A bit of stand-up comedy …

The very funny “Funny or Die” has a regular bit titled, “Adam West hits on you, hard.”

It’s all about Adam doing a classic one-liner while holding a drink at a bar.

For example, West is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and holding a colored drink decorated with a tiny parasol and he says, “Are you from Tennessee? <beat> Because you’re the only ‘ten’ I see.”

I think it’s time to update those old tropes to the modern age of sexting, Twitter and the overall meme of the less characters you use, the better.

With that in mind:

The establishing shot is me in a bar, artfully grasping a suitable drink — maybe a bottle of beer, maybe a single malt with a splash.

And the line?

<beat> “I bet you taste good.”

DVD recommendation — “Gentlemen Broncos”

If you like Napoleon Dynamite (from the same creators) or Flight of Conchords (stars Jemaine Clement) be sure to check out Gentlemen Broncos. It’s coming out Tuesday on DVD and I caught a pre-street tonight. Funny, quirky, a little bit stupid and totally worth seeing.

Saturday video fun — Mr. Show’s “The Joke”

Yes, it’s the hated milk machine from the first season of Mr. Show with Bob and David. And yes, that is a young Jack Black.

If the Large Hadron Collider worries you …

… just hit this link for a status report.

(Hat tip: Hit & Run)

Quantum stickiness, Hawking and teh funny

From KurzweilAI.net, micromachine stiction, Stephen Hawking tackles the universe’s inflation and defining humor.

How a quantum effect is gumming up nanomachines

New Scientist news service, June 28, 2008 Researchers are making progress in overcoming static friction, or or “stiction,” which sticks together the parts of micromachines on scales of between 10 and 300 nanometers and limits progress in reducing their size, affecting computer hard drives and other devices with small moving parts. Stiction is due to the Casimir effect, a quantum-mechanics phenomenon that causes surfaces to be attracted. Methods to reduce its effect include use of patterned surfaces, suspending the components in a liquid, and use of metamaterials.   Read Original Article>>

Hawking ‘close’ to explaining universe’s inflation

New Scientist (article preview), June 28, 2008 Starting with current observations of the universe and working back to narrow down the initial set of possibilities and by treating the early cosmos as a quantum object with a multitude of alternative universes that gradually blend into ours, Stephen Hawking and colleagues think they are close to perfecting an answer to explain why the infant universe expanded so rapidly. (Subscription required)   Read Original Article>>

Mechanism and function of humor identified by new evolutionary theory

PhysOrg.com, June 27, 2008 Humor occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, suggests Alastair Clarke in the forthcoming book, Humour. “Now that we understand the mechanism of humour, the possibility of creating an artificial intelligence being that could develop its own sense of humour becomes very real,” he says. “This would, for the first time, create an AI capable of exhibiting one of the defining characteristics that make us human, making it seem significantly less robotic as a result.”   Read Original Article>>

Go to hell in the UK

This website is great. It lists entrances to hell around the UK. Click on a few of the listings. Funny, funny stuff. Sites like these remind me of the wild and woolly olden days of internet yore — like B2K (before the year two thousand.)

(Hat tip: the Corner)