Home from Edinburgh, having had a great week in Edinburgh.

Aside from performing in a few Imps shows whilst there (more on that later) we got to see around fifteen shows. Some were exceptional. Tim Key (this years main award winner) thoroughly deserved his accolades with his show, The Slutcracker, and his friend Tom Basden's show, Now That's What I Call Music-Based Comedy, was also great. They both have a similar style, delivering what could be described (simplistically) as intentionally bad poetry (Key) or songs (Basden) ("it's not intentional", says Key, "when I sit down to write a poem, I think 'Let's make this a good one'"). Basden is an excellent guitarist, I should also note. Their material is coupled with extensive use of multimedia and some props, making the show seem so much more than just stand-up. Key ends his show attempting to cross the room, aided by the audience, without touching the floor, paying off an earlier bit. Basden litters his shows with slides on his inventions (new boys names, girls names, maths) cartoons, and other ideas (a wordsearch comprising 100 letter Y's and the word 'Patio') set to music. I liked Key's show more, because of the quality of his performance, his delivery, his interactions with Fletch the techie, but Basden has perhaps been underated this year.

I also really like Laura Solon's first show in Edinburgh since winning the Perrier in 2005. She tells a story through a number of charachter (both male and female) which she voices. The story is both good in of itself and serves to allow a number of excellent standalone sketches (the French radio interview where the presenter and the French author debate whose culture is better, England or France is a highlight, as is her Welsh call-centre lady). The performance was energetic, her delivery impeccable and she seemed just, for want of a better word, lovely.

Rounding off my picks (bearing in mind I'm waiting to see Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee on their post Fringe tours) was Simon Munnery's 2009 AGM. For our ticket, we got an hour and a quarter in the venue, and a further hour in the pub after as he finished going through all the submitted motions, improvising responses leading into more established routines. It's incredible how much matertial he has to draw on, and style-wise, there's no-one like him ("I went swimming in the river: widths, mainly").

I saw a lot of sketch shows - the Bristol Revunions and Delete the BanJaX were really fun, especially the latter. They seemed liked good friends whose palable delight at performing together was infectious, and where bits fell apart due to exhaustion and lost voices at the end of the run, their good natured mocking of each other was pitched exactly right. One of the guys, Dan, was particularly difficult to stop watching, and his enormous personality was obvious in all his characters (both human and horse). I want to do shows with them.

The Durham Revue were disappointing - I've often enjoyed them more than their Oxford or Cambridge counterparts. Cath and I left feeling quite bored by the end, as the show ran out of ideas about halfway through. I enjoyed the Penny Dreadfuls and Pappy's Fun Club, although given the disputes over the latter between Imps, I've had quite enough of discussing its merits and shortcomings. Rich Hall was quite a letdown - it was a bit meandering, and while he's great at dealing with the unplanned bits with the audience, little of his material was as stellar as I've seen in the past.

There's more, but instead, let's talk about the Imps. I did three shows, and to be brutally honest, I didn't enjoy myself a huge amount. Part of this was being a little out-of-practice, and the problems with joining a group of people who have their own momentum. I also didn't particularly like the set lists - I find improvised musicals tedious and I don't have much more love for Shakespeare scenes either. I find them restrictive with their conventions and often too long and convoluted. I'm also not convinced the audience don't share my assessment, for all our own bluster. Quite frankly, I like short form with all its silliness and energy and gimmicks and short scenes which allow quick ideas and short bursts of insanity, and I like long form for the ability to develop ideas and characters slowly and build up layers of humour and bring back themes. Where the group currently is sits between these two, but without the positives of either.

Booom.

Barney Frank murked that shit.

Update: Colbert adds joy to already joyous event.

Loading up the BBC News website is always more entertaining when the side bar tells you that science proves zombies could annihilate humans.

In such an event, says science, "only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures." (I think it's the word 'fictional' in the last sentence that makes it comedic art). Because, science reminds us, "it's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble." (I would personally have added the word 'fictional' prior to the word 'trouble', but then I am known for overkill)

Of course, science may not have quite got the model correct - it failed to recognise that the alternative assumption about "zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever." So stop your (fictional) panicing right now.

Man, I love it when other people are funny for me.

Stupidly, a week ago, I got caught going 36mph going down Banbury Road into Summertown. The letter came yesterday, but addressed to Cath because she's the named owner with the DVLA. And instead of taking the £60 fine and 3 points like a good wife, she's shopped me. Actually, she has filled in a form with my details, put it in an envelope and asked me to post it tomorrow, so technically, I'm shopping me.

