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Report to the Senate Appropriations Committee re: FQ4 2008.

Senator, I appear here today to testify on why Congress must refrain from cutting funding for the Million Monkey Room Project. As you know, the Project was a research initiative funded as an add-on provision to the recent Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—otherwise known as the “Wall Street Bailout Bill.” As you recall, this provision was justified by the Committee for both strategic and national security concerns.

Our project’s goal was to prove the often-quoted saying: Put a million monkeys and a million typewriters into a room, and at some point, one of them will type out Shakespeare. The thinking was that—if feasible—this technique could then be applied to other texts of strategic importance to the country.

It worked.

I am proud to report today that our project has achieved historic results.

In fact, on October 6, 2008, one of our simian charges, Monkey #671,876 typed out a near perfect First Folio version of Hamlet. Of course, no extraordinary breakthrough is without its kinks, and this one is no exception.

The “Foggy Bottom Hamlet,” as we have dubbed this manuscript, unfortunately, lacks the letters “l” and ‘t” throughout. For a reason we are still investigating, Monkey #671,876 simply did not use those two keys at all in the text. Undaunted, our team of handlers is standing by, placing dabs of peanut butter on those two keys at Monkey #671,876’s typewriter.

At any rate, here’s an amazing sample of this history-making text from Act III, scene iv after Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius in Queen Gertrude’s closet and tells her of Claudius his uncle’s vile crimes. Her response, according to Monkey #671,876?

“O Hame, speak no more:

hou urn’s mine eyes ino my very sou;

And here I see such back and grained spos

As wi no eave heir inc.”

The Million Monkey Room next tackled—at the request of Congress—several more test projects of national security importance, including The Constitution of the United States (Sadly, the simian typist on the project, Monkey #143, inadvertently left out the Fourth, Sixth, Twelfth and Fifteenth Amendments; we don’t see as this as a fatal flaw, however, unless someone reading closely at Justice notices the omissions.)

In addition, at your request, the Million Monkey Room typed valiantly around the clock the dozens of pages of text for the recent Economic Stabilization Act itself. Admittedly, because of time constraints, they could not get all the provisions into standard English, which is why some of the Act appears to be written as Euclidian geometric postulates, a lost Cajun dialect, and a form of Mayan haiku.

But despite this dedicated service, the Million Monkey Room Project now verges on insolvency. Today your Committee moves to slash The Million Monkey Room’s appropriation, contending that our funding was somehow a “pork barrel” mistake.

We question this, since from the beginning, the Project was designed to be self-sustaining. The Million Monkey Room was scheduled to begin work on a number of historically and culturally useful texts, including the New Testament, the Koran, and the Talmud in their entirety; The Joy of Cooking; the Los Angeles County Yellow Pages; and every song ever covered by Nat King Cole.

Granted, we could not have foreseen this quarter that global markets for recycled monkey scat would collapse, leaving the Project with no way to generate supplementary self-funding. On the contrary, we ended up with tons of material we could not unload on the markets—having had to store it in the basement of The Congressional Record offices.

We will leave you with what we clearly see as our only alternative to keeping the Million Monkey Room operating absent continued federal funding. Our three-part solution, while workable, is dire, and certainly not the most desirable:

—Sell off the entire Room of one million monkeys to online political blog sites.

—In their place, employ one million GS7 grade government workers.

—Sell shares in a privatized Project to the Book of the Month Club. The choice is yours, Senator. We await your decision. Do your duty.