The New York Times told a great little story yesterday about how Conan O'Brien spun arcane bureaucratic FCC regulations into comedy gold. After mentioning a made-up website called hornymanatee.com during a bit two weeks ago, Conan was told that NBC was legally obligated to buy the domain name.

How crazy is that? Just because wacky Conan mentions a URL, General Electric has to drop $159 to register the domain name for a site devoted to sexually aroused underwater mammals! All because of those fuddie-duddies in Washington!

Conan got such a kick out of it he actually created a mock porn site about horny manatees, mentioned it on the air, and sat back as 3 million visitors poured in.

Except: There are no FCC regulations that required NBC to buy the domain. "We have no regulations dealing with URLs," says David Fiske, an FCC spokesman. "I don't know what they're talking about, frankly."

"Yeah, the Times overstated that a bit!" wrote Marc Liepis, a spokesman for the show, in an e-mail, explaining that NBC has a policy of registering domain names mentioned on-air not to comply with regulations but "to prevent others from registering sites that our talent mention, then trading off our intellectual property."

Of course, "Late night host creates irreverant website—because the FCC made him!" is a much better story than, "NBC creates website to promote itself."

Whatever: Conan got a Times story out of it.