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Remember when I talked about the Tesla Roadster back in Feb of 2008? Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk was on Letterman recently and gave a nice interview (below). Musk made the first of his several fortunes on Zip2 and PayPal before moving on to do the kind of world-changing work that he’s doing now.

A comedian buddy of mine recently launched a monthly themed storytelling event at Le Cagibi.

The inaugural storytelling theme was “the law” and I got on board both because I’ve been I’ve been buried for a long time in solitary writing and because the topic hit a nerve. The extent to which modern conservative governments are flagrantly breaking the law really upsets me.

I originally wanted to do a bunch of short stories about the scandals that are linked to up above, but time got the better of me. I only managed to bang out one before the June 26th reading.

The event was, I think, a big success. There was some comedy, some drama and some dramedy.

I thought it’d be fun to post up the story that I read that night along with a song that I think works well with the theme.

Hope you like it…

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Conan O’Brien casts his fake made-for-TV movie about the Eliot Spitzer scandal. Some really priceless choices in there (Bea Arthur’s is my fav. Knowing a bit about her temperament, she’ll probably sh*t a kitten.)

Why is the Internet so great? Because it tears down barriers to information and communication enabling the dream of creating truly free and democratic societies? OK, yes, there’s that, but the Internet also shows naked celebrities and often makes you laugh…

I saw Brandon Hardesty on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, tried to find this video online, couldn’t, tracked Brandon down through the Tubes and he quickly got back to me with the link below. Are the Internets awesome or what?

As you’ll see in this video Brandon is a grocery store clerk from Baltimore who re-creates scenes from movies in his parents’ basement. He does everything, the shooting, lighting, editing and acting. As in all the acting, every part.

Brandon is currently tackling Oscar-nominated films for Jimmy Kimmel and this is the first of the series, Brandon’s take on There Will Be Blood.

If loving this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Spotted over at Dead Things on Sticks. Love the aesthetic of this thing. Enjoy.

I’m still beavering away on this book that I’m writing, but I haven’t laughed this hard at an online video in some time. Science bless Bill Maher. Can’t wait for the new Real Time season to start.

UPDATE: This vid got broke over at the YouTubes. Here’s a new link.

This comes from a show called Fonejacker that’s broadcast at E4.

Hilarious.

Just For Laughs has asked me to do another audition for this year’s festival.

If you count the Montreal Homegrown Comic Competition (won by Claire), this will be my third JFL audition. Here’s hoping third time’s the charm… (not that I believe I’m ready for the festival yet, but it’s nice to be in the company of funny and seasoned comics that are also showcasing like this guy).

Yippee-ki-yay. Happy Friday. (Spotted over at Kung Fu Monkey.)

As I first wrote about here, Jeanne and I pitched a new radio series to CBC Radio back in December. Early in 2007 we got the go-ahead to produce a demo with Frank Opolko that we sent up the CBC Radio chain-of-command earlier in April.

And then we waited.

Today the CBC spoke. And there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the unscripted realness of the concept sort of frightens them. (Frankly it frightened us a bit too.) Overall, although they liked the way the demo sounded, the process of putting it all together was too unpredictable and time consuming for them and it would be too expensive to produce the show if we actually started getting paid for each hour of work. (If I sat down to figure out what our hourly wage for the demo was, I’d be surprised if we cracked into loonie territory.)

The good news is that they like us. Tom Anniko still wants us to do something for the CBC and Frank Opolko wants to keep working with us. So its back to the drawing board, but this time it’s gonna be scripted. Which is definitely fine with me. It’s (supposedly) what I do best.

We’ve already begun on the concept, but its too early for details. Watch this space for updates and thanks for listening.

Do y’all watch 30 Rock? Well you should. And one of the reasons is this guy: Jack McBrayer.

Listen to a great half-hour interview with McBrayer over at Jesse Thorn’s Sound of Young America. Funny stuff. You just might pee yourself.

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Katrna VandenHeuvel, editor of The Nation magazine did a great job on The Colbert Report the other night, but I still walk away from this clip marvelling at the performance of Stephen Colbert.

(Ever wonder what he’s gonna do when/if this character-based gig of his ever ends?)

Here’s the “what’s it going to sound like” demo for the new CBC radio series that Jeanne and I pitched to the network back in December.

Over the course of a few weeks, Jeanne and I worked with a variety of microphones, locations, friends and family (thanks to Massimo, DeAnne, Joanne, Graham, George and Beryl). With audio in-hand, the Jeanster and I then huddled together in the bowels of the CBC Montreal mothership with CBC producer Frank Opolko (an all around great guy and comedy radio legend who produced Radio One’s most popular comedy show ever “Madly Off in all Directions”).

The demo has been sent off to Tom Anniko, CBC’s radio ‘decider’. We should hear back by the end of April.

In the meantime, we’d really appreciate hearing what you think about the demo. You can leave your comments right here on this post.

(As always, iTunes users can subscribe to the irregularly updated SDtSU podcast by clicking here. If you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the podfeed by copying this link into your podcast player.)

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Are The Simpsons making a last-minute comedy comeback?

Check out this intro segment to a recent show. Feels like a return to older, gooder times…

Have you heard of Channel 101? 101 started out as a 5-minute film festival that challenged people to abandon perfectionism to make short little pieces for, essentially, themselves and their friends.

But something unexpected happened when the group started to mix time-pressure, talent, a wicked sense of humour and this new-fangled thing called the Internet: Heat Vision and Jack, the Lonely Island and, uh, fame.

Now, from the fertile mind of Channel 101 comes Acceptable.tv a weekly sort of uber sketch show airing on VH1.

Acceptable.tv lets the audience judge what lives and what dies on the show. Each week shows are voted off, shows are voted on.

You can see the current batch of shows here. Although I like “Homeless James Bond” and “The Teensies”, my hat goes off to the perfect satire of TV’s current round of shitty gameshows: “Who Farted?”

Jeanne and I are currently producing a demo radio show for the CBC and one of our influences for what we’re doing is WBEZ Chicago’s awesomest-amazing, This American Life with Ira Glass.

Now TAL is going to become a TV show and you can view a sample of what it’s going to look like here.

(And if you’re already a fan of This American Life you’ll love the spot-on parody that you can listen to

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I have my first Just For Laughs standup show in about 18 hours and all I can think about is that my whatever my future with JFL and comedy is, it’s going to be pretty impossible to top last summer when Jeanne and I were hired to work with John Cleese.

The whole experience deserves a proper long post, but it’s late and I gotta get to bed.

Here’s how it all went down on July 22, 2006…

My long-lost buddy Dan Guterman is a staff writer at The Onion.

Awhile back Dan brewed up this article that was loosely inspired by my own experience with cellphones.

(For the record, that’s not a picture of me and although I’m not really passionately anti-cellphone, the only time I’ve ever owned one was when I was given a company phone while I was working for Airborne Entertainment.)