Aaaaaaand here we are again, right back broadcasting late as usual. You know, we really thought we'd start this week off on time for once-- and we would have, too, if we hadn't had to take time out to answer about eleven hundred bajillion email messages telling us what an "arse" is. Yes, folks, it's clearly time once again for a new induction into the AtAT Failed Irony Hall of Fame, home of such grossly misinterpreted scenes as "Ninja Attack 2?" (which apparently convinced several viewers that Apple had dispatched a deadly squad of shadow warriors to silence rumors sites at their sources), "A Whole New Direction" (which caused widespread unrest among viewers who believed we'd actually sold AtAT to Microsoft), and "Is This a Flaying Offense?" (which several viewers thought was an earnest claim that Panther supported AMD chipsets). Well, it's been almost a year and a half, so we suppose we were overdue: please give a warm welcome to the Hall of Fame's newest hamfisted inductee, "A Puzzler for the Ages"!

Yup, here we thought we had crafted a scene positively dripping with sarcasm as a clever commentary on both the foibles of U.S.-centric thought and the worldwide stereotype of same, but clearly we only ladled on the satire when we should have hooked up the firehose, because the rest of the human population (imperialist yanks and shifty-eyed foreigners alike) thought we honestly had no clue what an Australian newspaper could possibly have meant by the term "a***hole." Let us assure you all that nothing could be further from the truth; indeed, Jack spent a couple of his formative years living Down Under, and Melbournians on the AtAT Reality Tour can even drive past 17 Brisbane Street in Ascot Vale to see the house in which Jack first had his mind warped beyond repair by exposure to Lewis Carroll, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (but please don't hassle the nice people who live there now). Furthermore, the AtAT compound is equipped with hot and cold running BBC America, a fine selection of British comedy on DVD, and a two-year-old who giggles like a maniac whenever anyone yells "ARSE!" in the manner of Father Jack from the brilliant series Father Ted. Yes, even the toddler on staff is arse-aware.

We should have learned our lesson last time something like this happened and been a bit more careful, but hey, we went nearly eighteen months without a major irony breakdown, and that's well within OSHA guidelines. Still, given the sheer bulk of the response generated, this was clearly our fault, and we'll be sure to double-check all sarcasm levels when we address certain topics in the future-- such as, say, Bill Gates's recent personal antitrust fine. That's right, we said personal; this fine is his and his alone, not Microsoft's. Faithful viewer jammerb tipped us off to a CNN article which reports that Gates violated "premerger reporting requirements" when he bought $50 million worth of stock in the pharmaceutical company ICOS a couple of years back. (That'd be the folks who make Cialis, a named recognized by the spam-ridden everywhere; let there be no more debate over why Gates named his company "Microsoft.") It seems that he was required to report such a massive purchase to the feds and kindasorta didn't bother, so the FTC and the Justice Department have slapped him with an $800,000 fine.

So the question that CNN asks is, "Will the world's richest man feel an $800,000 fine?" Well, let's see, here... when a mosquito lands on a rhinoceros, does the rhino scream in pain? And the answer, of course, is: of course it does. It screams like Jamie Lee Curtis in any of her four dozen '70s- and '80s-era horror flicks. In point of fact, due to a congenital larynx defect, Ms. Curtis is incapable of screaming on her own, and all of her onscreen shrieks were actually dubbed-in recordings of black rhinos being buffeted by the tiny airborne feet of the common mosquito. So there you go.

To get a sense of the pain Mr. Gates must surely feel upon learning of his sorry fate, let's employ the unbeatable comparative power of fractions. Let's say you're doing reasonably well for yourself and have managed to amass $20,000 in your various bank accounts, mattress stashes, and piggy banks. Well, an $800k fine to Bill Gates, who has $47 billion stashed away, is proportionally equivalent to your $20-grand-having-self being forced to shell out the exorbitant sum of 34 cents. Why, if the feds weren't sticking it to you so hard, you could have spent that money on a First-Class stamp a couple of years ago. So yeah, you can be sure that ol' Billy-Boy is boo-hooing into his chocolate milk and trying to figure out how he's going to pull his life back together.

Now excuse us, we have to go answer 1.6 trillion email messages about Bill Gates's relative wealth. Sure, we dig our own graves down here, but hey, it's something to do until Carnivàle gets back on the air.