One homily my grandparents never said to me it was that old chestnut that: “An internet telethon without special guests is like a day without sunshine.”

Thankfully we don’t need to worry about that oversight, since we have awesome special guests showing up throughout the Couchathon to entertain you, taunt the Imponderables, and entertain you BY taunting the Imponderables.

Make sure you’re back here in just a few short hours for a chance to see some of the following incredibly talented individuals appearing at random times:

Debra DiGiovanni
debradg.com

Jon Dore
The John Dore Show

Nikki Payne
nikkipayne.com

Dave Bidini
davebidini.ca

And the e-mails just keep pouring in! The only way to make sure you don’t miss a single guest is to watch the Couchathon. The whole thing. All the time. Everywhere. And also make sure you throw our video player, donation buttons, and link banners on every possible surface you can think of!

We’ve had a very good day here at Couchathon HQ as press is starting to really pick up. How good a day? We had more web traffic today by noon than the entire history of couchathon.com. Combined.

The best part of lots of traffic is seeing all the great blogs and websites that have taken the time to say nice things about the event. We appreciate each and every link - even if you don’t have a plug nickel to donate to us come Thursday, you can still help by trumpeting our epic windmill-tilt at blogs, websites, and forums far and wide. So wide, in fact, that the Swedish blogosphere is pumped for the Couchathon!

På torsdag ska jag inte göra någonting, bara sitta i soffan hela dagen och kolla på “The Couchathon”, där de stänger in fyra komiker i ett rum med en soffa och gör taskiga saker mot dem. Ju mer pengar de samlar in till välgörenhet ju längre tvingas de fyra stackarna sitta i den jävla soffan, det hela kan teoretiskt hålla på i en evighet. Och nej, de får absolut inte sova. Kalaset kan ses via stream på thecouchathon.com.

(apply a little Google Translate magic and:)

On Thursday, I will not do anything, just sit on the couch all day and watch “The Couchathon,” where the bars four comedian in a room with a sofa and doing dodgy things against them. The more money they collect to charity the longer forced the four stackarna sit in the damn couch, it could theoretically go on forever. And no, they should certainly not sleep. Banquet can be seen through the stream of thecouchathon.com.

Incidentally “The four stackarna sit in the damn couch” is our new slogan.

Tackar så mycket, Dr. Hannes Modig!

If you want to help our international star rise we have a whole lot of new stuff on the spread the word page you can put on your own website - banners, the actual embed feeds for the video player, our cool flash ustream chat box - and our ChipIn donation button!

Heck you could watch the couchathon, chat with us, and throw us some money to keep going without leaving your home website! Now that’s service.

We conclude our thrilling introductory phone calls with Matt and I (on behalf of the rest of the RocketAce crew) ruminating on what the heck we’re getting into.

Now hopefully you have a better idea of the subtle dread and quiet panic that has been creeping into all our phone conversations for the last week! Is it too late to back out? Absolutely!

Part four (of five), the penultimate introductory “Couchathon” phone call combines the most heart-pounding elements of Sunday telemarketing phone calls, with Tony’s views on his Italian heritage. (Note: Tony’s views on his Italian heritage are not necessarily those of Couchathon.com, our sponsors, employees, or assigns… capice?)

We continue with the third thrilling introductory phone call profiling our Couchathon ass-tranauts (no I’m not sick of that pun yet, thank you very much). In this one we combine the most heart-pounding elements of Sunday telemarketing phone calls, with speed-googling information about “Destiny’s Child”.

As promised, the second of five thrilling introductory phone calls which combine the most heart-pounding elements of Sunday telemarketing phone calls, and my heavy mouth-breathing into a headset microphone.

In this episode: Jon demonstrates a (disconcerting) knowledge of the psychology of the rest of the group.

