Woz's quip:

I was more shocked than any time in my life. Maybe except when I got served with divorce papers.

Turns out I'm not alone in thinking Woz makes a great reality TV star. It's not like we want to watch quality dancing; we just want entertainment. And we're getting it for at least one more week.

Still, he scored a modest 17 out of 30, and the judges told him he needed to work on things like "dance quality" and "endurance." Oh, please. This is America! No one succeeds on actual talent anymore. You just have to be liked. And who can't like a rotund dude who ends his dance with a Tom Selleck beefcake pose?

Watch for Woz's ex, comedienne Kathy Griffin, in the audience:

Woz was photographed leaving dancing practice with a cast on his left leg. His next dance will be "wild and fast and all-over crazy and fun, just like the first one," he told fans in an email that one republished on his Facebook page. Entertaintment Tonight reports that an ABC spokesperson has confirmed Woz's plans to keep competing.

Wild, fast, and crazy, with a fractured leg? That's the kind of braggadocio that led Woz to create Apple's first hit computers, the Apple I and Apple II three decades ago — and led him to enter the dance competition in the first place. But human bodies are not mutable digital objects, like the silicon chips and digital bits he manipulated into personal computers. We can admire his resilience even as we scratch our heads at his quixotic terpsichorean quest. A leg fracture isn't simply something you can debug. But this drama — geek obstinance versus corporeal decomposition — makes for must-see TV.

(Photo via Entertainment Tonight/Adrian Varnedoe/Pacific Coast News)

It's a phenomenon the geeks are already calling "Dancing with the Woz" and is potentially the greatest terpsichorean trainwreck in television history. Woz has entered the ABC dance competition to prove that anyone can learn some new steps, and his fans are already gearing up to stack the vote by any means necessary. Wozniak has asked tech-savvy viewers not to hack ABC's voting systems. If that happens, it will be just part of the circus that will make this a must-see.

When did computer-company founders become reality-TV contestants? When they stopped having anything resembling a real job. If hard-driving Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on technology's A list, then Woz, who dropped out of Apple to teach at a public school, and then returned to a life of studied Silicon Valley dilettantery, is surely on its D list.

Indeed, he's so on the D list that he dated My Life on the D List's Kathy Griffin for a while, before a surprise marriage (his fourth) to an Apple colleague last August.

Wags are already calling his pairing with dancer Karina Smirnoff "Beauty and the Beast." But Woz makes up for his schlumpy, bearded appearance with a lot of what American Idol's judges call "likeability." Unlike Jobs, who is obsessive about his privacy to the point of being a snarling jerk, Woz overshares to a degree that the Twitter generation finds charming. He's a bit of a prankster — which means we might have some on-air pratfalls to look forward to. He may not make for a conventional TV star, but he's perfect for the low expectations of today's reality lineup.

Obsessive fanboy Brian Tong of CNET infiltrated Woz's dance studio and interviewed him for the clip above. "If you ever want to focus on one thing and see how far you can go, this is the way to do it," Woz says. Here's the full segment from CNET's "The Apple Byte":

• Blogger Michael Arrington holds his New York City TechCrunch party at BED, the bar/restaurant furnished with beds instead of couches, once featured on Sex in the City. One Yelp reviewer says, "It's a definite must for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd." Expect plenty of confusion as the selective bouncers reject Arrington's more unfashionable guests. [TechCrunch]
• Meanwhile, Arrington keeps collecting blog enemies, including Paul Stamatiou, who puts Arrington at the top of his list of insufferably ignorant bloggers with undeserved fame. [Drums n Whistles, Paul Stamatiou]
• How do startup founders prepare for fawning profiles in the mainstream press? By getting fawning profiles in the college press. Most ridiculously laudatory line: "Gregarious and not exactly shy, Afrooz has already assembled a respectable number of Facebook friends at Berkeley, despite living off campus." [UC Berkeley News]
• MySpace gets ready to scrub copyrighted music from the site — not such a big deal since every band puts its own music up there anyway. [Reuters]
• Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus gets an e-mail from the head of yesnomaybe.com. The new dating site begs the males dominating its user base to sign up their hot female friends. As Mark notes, what a lame plan — and free premium accounts for women is a sure sign of a lousy dating site. [Mark Pincus]
• A Forbes writer brilliantly spins the plague of awful startup names (Pluggd, Gabbr, Wufoo) as a sign of prudent spending — these unregistered domains cost their new owners about eight bucks a pop, instead of the $10,000 demanded for URLs like plugged.com. [Forbes]
• Local video blog Geek Entertainment TV interviews Apple co-founder and Segway enthusiast Steve Wozniak about the company's recent recall. [GETV]

As teenagers, before they co-founded Apple Computer Inc., Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs would listen to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and debate which one was better.

Dylan, with his soulful lyrics, won.

Clearly these gentlemen never heard the touching beauty of "I am the Walrus." Anyway, the Chron says the book centers on Woz and Jobs's teen years. We'll print a review here as soon as the mailman brings our Amazon package.

Wozniak book reveals the core of Apple [SF Chronicle]