Fished in! Fished in!! We probably should have mentioned this on Friday just so's you wouldn't be needlessly nauseated all weekend, but whatever. We were busy; lots of tapes of "What's Happening!" to watch, you know? But basically, you remember that Athloned-up, green-neoned Power Mac G5 that had you retching in the corner and weeping uncontrollably at the now-undeniable presence of unconquerable Evil in this world? (Of course you remember; as if you could ever wash that hideous image off of the defiled canvas of your mind.) Well, as it turns out, it was just a hoax. Sort of.

Yup, a hoax. But don't go unknotting your intestines all the way just yet; we said "sort of" because the green-glowing x86ified Power Mac enclosure does, in fact, stain our plane of reality by virtue of its very existence. (Short version: it's real.) The hoax part was the story behind its construction. Faithful viewer Clayton Romer notes that the original URL for the butchered G5 now includes a note from "Andy," the vile perpetrator of the beast's unholy assembly, in which he reveals that, no, his parents didn't give him a dual-processor Power Mac G5 for Christmas which he subsequently mutilated in order to install a hodgepodge of icky Wintel parts just so he could play MP3s in Windows XP. Instead, he actually just came into possession of a "free G5 shell" and stunk it up with junkyard crap, primarily to "pull a prank on a Mac-loving friend." In other words, no G5s were harmed in the making of this nightmare.

We admit it: we fell for it completely, largely because if someone has little enough taste to violate a G5 enclosure (free and empty or not) with a hacksaw, green neon, and PC parts, such a person seems capable of any contemptible act, no matter how vulgar. While we're still appalled beyond mortal understanding at knowing that an abomination like that exists, we can at least take the slightest bit of solace in the knowledge that at least a brand new, fully functional, never-hurt-anyone G5 wasn't destroyed to create it. As far as acts of optimism go, it's sort of like saying "well, at least Ed Gein got most of his corpses from the graves of people who had already died." It is a little bit better, right?

Then again, if you were really digging the persecution complex, consider this: by his own admission, "Andy" received 1300 hate mail messages in two days. (Well, actually, 60% of that was probably MyDoom mail, but still, he was getting flamed pretty badly.) So how sure are we that his "it was a hoax" explanation isn't the real hoax? After all, if he really did gut a brand new G5 and then received death threats because of it, wouldn't he try to convince everyone that he was "just kidding"? Think about it: who gets a free G5 enclosure from "a buddy"? That's right up there with "Gee, officer, I was just standing here and this guy asked me to hold this TV for him and then he just took off..."

Anyway, we suppose the point is largely moot. There's no question that Andy's going to Mac Hell for defiling a G5 enclosure and causing thousands of Mac fans severe gastrointestinal distress; the only question is whether he killed a G5 to do it, and that'll only determine how hot they'll crank the flames. Enjoy your remaining time on earth, "Andy," because the place you're headed may have four distinct thermal zones, but it sure doesn't have nine fans to keep you cool...