1. Magician/juggler/comedian/Libertarian/atheist/nut Penn Jillette does a highly entertaining daily radio show out of his Las Vegas home. The show has not been picked up by any radio station in St. Louis (remember earlier when I said “atheist”?) but it is online as a podcast, and listening to it is often one of the highlights of my workday. This is saying something; Penn takes a lot of calls, and it is almost a physical impossibility for me to listen to a call-in show for more than fifteen seconds without an involuntary arm spasm knocking my palm into the dial. Smart person + radio = idiot.

Several months ago, the breathless, free-form stream of consciousness that is Penn Radio found its way to an anecdote about Penn inviting a chimp and a dwarf to the same party, which turns out to be a terrible life-threatening faux pas. (Apparently chimps get really angry at dwarves due to some social dominance issues.) Based on the popularity of this (eventually two-episode-spanning) anecdote, Penn decided to have a Monkey Tuesday on which callers could phone in with their own simian stories.

The first Monkey Tuesday was over six months ago. They have done it almost every Tuesday since, and they have never, ever run out of callers with monkey stories. Every single week, callers and e-mailers fill the entire hour with monkeys without an end in sight. In recent months, Penn has actually disqualified all stories about monkeys throwing excrement or performing sex acts, and they still fill every single show. America has a bottomless reserve of funny monkey encounters and stories of same. If our men of science could discern a way to convert monkey stories into electricity, Penn Radio would be the source of a renewable resource that could power every car in the country. Provided we only drove on Tuesdays.

2. In 2006 A.D., the latest CD of an artist whose first album came out in 1983 debuted in the top 10 on Billboard and in the top 5 on iTunes. That artist’s name is Weird Al Yankovic.

Who else is still huge from 1983? Anybody searching Youtube for the newest Sting video?*

Guy who sang “Eat It”: top-selling artist 20 years later. Guy who sang “Beat It”: horrific pariah. Betcha didn’t see that comin’.

*If you had a time machine and could take a copy of that Sting/Sheryl Crow duet to the recording studio where the Police made “Synchronicity,” and you played it for them, what do you think they would do? Do you think the Police would kill Sting to prevent Future Sting, or do you think Sting would kill himself? Those are the only two possible outcomes.