Congratulations Conando and Ross the Intern.

I don't think a comic should ever apologize for a bad joke. Because there is no such thing as a bad joke. Sometimes, I'll be watching the Tonight Show monologue and Jay will get a silent audience from a two-liner and start apologizing while meanwhile back at the ranch here, I am busting a gut over the exact same bit.

And, well, it looks like my favorite Conan segment is not going to be revealed as one of the "final cylons". My official selection: Borat climbing all over the set trying to harvest Conan's "pubis" hair. Lucky for me, I have it saved. On my mac. For all time.

I have to get to bed early. Tomorrow I'm going back to Texas to help bootstrap the Bush Twin's 2012 Presidential Campaign. I can't think of anything more inspiring than seeing those two girls running the free world as President and Vice-President with daddy George W, Uncle Jeb, and Grandaddy George Sr. calling the shots from the shadows.

How lucky that I have a close proximity to Hollywood on Oscar's day. There is nothing like the Academy Awards to remind ourselves how important movies are and how dreadfully difficult it is to point a camera at a group of people and shout: "Talk!"

I'm starting to get the feeling that people think I don't believe in nepotism. Don't be silly. Nepotism played a key role in the founding of America. And nepotism has already produced the greatest world leader of my generation. Hello! If it works for world leaders, it works for entertainers. Because if we're talking about funny, I can't think of anything funnier than a political satirist who has ascended via a nepotistic system thinly disguised as a democracy in order to satirize a nepotistic system thinly disguised as democracy. It's like Lou Gehrig getting Lou Gehrig's disease: what are the chances of that happening?

Back in the summer of 1988, I was hanging out in Alphabet City with my chum, Jim Chu. He had lived in the same apartment all his life, on Avenue A between 5th and 6th. I was staying in a bunk in an office in his dad's four story walkup -- on 10th between B & C.

Anyway, we spent most nights walking around the East Village. We did construction for his dad in the day. One night we were walking near St. Marks Place and suddenly there were crowds of people running through the streets and eventually, huge teams of policemen in full riot gear facing off against the protesters. We headed back to Jim's apartment, threading our way through the melee, past Tompkin's Square Park, where they were burning a man in effigy (Mayor Koch -- as it turned out). I used to have photos (taken with my Pentax K1000), along with some other ones taken from the top of the Twin Towers observation deck. But they didn't survive.

Those were interesting times. Between that and surviving three litigations, the notion that a bunch of sketch comics sequestered away in Midtown would ever be able to ruffle my feathers is, quite literally, hilarious.

That's one theory. There are others...

First thought, best thought.

-Chogyam Trungpa

I do my best work in bed.

-Mae West

Release often, release early.

Now, if you've been following the saga of Jay Leno and his Tonight Show replacement, Conan O'Brien, you may have seen Jay's recent "As Seen on eBay" desk piece. Nobody is exactly sure what is going to happen after the switchover. However, we did hear that the studio audience was privvy to several eBay items that were not included in the broadcast master distributed to NBC affiliates via pneumatic tube.

Now, the first one might surprise you. Jay showed us a gold-foil bag of hemp-laced coffee that had failed to sell. Hello? Coffee doesn't help you write jokes, but it might help your P.A. learn Final Draft faster. Anyway, a reliable source said this is the real item that they are using to fumigate the writer's room at the Tonight Show. Imported from New York, apparently. Sold or not sold?

Now, if you're a follower of the show, this next item won't surprise you at all. It's a book of over 1000 Paris Hilton jokes from Jay's 2008 opening monologues. Sold or not sold?

I heard a rumor that a half-japanese drag queen in a pink jumpsuit with tourette syndrome was removed by security after disrupting the Tonight Show taping by yelling expletives such as "You can keep your $50, just give me the FAX number to Jay's two-liner farm team and I will THROW DOWN!" and "Even my pet monkey can write Paris jokes: he just has trouble with touch tone dialing!"

I got some bad news recently. I learned that SCTV, my favorite joint, is no longer on the air. But the good news is that there is another similar show -- that has no name -- broadcast live from NYC most Saturday nights (I've only seen about 9 episodes, but it seems pretty cool). Which is what you get when you only watch TV for afew years in the 80s and afew years in the 00s.

Apparently, many TV stations are still relying on an arcane snake oil "system" called Nielsen ratings to estimate the popularity of a media property. Here on the internet, the word is that Apache logs and Google analytics are the only way to tell for sure. Here's an exercise: take a terabyte and divide by the average size of a mp3 pop song encoded at 128k.

Until last night, my favorite show with Alec Baldwin was the Hulu commercial. Now it's the Wii sketch. Rock on Seth & Paula!