otel heiress and mysteriously celebrity-like person Paris Hilton ruined the lives of millions this week with the announcement that in two years' time, she will retire from whatever the hell it is she does in order to start a family.

Mothers were crying in the streets and children were dumping out bottles of Hilton's best-selling "Sexpot" children's bubble bath in protest upon hearing the news, and at least twelve people had to be talked down from ordering extra dessert and totally going off their fad diets after the news struck.

Internationally, distraught internet bootleg fans lamented the long nine-month-or-longer wait to see Hilton's childbirth video on the internet. Millions expressed a vague sense of malaise at the thought that whatever Hilton is famous for doing, she won't be doing it any more twenty-four months from now.

According to local teenagers, after taking the "oops, somebody stole my sex video and now I'm really famous, isn't it funny how that works" route to career relevance pioneered by Pamela Anderson and ex-hair band dongmeister Tommy Lee, Hilton raised being famous for nothing to an art form, starring in a show about her being famous for nothing on which she didn't do anything, then specializing in ironic movie appearances that capitalized on her status as not an actress.

"She was in that, that uh, Troy movie," remembered ocelot trainer Doug Finken. "She was that pussy little brother that the Hulk had to bail out. Jesus, man, everybody remembers that."

"No way dude," disagreed Finken's companion, Artie Dolch of White Plains, Arkansas. "She was on that show Real World: Rich Bitches with Lionel Richie. How could you forget that shit? That shit was on TV for like, ten years yo. I never watched it though."

Others remembered Hilton's legendary career differently.

"I know she's got a casino in Vegas, that's for sure," explained a confident Lucia Weisman of the Bronx. "Is she European or something?"

"Oh man, she was hot in that one Winger video," added Staten Island's Frank White. "That one where she was eating that big fucking hamburger, you remember that? That bar-be-cue sauce was hot as shit."

Confident in our grasp of what slobs off the street think, we decided to head straight to the source: Paris Hilton's publicist, Liz Dick.

"She's a brand name," explained Dick.

Ookay. So, a brand of what?

"What's hot this week? Cell phones? Paris Hilton is a brand of cell phones. This week. Check back with us again next week, though, since I hear denim panties are on the rise. On second thought, don't call us again."

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Hey commune folk. Stu here.

Thanks to a little bird who gave me the word I'm now officially up to speed on the whole situation. The Cubans, the whole acid rain deal, and the clandestine adventures of your friend and mine, Senior Swashbuckle. Some pretty wild shit if I do say so myself, and in case anyone's taking notes: I do. Now that I've got it all under control I feel comfortable sending you this. Yes! A human pancreas! Gross! No, but seriously, that was a joke, and if I really scared you then I think it's time to admit that you have absolutely no idea what a human pancreas really looks like. I think they have informational pamphlets down at the DMV that can help you with that. In actual actuality, I have sent you this column, at least in some loosey-goosey futuristic sense of the word "sent," you beamed it down or whatever from the intergalactic informational alcove where I had seen to it being stored. You know the score.

This is it, folks, the Stu Umbrage Show. What you see is what you get, and that includes more topless birds than the Tropicana and Charlie Sheen's house combined. So if you don't like it you can blame me, and also kiss my black ass while you're at it. On a side note, I was trying to get Diana Ross to be my column sidekick here, but it didn't work out because she had no idea who I was and also I use phrases like "kiss my black ass" far too often.

Sure, the idea of a sidekick for a humor column is a fairly revolutionary one, but I think it's solid. After all, I don't hear any of you laughing. Which may be some kind of technical issue we haven't resolved yet, but in the meantime I could use somebody to sit over here and laugh like I just pulled the tonsils out of the lead guy from Weezer when I type the punchlines. Carson made it work on the Tonight Show, which revealed the show's roots: him and McMahon sitting in Johnny's basement, smashed on Absolut and babbling incoherently about current events and Ed's supernaturally large goiter. But damnit, it worked. They didn't make an afterschool special about it, but it worked.

This has been a crazy year already, and I'm not even talking about those cannibals they found living in the walls at the White House. Those guys got a bad rap, you know what I'm talking about? It reminded me of the last few Public Enemy albums.