Couchathon fans in the Greater Toronto Area (or anywhere blanketed by the radiation from Toronto’s mind controlling tower) will want to tune in to the Edge (102.1 FM) morning show tomorrow (Tuesday Nov. 4) to catch some of the Couchathon team talking about how this horrible, horrible, idea has taken on a life of it’s own.

Couchathon fans outside the Greater Toronto info-sphere can forgo the fancy wizardry of “pulling streaming audio out of thin air through transistor-based electronics”, and just use the old fashioned Internet radio feed here.

Couchathon fans at the corner of Yonge and Queen - can just walk over to the Edge’s street-front studio and throw things at us.

We’ll be on sometime around 9 EST, so tune in around 8-ish and prepare for shilling. Shilling so hard it hurts. Maybe we’ll get to meet Todd. Maybe we’ll get to punch Todd. That would truly be living the dream.

As promised we have five thrilling introductory phone calls which combine the most heart-pounding elements of Sunday telemarketing phone calls, and heavy mouth-breathing into a microphone.

In this episode: Dave kicks things off!

Let’s end this week of awesome sponsors with one of my favourite Couchathon stories so far:

Because our own gear is such a mish-mash of multiple resolutions, formats, and cameras, we needed to find one standard camera that we could get multiple copies of for the telethon (chari-cast? inter-thon?). The webcameras we had were too low resolution, the camcorders we had weren’t chainable. Switching between a mix of webcams and camcorders looked… awful.

Some local business had offered a lot of clearance webcam stock they couldn’t sell, so I was spending my nights desperately trying to get some serviceable, ancient, webcameras to work with Apple OSX to see if that was a solution. Webcams and Apple don’t exactly get along, so I’d plow away until the wee hours, only to find out that a particular type wasn’t compatible, or was broken, or had horrific quality, or all three. Finally, I gave the whole thing up as a bad deal.

During my trials someone on-line had suggested that The Agent v3 by Liquid Digital, as a webcam that would do *exactly* what I wanted (but couldn’t get) the other cameras to do - high resolution, fast framerate, glass lens, Mac and PC compatible, works with CamTwist… heck they were even tripod mountable. That’s just taunting at that point.

So on a whim, I sent a quick e-mail off to see if there was any way they’d consider lending us a couple. James from Liquid Digital wrote back in less than five minutes that they’d send us as many as we needed. Furthermore, instead of a temporary loan, they’d donate them to be auctioned off during the event with the proceeds put towards the Couchathon itself!

So when you tune in to the Couchathon on November 6th, you’ll be seeing exactly what these cameras can do, plus have a chance to take home a “Couchathon tested” Agent v3 of your very own. I really wish I’d thought of “sending an e-mail, and waiting five minutes” prior to the two weeks of hair-pulling and driver-editing aggrivation I went through instead.

As awesome as this story is, what makes it my favourite is that it’s not unique. Every sponsor on the right be it NOW Magazine, USTREAM.tv, Trew Audio, or Agent v3 Webcams has, with no prodding, blackmail, or other conceivable motivating factor, agreed to give space, bandwidth, equipment, support, technical advice, and encouragement to a small group of guys who want to sit on a couch for charity.

And that is awe inspiring.

UP NEXT WEEK: Meet your ass-tranauts.

So we’ve got at least two major sponsorship announcements to make before this unfortunate enterprise takes off - and the first one’s a doozy!

Ustream.tv is one of the oldest and largest streaming video portals on the Internet, and they have stepped up to support the Couchathon in a big way. They’re not only host to nearly half-a-million registered viewers, who create hundreds of thousands of hours of content a month, but they’ve also presented United Nations conferences, the WEB 2.0 EXPO, and more political events than you can shake a stick at (including both the Democratic and Republican national conventions down south of the 49th parallel this year).

With a pedigree that impressive, and standards that high, is it any wonder they offered up their classy portal and jumped at the chance to be the official streaming partner of four Canadian comedians who will likely throttle each other in a small room for charity?

Yes, actually. Yes it is.