magazine put it. The winners this year were anyone using or creating content on the World Wide Web.

By those terms, Pensito Review certainly qualifies as Person of the Year. Hey, we create content, man. Currently, we have posted 3,228 (counting this one) posts. Our readers are almost as prolific, posting nearly 5,500 comments or complaints, so they get to share the singular honor of Person of the Yearhood with fellow digital democrats Jon, Trish and me.

Of course, some will say that Time was just being lazy in picking millions of people when there were so many stand-outs last year: Kim Jong Il, Vladimir “Polonium” Putin, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich, Nicole Richie — the list just goes on and on. But Time’s editor explains very well why they went with the cyber masses:

”If you choose an individual, you have to justify how that person affected millions of people,” said Richard Stengel, who took over as Time’s managing editor earlier this year. “But if you choose millions of people, you don’t have to justify it to anyone.”

Oh wait, some of those folks on my list actually did receive honorable mentions:

The magazine did cite 26 ”People Who Mattered,” from North Korean dictator Kim Jon Il to Pope Benedict XVI to the troika of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Hey, and since George Bush uses The Internets to access The Google, there’s a passing chance that he posted content, too, qualifying for double honors. Unfortunately, Time Managing Editor Stengel couldn’t leave well enough alone:

Stengel said if the magazine had decided to go with an individual, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the likely choice. ”It just felt to me a little off selecting him,” Stengel said.

A … little … off? Come on, Time, don’t cheapen our laurels! We deserve to be right up there with Bill and Melinda Gates, and Bono (last year’s PoYs). Leave Mahmoud out of it, man.