Somebody Accidentally Downloaded Orrin Hatch MP3

tah Senator Orrin Hatch made a surprising statement during last week’s hearing on copyright abuse, calling for the remote destruction of home computers used to illegally download music files. Though the senator refused to discuss his motivation, many believe Hatch’s sudden interest in copyright infringement stems from the first-ever illegal download of one of the Republican senator and part-time composer’s musical works earlier this month.

The fateful pirating in question took place when teenager Jody Whiteman of East Plains, New York accidentally downloaded the illegal MP3 file during a sleepover with high school friends. “I was trying to download that new American Hi-Fi song, and it was late so I guess I clicked the wrong thing or something because the next thing I knew, the gayest thing that ever happened was playing through my computer speakers.”

Whiteman had inadvertently downloaded the track “America Rocks!” from Hatch’s album “Heal Our Land,” recorded with composer Janice Kapp Perry in 1997.

“We must’ve played that thing 100 times,” Whiteman confided, wiping a tear from his eye. “It was like that video clip of that fat guy falling off his bike, we couldn’t stop laughing. First it was funny just because it was so bad, but then we realized somebody must’ve did it on purpose, which was even funnier. Then Tom pointed out that somebody had to like it enough to post the MP3 online, and at that point we all really lost it.”

Some speculate the MP3 download must have led to an ironic purchase of the album by one of the high school students involved, tipping off the senator that someone outside of the Hatch family had purchased one of his albums and leading to the discovery of the illegal download.

“If they illegally download a song once, or twice, they’ll get a warning,” fantasized Hatch out loud during the hearing. “But the third time? Zap! We blow up their computer. I don’t know how, maybe a laser satellite or some kind of Mission Impossible button or something. But the point is, we blow it up and they never rape our music again. Do that a few hundred thousand times, and people will start to get the message. We’ll copyright-enforce them back into the stone age.”

Thinking Hatch was kidding, technological consultant Randy Saaf attempted to save face for the entire Republican Party, if not the white race. “No one is interested in destroying anyone’s computer, but we feel that more strict enforcement of—”

“I’m interested,” interrupted an annoyed Sen. Hatch, who was not kidding at all. A long, uncomfortable silence followed.

Jonathan Lamy, spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America, suggested Hatch was “apparently making a metaphorical point that if peer-to-peer networks don't take reasonable steps to prevent massive copyright infringement on the systems they create, Congress may be forced to consider stronger measures.”

“No,” countered Sen. Hatch. “I’m talking about blowing up fucking computers! Kaboom! Do I have to spell this out in sign language for you people? Kazap! And maybe a little shock or something to put the fear of Jesus into these people.”

After the hearing limped to an awkward conclusion, several senators gathered in the hall to discuss Hatch’s proposal, but to this reporter’s ear it sounded more like a lot of laughing and some gut-busting falsetto renditions of such Hatch classics as “Jesus’ Love is Like a River,” “Someday I’ll Fly,” “I’m Goin’ to Pray for This Land,” “I Am Happy,” and “It’s Not So Easy Growing Old.”

Officials to Celebrities: Please Get Out of New Orleans

Wisconsin Man Takes in Jazz Band

Alec Baldwin Records Devastating Voice Mail Message for Shooter

Sony’s Poorly Timed “PS3 Price Massacre” Backfires

If you see someone crying on the street today, you'll know why: The pencil is dead. After serving as the writing implement of choice for hundreds of years, the noble pencil is now relegated to the bottom of the drawer, falling behind more popular instruments such as the keyboard, the ball point pen, the fountain pen, the crayon and the bloody stump. Rest in peace, lead brother. You have served humanity sort of well.

But what happened to this once-proud utensil?

By most all accounts, the simple, elegant pencil fell victim over the years to the fact that it sucked completely. Messy, impermanent, and hard-to-read, the pencil was all the things you'd avoid in a search for the perfect writing tool.

Before the invention of the pencil, early man would often write with a carrot, which was mostly useless, but tasted good. Other good-tasting writing implements, from cucumbers to elk penises, would pass in and out of fashion over the years.

In more modernly times, people wrote using one of two implements: either a sharpened feather dipped in mouse blood, or a stray piece of chalk, coal or random feces. In 1321, Crowburton Finley of England developed a tube of owl shit that could be squeezed to form a writing implement, which was a lot like trying to write a letter with a tube of foul toothpaste. The resultant text smelled even more like dead mice than the popular mouse-blood ink of the day, and was highly popular for writing hate mail and resignation letters. Finley's company would eventually fold, however, when it was revealed that he was stooping to unethical means to obtain the owl shit.

The pencil itself evolved from the stylus, which was a thin metal rod the ancient Romans used to control their PDAs. Before the invention of the PDA, Romans used the stylus to "write" on papyrus, which was only really good for looking busy since metal rods don't tend to make any marks on paper. Eventually someone got busted over this and the Romans had to move on to lead styluses which actually wrote, and this quickly made the Romans slow and stupid because of the highly toxic nature of lead. This development necessitated the invention of the PDA, but unfortunately by then the Romans were too dull and lead-poisoned to get the software installed and they soon went back to living in caves and throwing rocks at fish and squirrels.

Lead's eventual replacement, graphite, was discovered in a big hole in the ground in England in 1564, and people immediately began building houses out of it. Soft and brittle, graphite proved to be an exceedingly poor home-building material, but the people who lived in graphite homes were quickly recognized as excellent writing utensils because of the dark graphite coating all over their bodies. Eventually, a businessman in Sweden named Marvin Johansson become fed up with the high cost of hiring "bodywriters" and decided to cut out the middleman, literally, by inventing the first "pencil" made by wrapping a piece of graphite in bologna. Unfortunately, his first several prototypes were eaten by his son Marcus, who later came down with a little-known coal mining ailment known as "black bung."

