Seeing as there's no images, I doubt you'd need a towel, or tissues, or anything like that really.

Something like this happened for real - the band Black Sabbath wanted a Stonehenge-style stage set for their 1983/84 tour, but someone got confused between imperial and metric measurements (I don't know, maybe they used metres instead of feet) and they ended up with a Stonehenge replica much larger than the original (and too large to fit in most venues). From what I could figure out, they still have it in a (big) warehouse somewhere. And apparently this was the inspiration for the Spinal Tap Stonehenge bit.

Or you can do what I do, which is an extension of the above - use some sort of virtual desktop manager thingy (but keep it's very existence hidden, of course), then you can have your normal stuff in Firefox on the main screen, and have your other stuff in Chrome on the secret second screen... just be ready to flick screens at a moment's notice.

I need it to be able to run System Shock - I've been trying for a while, and damned if I can get it going any other way.

Have you seen the 'butcher' cover? I don't think that's the sort of thing Microsoft would do.