Anybody else out there realize that salsa is a food as well as a dance style? I've never been so embarrassed in my life; I always thought you had to be a bum to get kicked out of a Mexican restaurant. This country's going to hell and nobody's stopping for bathroom breaks, be advised.

I've often wondered what our medical profession would be like if cancer gave you really big breasts instead of just rotting out your organs and whatnot. Dollars to dodos says they'd be force-feeding skinny blonde broads asbestos in day spas all over L.A., and the doctors would all turn their attentions to curing whatever the hell is wrong with Pauly Shore. Mark my words, on the off chance something truly freaky happens and that situation actually comes up.

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Dorothy said there's no place like home, but I would say that wartime Yugoslavia can't be all that different. No, dudes, I'm not a homebody. My thoughts don't turn to charming holiday gatherings around the fire with the ones I love since it usually involves a lot of alcohol and the fire involves the firecrackers someone tried to light by cooking them in the oven.

I would say my family's strange, but that's everybody's family. My family is homicidally manic-deppressive—there, that at least sounds more original. Seriously, my family is always happy when I come back to Bellmont for Christmas, but catch any of them on the right day and they're happy when the mail shows up. They're fundamentally unhealthy enablers of every drug habit you could name and they derive pleasure from each other's pain. Which is all fine, since that's how I am, but it's real dangerous to put us all in the same place.

First, there's my dad, Fozzy Coleman—dad somewhere got the impression that he was black, and even more odd, that he's Ike Turner. Dad rules the house with an iron thumb, an iron thumb being some gardening device he got for Christmas 20 years ago that spreads mulch. My favorite holiday memory of dad was that year we converted to Judaism. Mom made soggy cornbread and accidentally poisoned the turkey gravy with make-up remover, and when dad found out he was so pissed he threw the menorah like a trident and it stuck in the wall. The bright side was that it worked so well we use it to hang the Christmas stockings still.

Then there's my mom, who's great when she's sober, if you can be there during that time from 8 to 8:15 a.m. When she gets drunk she says all the things normal moms only think, like, "I had plenty of chances to drown you, Clarissa," and, "By my calculations, you still owe us about $359,000—oh, what, you thought the room and board were free rides?" My mom's name is Bunny, but dad always calls her Bunny Coleman like it's one word. Like, "Bunnycoleman, who ate all my fucking French toast?" Or, "Get my bath ready, Bunnycoleman."

It's hard to complain about my brother and sister, they're not really to blame for anything—between having my parents for their parents and having my shadow to live in all their lives, it's amazing they aren't screwed up.

My brother, Randy, doesn't let us call him Randy anymore since he joined that cult in the compound next door to mom and dad. At least he didn't have to go far to get brainwashed. He prefers to be called Toot now, and he's actually pretty nice, the nicest one of the bunch. He curls up in a ball and chants whenever mom and dad fight now, he tells them they have bad Chaka Khan or something, some kind of karma rip-off the cult made up, and the worst thing he does is steal from mom and dad to give to the cult so they can build that glass temple of theirs. Which is all fine by me, I never take more than $20 home when I go anyway.

My sister's a bit more peculiar. She never had the looks or talent to be an actress like me, so she was driven into this weird-ass obsession with grades and scholarships and stuff. She went to Harvard like that Good Will Hunting guy and majored in lawyering. Now she works for the ACLU and writes books on feminism in her spare time, really spaced-out shit. She doesn't come home too often, actually, but she sends self-help books and fruit baskets.

I guess, more than anything, this time of year is about forgetting your family is clinically sociopathic and learning to keep your temper in check long enough to sit down for a single Christmas dinner. To gather around the tree, open up crappy presents, and pretend you like at least one of the things. To sleep in your old room and act like you don't hear your dad getting nasty with your mom, shouting, "Take me to town, Bunnycoleman!" in the room right next door. But at least when you hear that, you know it's just another ten minutes until everyone gathers in the living room around the kitchen fire and opens their presents. And that's as much family as anybody gets these days.

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