Two facts are inescapable this Monday, November 26th, in the year of our Lord 2012.

Tomorrow is Monday, but not just any regular old Monday, it's Cyber Monday. No that's not a Monday to spend all day at work cyber sexing with strangers on the Internet. Did you really think that's what it was? Ugh, explaining the Internet is so hard.

Say what you will about Cyber Monday and the surge of online consumerism in the days that follow — it does tend to remove an element of risk from the holiday shopping experience. For example, there's an almost zero percent chance that you'll accidentally stab yourself with a hypodermic needle while browsing brassieres at Wal-Mart if you buy those brassieres with a computer.

Each year, Black Friday is plumbed for symbols of American decline and avarice. Oh, look at the riffraff with their Wal-mart pepper-sprayings and $2 waffle iron riots! But now it's Cyber Monday, which is so cool and new.

Bad news: The federal government has once again made it harder to find the best online shopping spots for all your counterfeit sports jersey and fake Louis Vuitton bag holiday shopping needs. Why? Because they want your family's holiday gift-giving experience to be authentic.

In a move timed to disrupt illegal retail activity on "cyber Monday," the government has executed seizure orders against 82 domain names of websites selling counterfeit goods or enabling illegal file-sharing, the DOJ announced today.

If you were worried you'd miss out on the great bargains available this "Cyber Monday," the day when e-tailers use every gimmick in the book to get consumers to begin their holiday shopping on the Web, rest easy: It seems "Cyber Monday" is now "Cyber Week." [Crain's]

As white-collar workers return desultorily to their desk jobs, they waste time by shopping online. To capitalize on this, a group of online retailers invented "Cyber Monday," a day of Internet discounts to match Black Friday's in-store deals. You'd think that the planned traffic from such a staged event would go off smoothly. But you'd be wrong.

The online shopping extravaganza that is the Monday after Thanksgiving may be a two-year-old fabrication which pains you to no end, but you can't dispute the numbers. This year, online retail spending on Cyber Monday jumped 84 percent over the previous month's daily average, according to ComScore. Cash registers e-commerce transaction servers rang up $733 million in sales, up 21 percent over last year. There was also a 38 percent increase in the number of online buyers this year. So expect to hear the term for years to come. Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday!

At 2:30 a.m. yesterday, heavy holiday traffic began to overwhelm the infrastructure behind Yahoo's hosted stores, a Yahoo spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. The first Monday after Thanksgiving — Cyber Monday — was expected to account for 12 percent of 2007's holiday-season online sales.

Fox Business conducted "man-on-the-street" interviews for "Cyber Monday." (Note: I want to gouge my eyes out when I hear that ridiculous name, myth or not.) The object? To see if people really were shopping online more. Let's not even get into the question of why Fox thought they'd find people shopping online if they were interviewed on the street. Even so, a Fox reporter found Peter Perweiler at the ESPN Zone in Washington, D.C.

The Monday after Thanksgiving used to be the Ron Paul of holiday-season shopping. Called "Cyber Monday," it was an Internet-only creation, as relevant to real-life commerce as the Web-friendly presidential candidate is to national politics. Which is to say, not very. That's changed.