• Image courtesy of Brad Ostrow.

Arizona is home to some of the funniest people in comedy. Successful acts like Pablo Francisco, Craig Gass, Robert Schimmel, Gary Shandling and David Spade all that got their start in Tucson or somewhere in the Phoenix area. The bookers at The Stand Up Live are holding a statewide contest to find the state's funniest comedian. It's the closest thing to Last Comic Standing local comedians will ever get.

Local comedians will have to show up to Laffs Comedy Cafe on Thursday, March 6 to compete for paid gigs at the Stand Up Live, Tempe Improv and other clubs in Los Angeles and Florida.

The $25 entry fee is worth the grand prize:

1 week of work at the Tempe Improv, Stand Up Live a flight out to Florida and one week work at the Palm Beach Improv and the FTL Improv. That’s 4 weeks of work. A guest spot in LA to showcase for industry, flight and hotel, all paid!!

Thanks Coachella for giving recently reunited indie-folk-pop weirdos Neutral Milk Hotel an excuse to come to Tucson. Sure, we had frontman Jeff Mangum here in April last year, but this time, we get the entire group on April 18 at the Rialto. Tickets, which will certainly sell out so don't complain that no one told you when you're trying to buy them the week of the show, go on sale this Friday.

No word yet on whether a Joshua Levine dunk tank will be set up on the Rialto patio.

The Obama administration's Heath and Human Services Department has revealed that the number of Arizonans who have signed up to purchase health insurance through the online marketplace surged last month, from 3,601 on Dec. 11 to 27,943 as of Dec. 28.

The big jump wasn't limited to Arizona. Around the country, nearly 1.8 million signed up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act in December, accounting for the vast majority of the 2.2 million who have now used the ACA's marketplaces to get health insurance. If you're interested in digging around the numbers, you'll find a lot of data here.

Slate's Matthew Yglesias examines the data and notes that not enough young people are signing up:

• Courtesy of 4th Avenue Deli.
• Limited edition 4th Avenue Deli t-shirts.

December Chow feature 4th Avenue Delicatessen decided to reward its customers to celebrate a year of serving hot dogs and sandwiches on Fourth Ave.

You can get your own "I survived the streetcar" T-shirt for $15 or $18 in XXL. The shirts will be available for purchase on Monday, according to deli owner Austin Alexander Counts.

From the people who brought you “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards" to replace "Common Core," comes "Student Success Funding" to take the place of "Performance Funding." The more the names change, the more the programs stay the same.

Gov. Jan Brewer and Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal got all kinds of flak from the right when they got behind the national "Common Core Standards." (The left isn't happy with the standards either, for different reasons, but that doesn't bother Brewer and Huppenthal much). So Brewer issued an executive order changing the name to “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards," which changed absolutely everything nothing.

In the Brewer budget last legislative session, she proposed money for Performance Funding, which would give a bonus to schools whose students scored high on the AIMS test. One of the few things educators know for sure: no matter where you are in the world, higher income students perform better on standardized tests than lower income students. So the Brewer plan meant schools with students from high income families would get more money, and schools with students from low income families would get less. Oh, and as an afterthought, schools whose scores improved would get a little extra too. That's supposed to balance things out. It doesn't.

Gov. Jan Brewer hit the usual notes in her final State of the State address yesterday: The federal government is bad, Arizona is on the rebound, the state of the state is strong, yadda, yadda, yadda.

She also made a pitch to get tough on human trafficking, provide more subsidies for the tech biz, help families afford higher education by keeping tuition rates steady for university students, invest in infrastructure such as roads and a collection of business tax cuts.

But the big drama was with the announcement she left out of the copy of the advance speech distributed to the press: A call for CPS to be spun off into its own separate government agency instead of being under the control of the Department of Economic Security.

Brewer announced she had already started the process with an executive order moving CPS away from the current DES administration and creating the cabinet-level Child Safety and Family Services Division, which will be run by Charles Flanagan, the boss of the state’s juvenile-justice program. She’ll need legislative approval to properly attend to all the proper administrative hoo-hah—which she can probably get, given the need for lawmakers to appear to be doing something about CPS after last year’s disturbing revelation that more than 6,000 reports to the agency had gone uninvestigated.

