Is there any way for those poor fellows like me, equipped with an Intel Dual core 2.2 GHz CPU and no GPU and no Bitcoins in their wallet to buy hashes, start mining some Bitcoin in tiny amounts?
Instead of mining bitcoin, you can mine some "CPU-coins" with your CPU. Check
http://cpucoinlist.com/ for details.
These coins will generally offer the same profitability in terms of BTC per KH/s that scrypt mining would, only you would need to incur the added expense of having to exchange the coins on an exchange for bitcoin