Is this what you meant by (1):
$(document).ready (function() {
$('#my-element').hover(function(){ alert("Yo hovered over my element!") });
});
It appeared to work for me.
I did a few years of undergraduate physics a long time ago, but discovered computers and switched majors to computer science. I still enjoy trying to follow the latest developments in physics at a level between the pretty pictures in the populist media and the dense equations of a graduate...