Mainly I'm most embarassed by the fact that I got speeding just 6mph over the limit. What's the point of speeding by so little - you get there hardly any faster, but the penalty is the same as if I'd gone 50.

Speaking of speeding, Usain Bolt's new world record was just breathtaking. The record came down by 100ths of a second every few years for ages - he takes 0.11 off in one go. It's important not to go over the top though - listen to the commentator saying (approximately), "he thinks he can go 9.4, but that's his limit. I'm not sure, I think he could go whatever time he likes". One day he shall wake up and say, "I want to go 5". And it shall be done.

Two gigs at the Camden Underworld I'm excited about this winter - Amorphis in October, and Insomnium in December. Two of Finland's best, and the makers of my favourite doom/death albums. Insomnium's Above the Weeping World is one of the few albums I'd consider utterly essential - by turn melodic, melancholic and eventually uplifting, I think it could make believers out of non-metal fans.

Say you buy an asset of some form, which produces a regular payment to you (like a bond or a share, for example). The price you pay for it should reflect the stream of payments you are expecting to get from it. If there are fluctuations in the stream of payments, this is generally captured in the price as a discount to compensate you for the risk you are taking on.

If an asset produces payments in perpetuity, and say that you expect the payments to be equal each year, and that the riskiness of these payments doesn't change, then the price of the asset should remain roughly constant - that is, the price you buy it for would be the same as the price you sell it for some years later.

If, however, the asset has a fixed life, after which it no longer produces any payments to you, then over time, the price of the asset falls. I mention this because of this story. The same thing as above applies here. The asset is Friends Reunited, which has produced income for ITV since it was purchased in 2005. The gap between £175m and £25m is vast, but this ignores the profits that have been earned in the meantime. In fact, if ITV expected that revenues would likely tumble by 2009 - possible, given the fact that Facebook and MySpace were taking off at the time, and are much more all-encompassing sites - and the price they paid for it reflected this, then this isn't a story at all. Investments can be for short term rewards as much as they can be for long-term ones.

In all likelihood, ITV probably didn't anticipate how much the value of the business would fall, or at least that this was at the low end of their expectations. They may have hoped to be able to create a better competitor for other social network sites than what resulted. I also don't deny that some of this is related to the recession, and the effect that has had on most businesses' income. But at least some of this is part of the riskiness I mentioned above, and the original price likely reflected it. Investmests underperform as often as they overperform, and its pointless to pick out individual ones that were bad after the fact. It may not have been, strictly speaking, bad - the overall gain from the investment (profits plus resale price) may still have exceeded the initial purchase price.

All I'm saying is there is more going on than "ITV lose £150m on investment".

I'm starting to put videos from Correctness on the YouTube. Here's the first one - the Elephant in the Room. I'll try and add more to this post tonight/tomorrow.

Update: Have now uploaded Good Cop, Good Cop, Secrets of the Stage and Artsy Parents. If you like them, do share with others. More tomorrow.

Further update: I've now uploaded Don Alfonso, Balloon For Sale, Tenzing Interview, Spleen Conference and Weather Vanity.

Well, I've spent most of my evening (aside from two and a half hours gloriously spent rewatching The Dark Knight) setting up a new website for Gelastic Band Productions, mine and Andy's production company. It's placeholder stuff for the time being while I get some graphic stuff done, but I thought I'd link it anyway. It's here.

There's important life changes going on related to employment next year, but until I have it all sorted, I'm not writing about it. Check back in two weeks, when I should know. It will either be great, or I will need to sell my organs to you.

It occured to me recently that I don't know what to do when people tell me a joke, where by joke I mean the kind with in the traditional elaborate setup and punchline format. Whenever this happens, my brain can't stop worrying that this joke had better make me laugh, so as not to offend or embarrass the joke-teller. Humour generally occurs when there is a gap between the expected and the unexpected, leading to laughter as an expression of surprise or possibly relief. It is very hard to be really surprised and spontaneously laugh at something when all of your mental energies are now directed towards spotting the end of the joke and producing a socially appropriate level of laughter.

The net result is generally a short burst of what must sound like a very forced chuckle, and a lot of nodding, as I try to convey that while I didn't react like that was a funny joke, I nevertheless want the joke-teller to know that, "Yes, I can see why that might be considered humourous - well done".

But here's a truth. Children laugh ten times as often as adults. And we should all laugh more. Scientists have shown that there are many health benefits from laughing - it releases endorphins into our bodies, much like a good work-out, strengthens the heart and lungs and generally improves our prospects of surviving until a good age. And if you think about it, it makes sense. After all, children do tend to live longer than adults.

(This is where you force a chuckle and nod excessively)