By Daniel Lyons

The coverage of Steve Jobs of Apple and his health woes is starting to remind me way too much of the old Generalissimo Francisco Franco jokes on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s. Back then, Chevy Chase would report that “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” – a dark-humored play on the drawn-out coverage of Franco’s declining health, in which newscasters had solemnly reported that Franco was still alive.

So, we are told, is Steve Jobs. We know this because a terse and somewhat grumpy letter was issued from the Apple mothership in Cupertino, Calif., today, over the signature of Dear Leader himself. In this letter, Jobs acknowledges that he’s lost a great deal of weight in the past year, and says doctors have finally figured out what’s causing it – it’s a hormone imbalance. And now he’s being treated for it, and he should start gaining weight again soon, and he hopes to recover by spring. And, as Jobs finishes up in his letter, “So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.”

Left unaddressed were fears that Jobs has suffered a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he underwent surgery four years ago. Today’s note doesn’t mention cancer at all. From this we are presumably meant to infer that Jobs does not have cancer again. That at least is the message Wall Street took from the news, as Apple shares popped  four bucks today, to $94.

Even those who hate Twitter tend to like the concept of fake Twitter -- that is, false accounts for real people that come off as absurdly plausible, or plausibly absurd.

The best of these can be great satire. The fake Twitter feed of Michael Bay, for example -- whose approach to directing movies seems to be making everything in them bigger, bigger and bigger -- claims that he has just signed on to direct "Slumdog Billionaire." Back in January 2008, the acid postings of @FakeHillary amused the presidential candidate’s traveling press corps with tweets like, “Apparently there is a limit to how much I can say here (I wonder if the male candidates have the same limit?)” And half the fun of following the Twitter feed of @THE_REAL_SHAQ when it first appeared in November was trying to figure out if its author was the actual Phoenix Suns center or not. (It’s Shaquille.)

But now there’s Twitter hacking, a more malicious version of fake content on the site. Today, the microblogging service announced that 33 bona fide accounts, including those of President-elect Barack Obama, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and singer Britney Spears, had been broken into and defaced with juvenile updates. "i am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today," read the official feed of CNN anchor Rick Sanchez; "Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay," read O'Reilly's page.

Not exactly Jonathan Swift, but the crudeness amused many bloggers, Valleywag among them. Twitter called the matter "a very serious breach of security" and says its support team has identified and disabled the part of its site that failed.