You may think you don't know John Hodgman, but you do. He's PC to Justin Long's Mac in the ubiquitous Apple computer commercials. You probably see him more than you see your kids.

Yes, he's a long-time Mac user. And no, he doesn't mind being recognized for his Vista-defending alter ego.

``Weirdly, I have kind of the best of both worlds,'' he says from the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. ``I am proud of the affiliation with a product I like. People are nice about it. The Mac users, one of the reasons they're happy is the product is compelling. The flip side is I am also approached by people who use PCs, and to them I'm a folk hero. . . . I'm a little sheepish about it. I want to ask, `You understand who's paying for these ads, right?' ''

What you may not know about Hodgman, who is also a contributor to The Daily Show, is that he's also an author of fake trivia books, most recently the hilarious More Information Than You Require (Riverhead, $15 in paper), which he'll talk about Saturday at Miami Book Fair International in an appearance with fellow Daily Show contributor Larry Wilmore.

Here's something else you didn't know: Fake trivia books require real research. You can't just write that Teddy Roosevelt had a hook for a hand without making sure he didn't.

``It's not what I had in mind when I proposed a book of fake trivia,'' Hodgman admits. ``I thought I was going to escape that tiresome chore. But you do want the falsehoods to ring hollow with a little bit of truth to them. So I do have to do some reading. But luckily the Internet is such a wonderful resource of dubious scholarship. It's a treasure trove of questionable facts.''

He will, however, defend Wikipedia: ``I think Wikipedia is maligned; it tends to be pretty accurate. I would go so far as to say pretty darned accurate.''

Writing fake trivia books, says Hodgman, who once worked as a literary agent, was ``my dream. If it were a success -- and there was no certainty of that -- that would be something I could do for the rest of my life.''

Then he went on The Daily Show to promote his first book, The Areas of My Expertise, and was offered a spot as a contributor, a position not to be confused with ``correspondent.''

``Contributors have it easy,'' he says. ``We breeze into work with the greatest staff on TV to create TV when we feel like it. We don't have to go through the torture of going out into the field to do reported pieces. We don't have to embarrass or humiliate ourselves in any way. For a long time we had the best suits, too. The correspondents were constantly destroying their suits. Contributors could safely garment bag it all the way.''

He figures Wilmore, the seasoned comic, will get more laughs at their shared event, the first occasion they've appeared together.

``Larry has a lot more experience. He is a comedy professional, whereas I am a half-baked minor television personality and literary humorist. And the role of a literary humorist is not to get laughs. If you're lucky, you get audible, wry chuckles.''

John Hodgman appears 5 p.m. Saturday in the Chapman.

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