And monkey's brains, though popular in Cantonese cuisine, are not often to be found in Washington D.C..

I was in bed this morning, having overslept not only past the time I needed to get up to go to the gym, but also past the time I should have been leaving for the gym, and right up to the border of the moment I needed to make a decision about either hauling my ass out of bed immediately or rocking the unwashed hair look to work.

I burrowed my head further into the pillow, and listened to the woman on the radio reading the news. "Custom agents at Dulles got more than they bargained for," she intoned solemnly "when they opened a man's suitcase and found the corpses of three charred monkeys inside."

That did what the inital blast of the alarm and thirty minutes of subsequent drowsy half-consciousness had failed to do: woke me up to the point that I sat bolt upright in bed.

The news woman continued. "Sources say that While we in the United States may find the prospect of dining on charred monkey corpses as peculiar, we respect that certain cultures consider this a traditional delicacy.”

I got out of bed. "Poor monkeys," I thought, and then I put the entire affair out of my mind.

Until, that is, about half an hour later when I checked my seldom used and much loathed hotmail account. I deleted about seventy spams and two legitimate e-mails, and then signed out and was taken to the MSN homepage. There I saw this headline: Woman Convicted of Smuggling Monkey Into the U.S.

"Oh, that must be about those charred monkeys," I thought. "I'll just go ahead and read that."

I clicked on the link, and learned that "Gypsy Lawson, 29, hid the sedated young rhesus macaque under her blouse, pretending to be pregnant when she successfully passed through U.S. Customs in Los Angeles after a trip to Bangkok, Thailand."

"So wait," I realized, ". . . .it's not the same story. It's an entirely different monkey smuggling story. I have seen or heard two separate stories about monkey smugglers, and it's not even 8 a.m."

And then I giggled slightly, because "monkey smuggling" sounds kind of dirty. EG, rather than the old saw "is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" maybe we should start saying "Wow, it looks like somebody's smuggling monkeys" to diffuse embarrassing erectile situations.

Alternately, it could be a sex act. "See that girl in the pink sweater? Last week she got totally drunk and smuggled my monkey, if you know what I mean."

I shook myself back into an adult frame of mind, and thought for a minute about how these monkeys were brought into the country for different reasons--the sedated rhesus, presumably, as a pet; the charred ones as food--but they were all confiscated. I thought about how the woman who was bringing the rhesus in for benign purposes knew she was doing something wrong, but the guy who wanted his American friends to chow down on some imported monkey meat (speaking of things that sound filthy) didn't realize there would be a problem with that.

And I tried to make some connections to larger issues, but I just couldn't. I'm sure this is at least partly because my brain is in an epic slow down from the Nyquil I took last night, but a lot of it is just because I can't stop thinking about what "monkey smuggling" might be slang for.

So I'm turning to you. Your deep thoughts on why monkey smuggling is such a hot crime trend, monkeys as a metaphor for immigration, monkey related recipes, why everything with "monkey" in it sounds dirty or suggestions for how to incorporate "monkey smuggling" into the vernacular in the comments.