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Yesterday I was received the program book for an upcoming charity silent auction. I was trying to read it while I paced around living room, sleep-deprived, with my 13-week-old son in the Baby Bjorn. I dimmed the lights in the hope that he would fall asleep. Still, I kept reading the program book.

I laughed when I read this auction item: “Liv Large Maternity Dress.”

“Now there’s an interesting brand name,” I thought.

Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a Liz Lange maternity dress.

I like Liv Large better.

It’s such a comfort to know that all the money you are paying in interest on your auto loan is going to build a really robust customer service web site. Maybe all the IT folks had to go meet their new bosses in Abu Dhabi.

• Broken spy satellite. Bought it in 2006, but it never really worked and I didn’t send in my warranty/registration card on time! Can be dropped at your approximate location in a few big pieces or disassembled and shipped in fragments. Great for target practice.
• Presidential Campaign paraphernalia: bumper stickers, lawn placards, hats, hoodies, web hosting plan prepaid through 2016, 30 minutes of prime time on the Hallmark Channel, 600 folding chairs, 8,000,000 frequent flyer miles. Pick them up at the Chappaqua town dump.
• 750,000 unused election ballots. Easily transferred from Kenya to your location in Florida or Ohio.
• 400,000 HD-DVD players. These make a pleasant night-light or clock. Easy to convert to a garage door opener if you have a soldering iron and a few gizmos from Radio Shack. One HD-DVD movie (Ishtar) and a case of Betamax tapes also available.
• Box of DVCAM tapes that I found in a dumpster near the NFL offices. Looks like guys on the sidelines of a football game making crazy hand and body gestures. Also offering a box containing old bloody gauze, beer cans, used hypodermic syringes and a pizza crust. Call 212-WE-CHEAT and ask for Roger (at Video Bargainville!).
• 13-year-old web portal, search and advertising business. Runs a little slow, backfires frequently, has rust and needs major engine repairs. With a little TLC and a one-time charge to cover severance packages, it could be a nice component in your business empire.

Turn Left at the Stomach, originally uploaded by ChristophrHiestr.

Good Morning Silicon Valley has been following the desperate efforts of various music recording industry groups to crack down on illegal music distribution. Groups such as the British Phonographic Industry are calling on Internet Service Providers to monitor their users online activities and punish or report those who share music illegally.

This week, the ISP’s shot back. MISPELL, the Multinational Internet Service Provider Education and Legislation League, issued the following press release:

Industry Groups around the world have been lobbying for legislation that will require ISPs to monitor our users’ activities and ban users who are found to share music files in violation of copyright laws. Our question is, why us? It would make just as much sense to require PC manufacturers to monitor their customers and punish those who steal music. Maybe they could make the violating computer melt into a useless smelly gray blob. That would be pretty good punishment, right?

Why not force hard disk manufacturers to detect suspicious music piracy-related disk activity and then send all the data to the authorities? What is music piracy if not the movement of data from one disk drive to another? Then again, disk drive companies would be correct in their assertion that data cannot be written to a disk without first being held in memory somewhere.

Memory chip vendors should add algorithms that sense illegal music distribution patterns in the silicon, then they should send the user’s biographical information directly to the BPI and the RIAA and display “Don’t copy that floppy” on the user’s screen.

Speaking of the screen, without a screen, it would be nearly impossible to pirate music. The bad guys have to be able to see what they’re doing in order to cripple the poor music recording industry by distributing music on P2P networks. Maybe display and peripheral device manufacturers need to speed up the artificial intelligence components in their devices so they can stop music piracy.

And how did the chip manufacturers come out of this smelling like a rose? Hello! You can’t be an Internet music thief without a computer and there is no computer without a processor. Intel and AMD really need to add some low-level music piracy detection machine code right into the chip. But wait! My Intel Core Duo is about as useful as an 8-track tape if I don’t have any electricity.

Utility companies must massage the power they distribute into a music piracy-detecting pattern in order to save the worldwide music recording industry from the crippling scourge of Internet crooks.

Not so fast there, young fella. Electricity doesn’t just get up and walk across the wires on its own. You’ve got to have some kind of fuel to burn to make heat to boil water to turn turbines to make electricity. What is the most common fuel used to make electricity? Coal. The coal industry has built itself on the theft of other people’s music. They should be ashamed of themselves! How can they sleep at night? We call on coal mining companies to start making “smart coal” that can burn in such a way as to make the electricity that it ultimately generates incapable of supporting intellectual theft. It would be nice, too, if they could alter its molecular structure so it doesn’t release carbon dioxide and speed up global warming, but that is a secondary concern to the music recording industry.

Roger Clemens tried to come out firing brush-back pitches to the House Committee on Oversight, Government Reform, Nannies and Seven Year-Old Hypodermic Syringes Stored in Beer Cans. Unfortunately he didn’t have his good stuff and got shelled for a grand-slam with nobody out in the first inning. My favorite moment was his plea of, “I’m guilty only of being too nice.” That’s chin music all right. Except it’s a coming from a violin under the Rocket’s chin.

Quite a few news outlets are making a big deal of the tense exchange between Clemens and Committee Chairman Henry Waxman at the conclusion of the hearing. I’ll replay it here for those who might have missed it.

You can fool some of the people some of the time and you can give the rest checks for $600. Forget “rebates”, let’s just be honest and call it good-old-fashioned street money for buying votes this coming November. The Chinese government will send some flowers to thank us for stimulating their economy.

German Ronald McDonald

Herr Ronald showed up a little late for a World Cup match in Berlin (summer 2006). Eyewitness News was there!

Philly radio loudmouth Michael Smerconish openly advocates the use of torture (in case you’re wondering if he has softened his position, he has reaffirmed his vows recently). In fact, the CIA has a secret program that uses Smerconish’s shiny bald head as an inverted hyperbolic magnifying device for its new satellite gamma radiation terrorist confession program. The super-secret-spy satellite (no, not the one that’s going to crash to Earth, silly!) shoots devastatingly powerful, yet highly accurate, gamma rays that scorch the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution beyond all recognition. The rays are then bounced off of Smerconish’s pate (where they are re-energized) and beamed to Geneva, Switzerland (if sunspot activity is light, they stop off in London and wipe out Amnesty International’s bank accounts) where they annihilate United States’ signatures from the Geneva Convention documents with the precision of the finest Swiss watch. A specially modified CIA AWACS plane flying above Lake Geneva splits the liberated torture rays and broadcasts them to every U.S. “black site” where they attack the central nervous systems of terrorism suspects. Once locked onto their targets, their energy can be modified to suit the interrogator’s needs. Options include severe pain in any area of the body, the sensation of drowning, root canal, watching an old recording of Bob Dole trying to say “Indonesia” (“Indian-EE-juh”), a Moe Howard hologram that can poke and kick the subject, and the sensation that Dick Cheney is about to shoot them in the face with a shotgun. If you feel that we are now safer than we were seven years ago, this is why. It works.