So, a horse, a siamese cat, and a nun walk into a bar...

Wait, you’ve heard that one? How about this one: A pygmy, and astronaut, and a clown are standing in line at the Pearly Gates...

Oh, you’ve heard that one too. Man! Tough audience!

Imagine what it must be like for stand-up comedians. These men and women put their careers, no, their very lives on the line each night just to make us laugh. You’d never know how tough it is to stand in front of a crowd of drunk sailors with a fake arrow on your head and telling knock-knock jokes until you’ve done it. (Not a pretty site, I can tell you.)

But why do people do it? Maybe it’s the thrill of a well delivered fat joke, the connection you feel with a room full of total strangers, or maybe it’s the lousy pay. Whatever the attraction, there are some of us (not me) who yearn to be a stand-up comedian.

Good news you Seinfeld wannabe, Comedy Central has a set of podcasts just for you. Stand-Up: Crash Course in Comedy takes your through the ins and outs, and ups and downs of being a stand-up comic. There are several parts to the crash course including how to handle a tough audience, bombing (like I’m doing now) and other pitfalls of stand-up. The Stand-Up series also offers behind the scenes videos of some popular comedians, as well as vids of their routines.

So if you have a hankering for making people laugh, or if you’re just looking for a few laughs, check out Comedy Central’s Stand-Up podcasts, and take my wife...please.

Don’t worry, I’m keeping my day job, which, in another life might have been a fiction writer. There was a time when I thought I could put together a decent story. I even wrote a few and sent them to several publishers. They were rejected, of course, not because the ideas were bad -- they weren’t actually -- but because I couldn’t write on paper what I had in my head. Believe me, it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially if you want others to read it and get what you are saying.

A good story is always worth your time to read, watch, or listen to, and National Public Radio (NPR) has an audio podcast called Selected Shorts, a program dedicated to bringing you short stories read by famous people.

I listened to the Lost Families segment, and to a story called Ovrashski’s Train, written by Lara Vapnyar and read by Heather Raffo, an actor and playwright most known for her theater work.

Selected Shorts prefaces stories with a brief interview with the author, which sometimes gives you an insight into what the story is about and how it affects the them, and therefore, how it might affect you.

After listening to Ovrashski’s Trains, my first thought was of the saying that goes something like, "It is the journey, not the destination, that is the fun part of a trip." That notion is very true in Ovrashski’s Trains, and I understand why Ms. Vapnyar is published and I’m nursing a stack of rejection papers.

Each show features two or three short stories loosely based on a theme. In the Lost Families show I listened to the two featured stories were about how families deal with death. It sounds morbid, but it’s anything but.

There are only five one hour shows available at the iTunes Store. I hope more shows become available, because this is a wonderful series.

OK, put your brain on cruise control for a minute. I need to talk about a reality show. Solitary is a Fox TV offering where nine people compete for $50,000 by seeing how long they can stay locked in a small room while performing stupid tasks given to them by a "HAL 9000 in drag" voice. The ideal actually sounds intriguing: Pitting the psyche of nine individuals against each other by pitting each person against him or her self is good stuff, but this show gets really dumb really fast.

Watching seemed like a psychological experiment itself: A test to see how much triviality you can endure before losing the ability to produce a coherent thought. Some people, it seems, have a higher pain tolerance than I do. Someone must like it because it’s in for a second season. If this is your cup of tea, then the iTunes Store offers two free episodes of Solitary for your enjoyment. Have at it.

Alright, you’ve just bought an AppleTV and a 50-inch plasma HD TV. You obviously want to show off both to friends and neighbors, you are also hankering for an iPhone, but your budget just took a solid right to the chin and is on the ropes. You need to save for the iPhone, which means buying TV shows from the iTunes Store is not an option for the moment. What to do?

Well, my penny-pinching friends, you are in luck. Not only am I pointing out free stuff to you on the iTunes Store, Apple has graciously decided to put all of their TV show episodes that are offered for free in one spot so we can easily find them.

Check out the FreeTV link on the iTunes Store and you’ll find a list of more than 20 shows that have at least one free episode available for you to enjoy. Good stuff too, like Grey’s Anatomy, Ugly Betty, and Battlestar Galactica.

Now you can proudly show off your dream system without spending another dime on content -- just download FreeTV shows from the iTunes Store. How phat is that?

That’s it for this week. Be sure to grab this week’s Discovery Single, Horse and I, from Bat for Lashes (I love that name). Horse and I is classified as ’Alternative’ on the iTunes Store. I think that’s the catch-it-all genre for music that’s hard to classify, which certainly fits here. Natasha Kahn wrote and sings lead in Horse and I and her voices is strong yet haunting, kind of like a spooky Kate Bush. I like this track and it makes me wonder what the rest of the album is like. Good stuff.

More freebies at the iTunes Store:

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.