Funny Business: Comedians play with fire

A month ago, Charna Halpern and a team of iO improvisers headed to Switzerland. This kind of thing happens all the time—businesses hire iO to teach them about improv, get them to loosen up and work better as a team. Only this time they were coming at the request of the team working on the Large Hadron Collider (ahem, the Halo), that thing that was slated to destroy us all, maybe. The project was a success, and Halpern's efforts were chronicled in the Wall Street Journal last week. Halpern just announced that a few lucky improvisers will be returning October 4 to perform alongside the physicists at a worldwide council. Now that's an experience worth publishing on your Facebook feed.

Speaking of dangerous behavior, delightfully outspoken Doug Stanhope has started a web project called Saving Bristol. He's soliciting dollars to pay for Bristol Palin's abortion, because, "Never in history has a woman been under more pressure to keep an unwanted pregnancy than Bristol Palin…Rather than sit back and impotently bemoan Bristol's tragic, lonely circumstance, it is time for us - the silent majority - to unite behind this poor, imprisoned woman and save her from both a tyrannical household as well as the horrible nightmare of a forced childbirth." The man has already offered up $25,000 of his own money towards the endeavor. [Thanks TOC freelancer Julie Seabaugh for the link.]

Oh, and here are some cool photos on the blog of Elizabeth McQuern, former Bastion editor. Check back tomorrow for more on the site's closure.