epublican Senator Judd Gregg finally ran into a big steaming pile of luck Wednesday when he matched 5 of 6 Powerball numbers and won a lottery jackpot of $853,492. Gregg immediately called Vice-President Dick Cheney to let his boss know he would not be coming into work.

"It's about friggin' time I got some good luck," Gregg told reporters in front of his home in his home state of New Hampshire. Gregg waved his winning ticket in the air frantically and laughed. "Eat it, taxpayers! I'm gonna be my own boss from now on!"

Gregg, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee and spent more than $2 million in his last re-election campaign, did admit to some sour grapes in not winning the $340 million jackpot won by an Oregon player in the same lottery.

"I wouldn't have minded some of that sweet cash," snickered Gregg, who didn't bother dressing up for the press conferences. Wearing a pair of cutoff jeans, brown flip-flops, and a Senate Budget Committee muscle T, Gregg added, "I only play the lottery when it gets into real money like that. I could've used it more than that Oregon guy. What do they even have in Oregon? I bet he uses that money to move to a kick-ass state like New Hampshire."

Though Gregg's announced resignation would be effective immediately, officials at the Republican Party Headquarters, the very mouth of hell, claimed Gregg would soon recant his resignation, and chalked it up to "lottery euphoria."

"He does this all the time," said RNC spokesperson Phyllis Harbor. "Last year he fixed up an old Geo of his and sold it and told Cheney he was quitting. Just a few months ago he called in because a banking error in his favor left $3,000 extra in his account. Or maybe that was a beauty contest he won… I may be getting confused with a Monopoly game we played in the office last night. But frankly, Mr. Gregg is fairly high-strung for a Senator. He quit one time when the Sci-Fi Channel had a Twilight Zone marathon on. He ended up taking a sick day and just came in regular. No big deal."

Fellow Budget Committee member Sen. Kent Conrad (D, North Dakota) confirmed Sen. Gregg has a tendency to overreact in financial situations.

"He was going around everywhere in town just a few months ago, trying to raise $300 million for some 'project' he was putting together. When I asked him about it, it turns out he wanted to open a bait shop by the interstate so he could quit this 'lousy job' and be his own boss. I reminded him he's a millionaire already, and he had perhaps overestimated the amount of start-up capital it takes to open a bait shop. But that's Judd for you. He doesn't take well to numbers."

Gregg himself answered some questions by phone, and was so far staying resolved in his plans to leave the Senate.

"Forget it. I'm quitting this shitty job. I might give 'em some notice—till the end of the week at least. But come Friday, no joke, I'm outta here." Gregg made a whistling sound to punctuate his impending exit, and the sound of Rosanne playing on Nick-At-Nite could be heard. "Between the lotto money and some stocks and shit I could sell, I might finally be able to buy a partnership in a bowling alley like I've always wanted. I'm so ready to be my own boss it's not even funny."

The soon-to-be-ex-Senator was kind enough to respond to all questions, but no one here thought to ask what a Senator is doing playing the lottery anyway.

he kangaroo trial of the century began this week, pitting former dictator Saddam Hussein against the entire Western world in a one-man cage match for crimes against humanity. The trial opened Wednesday, with the much-sought Iraqi ex-President facing charges of murder, torture, forced expulsion, illegal imprisonment, and being a late 20th-century Hitler.

The 68-year-old Hussein answered the charges with a loud raspberry, presumably learned from illegal copies of American movies or television shows. Appropriate charges will be added when the trial resumes in November.

While Hussein himself refused to answer any questions put to him by the judge, the ex-president's appointed lawyer, Barry Kitschwater, explained that his client refused to recognize the authority of the court over the president of Iraq. Whistles and cat-calls ensued, providing a salty opening to the most exciting trial since that of Manuel Noriega.

Kitschwater also added that his client asked to represent himself upon the trial's resumption. Vegas odds instantly doubled that the trial of the young century would become the hotpick for funniest damn thing on television.

In a 40-page letter to the American public (specifically not including the president and members of the government), Hussein outlined his plan for his own defense, most notable among the points an intention to call every living citizen of Iraq to testify on his behalf that he did not personally kill them. Hussein also footnoted that he planned to charge with perjury anyone that didn't testify accordingly.

Hussein also wrote a letter to the judge asking for the materials he would need to interview witnesses, including 200 thin sheets of bamboo, six batteries with electrical wires attached, and approximately 30 dank, windowless cells, or equivalent interrogation space. The prosecution immediately entered the request into evidence, and wrote a nice thank-you to the former dictator.

In his public letter, Hussein pleaded with the American people to defy the "propaganda" of its sort-of-elected leaders.

"Do not accept their polluted ideals as facts," wrote the eloquent scumbag. "Rise up and overthrow the whip-bearers who control your minds and bodies. Remove them from power and forge yourselves a land of freedom and opportunity. And if you really find yourself hurting for a new leader, it just so happens I'm seeking available positions as we speak. Perhaps we can work something out."

That letter, too, was taken into evidence by the prosecution.

The defense found itself getting off to an even rougher start than expected with the news that one of the lawyers of a Hussein co-defendant had turned up missing, presumed kidnapped. Hussein lawyer Kitschwater spoke for his client, saying his heart went out to the poor miserable infidel whose whereabouts were unknown. Kitschwater also reminded the press that he was not officially Hussein's lawyer, since the former dictator would be representing himself, and asked for the media to put that part in big print for everyone to read.

After concluding opening proceedings, the trial is set to resume Nov. 28, by which time networks officials and Pay-Per-View representatives hope to have some deal hammered out with trial officials. The high bet in Vegas at the moment is Saddam will show up on opening day with something obscene shaved into the back of his head, so get in on the ground floor if you have a good feeling about it.

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.

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