Other, smarter, inventors did Johansson one better by wrapping graphite in things like kite string and Kevlar, creating less perishable and more bulletproof early pencils. Pencils of any kind didn't really take off until 1839, however, the year that the eraser was invented. Previous to that, people used breadcrumbs to erase their pencil writing, which was only marginally effective but passed the all-important deliciousness test.

The pencil as we know it today was invented by some Japanese guy in 1860, then stolen in 1861 by a German inventor named Eberhard Faber. Faber compensated for his unfortunately convoluted name by inventing things with every breath he took on this earth. As a baby he invented the diaper stick, which instantly converted any used diaper into a proud, shit-laden flag. Then as a small child, Faber invented the chalk hammer, which pulverized chalk into small, edible chunks perfect for inappropriate snacking.

As a young man, Faber would craft his proudest invention: the mechanical pussy. This was an enormous hit until Eberhard indignantly ceased production in 1855 after learning that thanks to a language misunderstanding, Eberhard's customers were all screwing his beloved clockwork cats.

Faber named his pencil the #2; banking on the psychological fact that people believe the first version of anything can't be that good. Faber also wanted to advertise the fact that his pencils were made with high-quality Chinese graphite, the best in the world, so he painted all the pencils he sold yellow, assuring his buyers that they were made by the proud yellow people of China. Hence the modern pencil was born.

The pencil enjoyed a long heyday of popularity, and remains today the implement of choice for any writing that is almost certainly going to be erased, such as math equations, crossword puzzles, and letters to your boss demanding a raise. However, the enduring popularity of the pencil can be attributed less to its merits as a functional writing tool than to the difficulty in finding a suitable replacement that doesn't suck just as lustily.

Early attempts to replace the pencil included the much-hyped erasable ball point pen, which consisted of a regular ball point pen fitted with hard rubber nub on the cap for tearing through the paper to obliterate the words you had written with the pen. These flopped, however, because due to the tiny erasure windows torn into the paper, schoolteachers would often end up reading assignments with words from the paper underneath interspersed randomly throughout the text, leading to the rise of the Dadaist movement, which annoyed everyone universally.

Today, most adults use either ball point pens or finger-paints, depending on whether or not they've had any nearly-fatal traumatic head injuries. Modern children do all of their communicating through cell phone text messaging. This development has also led to the grisly death of proper punctuation, but dat mi frens isa colum 4 anothr dai.

º Last Column: The Truth About Dinosaurs
º more columns

"May old acquaintances be forgot, and their money remain all mine."

My favorite holiday is coming up quick: New Year's Day! I like that they put it at the end of every year, so I know right when it is.

Some people say they love Thanksgiving, but I say, what for? I can eat turkey and fall into a coma sleep any time of the year, thanks to my extra-sensitive allergies. When can you go out and totally shit-faced drunk? Not every day.

As for Christmas, I say, phooey! Which is little kiddish for "Fuck this, fat man!" I never got one thing in my life for Christmas that I wanted, except maybe the year I wished my dad would get off my back and he disappeared forever. No telling what happened there. Needless to say, I tried to make my Christmas wishes as detailed as possible after that.

No, New Year's is the time for me. There's the refreshing feeling, as all old mistakes and the old news gives way to the newness, a blank canvas is set up for the next year. It's like a big douche for the entire world. I wonder, if you were actually doing it, where you would stick a douche to do the whole world? I've heard the asshole of the world was Texas, but that might have just been what that guy from Arkansas was saying when he was mad after those Texans kicked our asses. I should probably find a globe. The whole thing is starting to turn me on, in a weird way.

Sometimes if you go out on St. Patrick's Day, my other favorite holiday, they give you little green hats. For fucking free! I usually slip out the back so I don't have to return it when I leave at night. Or the next three or four days, whenever. But it's totally sharp, you can wear it to high-class social parties and stuff. I assume. One day I might know. Either way it's funny just to put it on and stand in front of the mirror and pretend kids are after your cereal and you have to destroy them with magic powers. I tried to pitch that show to a network guy years ago, but he claimed it was already in development.

They should give you free stuff on New Year's Eve. It would be the best holiday ever, hands down, because all Christmas has over anyone is they give you stuff for free. Easter tried to cop, giving out eggs. Yeah, thanks. Like I can't get eggs. Nobody likes hard-boiled eggs, man, that's why the rabbit gives them away. Tons of people turn down hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, they start to pile up. Maybe that's a Bible story and I just don't know the significance. Jesus got pelted with hard-boiled eggs by the Greeks or whoever and turned them all chocolate and had the last laugh. "Now who's the asshole?" That's probably something Jesus would say.

Free food doesn't make for much of a holiday, though. If you hang out at the right shelters they give you free food on every holiday, but you got to be faster than some of these frostbitten bums to get it. And they have free beer nuts and pretzels at a lot of bars on New Year's. They hand out condoms, but I don't need gag gifts. Hey, fuck you, I know I'm not getting laid tonight. Why do I have to have that thing staring at me in the morning when I wake up on the curb out front? Adding insult to injury. Occasionally injury to injury, too, if you try to put those things on while a cop is watching you. I was just testing to see if it glowed or anything, officer. Chill out.

And Happy New Year.

º Last Column: Pure Garbage
º more columns