Breaking CPS out as a separate agency is a fine idea as a far as it goes, but keeping kids out of harm’s way in Arizona will require more than a few changes on a flow chart. Working as a CPS caseworker has to be among the worst jobs in the state: The pay ain’t great for a job in that requires you to deal with dysfunctional and volatile family situations that are sometimes overshadowed by the threat of violence. The stakes are huge: Taking a kid away from his or her parents is a heart-wrenching decision, especially when there may not be a great place for the kid to land. And CPS resources have grown much scarcer in recent years, although lawmakers did restore some funding in 2013.

Brewer boasted in her speech that she and the Republican leadership had “reined in government spending by consolidating, eliminating and transforming our operations”—which sounds great until you consider that slimmed-down spending means cuts in state subsidies for daycare and programs such as Healthy Families, which employed social workers who often interceded with families before things spun so far out of control that CPS had to step in.

Those kinds of programs can’t keep every family from sliding over the edge—and frankly, no government program can. But early intervention can make a difference in some cases, if you actually care to help children even after they pass the “preborn” stage.

2012 Republican presidential Mitt Romney showed he was pretty fly for a 66-year-old white guy when he attempted to dance alongside Mormon musician Alex Boye while the band covered Psy's "Gangnam Style" at the Arizona All LDS Young Single Adults Conference this past weekend.

October cover subject R Dub has put together a yearly celebration of baby making music for 14 years celebrating his Slow Jams Live radio show (heard here on Hot 98.3), generally featuring a mix of modern R&B acts and 90's nostalgic performers, and honestly, last year's edition (starring Miguel, Ginuwine, Bell Biv Devoe and others) was one of my more enjoyable nights out last year.

This time, the show moves to Centennial Hall from the TCC Arena (which should be interesting considering Centennial's general no-standing policy) with John Legend headlining on Friday, February 21. Also on the bill, Next (of "Too Close" fame) and Mario, with more acts to be added.

Tickets go on sale Saturday at noon.

SCOTUSblog analyzes the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to let stand a lower court ruling blocking an Arizona law that would have banned nearly all abortions after 20 weeks:

The Court’s reaction to the new Arizona abortion case had been eagerly awaited, for two reasons: it was a test of whether the Court would relax its repeated view that states cannot flatly ban abortion in the period before a fetus could live outside the pregnant woman’s body, and it was a test of whether the Justices would clear the way for state legislatures to experiment with bans on abortions at increasingly earlier stages in pregnancy.

Because the Court chose not to review the case, nothing final can be read into that denial, except perhaps that the Court is not ready to reopen the whole question about the continuing validity of its precedents on women’s abortion rights. Lawyers for anti-abortion groups have been attempting to fashion arguments that they hoped would lead the Court to see that earlier-stage laws against pregnancy terminations were actually regulations of the procedure, not a total ban. State legislatures have been passing a series of new laws to move the ban earlier, making the same argument that this is only a form of regulating the procedure.

In the Arizona case, for example, the ban on abortions in the twentieth week or later was said to be a measure aimed at protecting fetuses from feeling pain during an abortion procedure, and at protecting women from the health risks of abortions in that part of their pregnancies. Those arguments did not succeed in this case, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit striking down the 2012 state law, treating it as a flat ban that would interfere with a woman’s right to an abortion before the point of fetal viability—somewhere around twenty-four weeks of pregnancy.

The Tucson Weekly dug into the background of the bill earlier in the court fight.

Bryan Howard, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Arizona, issues a statement:

You might have caught Parmalee's performance during yesterday's 49ers and Carolina Panthers half time show. The North Carolina country band will be in town on Wednesday, Jan. 29, at the Rialto Theatre, 318 E. Congress Street. We are giving away 3 pairs of tickets from now until until Jan. 22.

Email us your full name and your name will be entered in to a drawing for a pair of tickets. The winners will receive an on Jan. 22. Must have an I.D. to claim their prize.