Well, I blame my bloggin’ absence on the frantic preparations for this Friday’s Secret Circus. If you’re in Boulder, get to CU’s Old Main at 8 p.m. on Friday for the best free comedy show in the world. Juice and cookies provided. Keep your eyes on this site for a sneak preview of one of our brand-new videos. On to the regularly-scheduled post (from a few days ago).

Every Sunday morning (or late Saturday night) I hope to provide you with a couple of links to some leisurely and interesting reading, typically on the topics of comedy and politics, which is where this blog seems to be going. This week’s Sunday morning reading comes on a Tuesday. How do you like that? Links below the fold.

On Gothamist, an interview with Brian Stack, writer and actor on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” I think they could have asked some better questions (particularly early on), but if you skip down a little way, you’ll get to some of the stuff that I found more interesting than Brian’s personal life (which is totally interesting, of course, but there are only so many “when you were a kid” questions one can tolerate):

How would you describe a typical day at Conan?

We usually get in around 10:30 or 11am. We have a morning production meeting at 11:15, and then work on stuff for that day’s show or for upcoming shows. We usually rehearse stuff between 2:30 and 4:30 or so, and then tape the show at around 5:30. After the taping, we usually have some dinner in the office and then keep working until around 11pm or so usually. Sometimes we get out earlier than that, and sometimes we get out later. On Fridays, we usually go home right after taping.

At the Politico, read about Republicans being conerned with getting “George Allen-ed” (which I found through ThinkProgress):

A list of rules, if one existed, would nix jokes, stumbling or snoozing in public. Don’t berate aides, ambush an opponent at a news conference or do anything humiliating enough to tank a career.

Or, I guess, you could try not being racist. But maybe this is why I’m not in politics. (For more reasons why I’m not in politics, see my column in two days).

On the Dilbert Blog, yeah, I already posted this, but if you skipped it before, hit it now. It’s Scott Adams very briefly making points about how “flip-flopping” is a really annoying term for what is sometimes a responsible change of opinion. But he says normally he doesn’t vote. So he breaks even on the moral responibility-o-meter:

The typical voter says to himself, “If a candidate goes off and starts using information and reason to make decisions, there’s no chance he’s going to agree with me.” No one wants that.