An unplanned alien abduction and our ensuing three-and-a-half-hour window of "lost time" has plunged any semblance of a schedule today into the throes of higgledy-piggledom, and truth be told, at this point we'd probably rather put some ice on our subcutaneous neck chips and call it a day. But duty calls, and we'd be remiss not to mention one of those rare occasions on which we Mac users get to be thankful for our lack of third-party software relative to what's available on the Wintel side of the tracks. Well, not counting virus attacks, of course. If you lump those in, the occasions go from "rare" to "thrice daily," so we exclude them in the interest of bolstering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Anyway, by now you're no doubt aware that the Recording Industry Association of America has decided that there's no better way to prevent casual music piracy than by suing file-sharing grandmothers, third-graders, and heavily-decorated paraplegic war vets to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. ("I love this plan!! I'm excited to be a part of it!!") For some reason, this strategy has inexplicably generated some ill will among the music-loving public; we're no experts, but we suspect the fact that the RIAA is tossing around third-of-a-billion-dollar lawsuits without actually bothering to verify that Granny could possibly be the pirate fiend it suspects her to be in the first place might play at least a minor role. Faithful viewer Peter Cook said "arrrr, matey" and waved a hook at a story covered in the Boston Globe: it seems that the RIAA has had to drop one such lawsuit against a Newbury, Massachusetts grandmother because she owns a Mac.

Yup, apparently the RIAA was convinced that Sarah Seabury Ward was a hardened scofflaw who had "illegally shared more than 2,000 songs through Kazaa"-- including a selection of Snoop Dogg tracks and "I'm A Thug" by Trick Daddy-- and therefore sued her for roughly a third of a billion dollars in damages. (The logic of how exactly a song like "I'm A Thug" is worth $150,000 continues to escape us, but clearly we're in the wrong line of work.) See, it's kinda tough for a 66-year-old Mac-using granny to share songs (gangsta rap or otherwise) over Kazaa, since Kazaa doesn't exist for the Mac. When confronted with this interesting little fact, the RIAA dropped the suit; apparently an apology was too much to expect, however. Indeed, the RIAA's lawyers even "reserve the right to refile the complaint against Mrs. Ward if and when circumstances warrant." Ooooh! No cookies for you guys, and you'll be sorry, too-- Sarah's snickerdoodles are divine!

So this is the part where we say, look out, Sarah! Don't dig your copy of Virtual PC and your Tupac posters out of that hole in your garden just yet, because The Man is still onto you! You'd best lie low until the heat dies down.

Hey, if we can't help a fellow Mac user get away with 2,000 counts of grand theft hip hop, how could we possibly look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning? Now excuse us, but we have some probing to recover from.