…before pay-per-view cable channels, championship boxing matches used to be telecast exclusively on “closed-circuit” feeds to movie theaters and arenas. For home audiences, the promoters would license one TV or radio network to broadcast a studio-based show, in which an announcer would read round-by-round descriptions of the action transmitted by teletype from the fight venue.

This is the closest precedent I can think of for “live blogging.”

One of the chief live-blogged events every year is Steve Jobs’s keynote address at the Macworld Expo, Apple’s chief vehicle for announcing new products.

Yes: An event that’s all about the latest, greatest, and shiniest electronic media devices gets its first communication to the outside world by the modern equivalent of telegraph-era technology. Guys with WiFi-equipped laptops sit in the audience and type out brief descriptions of what they hear and see.

(Apple used to try live online video streams of the Jobs speeches. But they never mastered the bandwidth issues. Online video is better suited for recorded content and niche audiences than for a lot of people watching the same live thing.)

So, like thousands of the Mac faithful, I went to Mac news-and-rumor Web sites to read about what Jobs was saying while he was saying it, accompanied by the occasional still digi-pic.

I’ll let other sites explain what Jobs said and showed. As many sites predicted, there’s a new really thin laptop computer, online movie rentals (some in hi-def!), and software updates to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. There’s also a new wireless external hard drive. All the live bloggers gushed in insta-print over all the stuff.

But they disagreed with the show’s closing entertainment. Jobs trotted out one of his celeb pals, Randy Newman. He performed “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” his return to his old snide singer-songwriter act after several years of toiling in the family business of soundtrack composing.

One live-blogger, Jason Snell, was apparently only used to Newman’s movie songs. Here’s Snell’s comments, reconfigured into chronological order:

“Randy’s singing a song about America, the president, and comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. USA! USA! USA!!!!!“’It pisses me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to outlive me.’” What the crap is he singing about? We have no idea. We think he’s gone nuts.

‘The first song’s over, but now Randy Newman’s just riffing about random stuff. The next song is from Toy Story. Randy says he wrote another song to go with the love scene between Buzz and Woody, but the scene was cut. This guy is blowing our minds right now.

“Holy crap. Who knew Randy Newman, the guy who makes the songs your kids play over and over and over again, would sing such crazy crap about our government?”

My question is different: Who knew such impolite but lucid talk about the end of the American empire would find an outlet at a Fortune 500 company’s PR show?