efugees from the New Orleans disaster were thrilled this week by the news that Mayor Ray Nagin plans to re-open large parts of the city as early as today, allowing the many refugees spread across the American South like spilled milk to finally return home. The decision to return, however, is not so easy for the small number of lucky refugees who were relocated to the French Quarter section of the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California during the first days of flooding.

“This is great, it’s like being back home, except Disneyer!� gushed socialite Anita Bomes, thrilled with her new New Orleans, a quaint miniature version of the city located near a fake lake that, to date, has never flooded.

Others have not been so happy with their new home, claiming the $20 in Goofy Bucks they were given for food and lodging upon arrival does not go far in Disneyland’s helium-inflated economy, where food prices and housing expenses can bear little resemblance to the outside world.

“How are we supposed to live here?� questioned refugee Alanis DuPree. “A storage locker here costs more than my apartment back home did. And I can only fit my head in that locker. That makes for some mighty uncomfortable sleepin’.�

Others have found creative solutions to the problem, like Ethan Fromme, who now lives inside the popular Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

“Aside from the whole town being on fake fire all the time, this isn’t half bad,� explained Ethan. “Sure, there’s still lots of water everywhere like back home and the whole place smells like the pool down at the Y, but on the upside none of the lifeless bodies here carry cholera.�

Ethan also enjoys the attention of having scores of children in boats gawking at his lifelike appearance as he sits and drinks beer in front of his house façade.

In a televised national address Thursday night, President Bush promised additional aid for New Orleans refugees who have been frightened by the Haunted Mansion ride and who could desperately use a frozen banana covered in chocolate. Bush also surprised many by taking full responsibility for the federal government’s failure to properly address the New Orleans situation in the early days of the disaster. Bush’s remarks were in stark contrast to his reaction when first hearing about the disaster weeks before, when the startled president blurted out “Fuck this!� and ducked into a secret tunnel hidden in the Oval Office sideboards.

After the president’s speech, everyone even vaguely related to the tragedy rushed to take full responsibility as well, with Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco taking full responsibility Thursday night, former FEMA head Michael Brown taking full responsibility after being ridden out of town on a rail Friday, and New Orleans homeless man Roger Dunkin taking full responsibility for the disaster on Saturday afternoon.

Louisiana residents are waiting with baited breath to hear if reclusive author J.D. Salinger will come out of hiding to take full responsibility some time in the next week.

Meanwhile, in Anaheim, refugees are wary of rumors that they may be relocated yet again to Frontierland if the New Orleans Square area’s shortage of caramel corn is not soon remedied.

“I’d rather die than live in Frontierland,� explained Ninth Ward refugee Darnell Hughes, wearing a humorous Donald Duck baseball cap. “If they move us over there I’m just gonna walk back. I’m serious, I don’t care how far it is,� boasted Hughes of the two-block walk separating Frontierland from Disneyland’s New Orleans Square.

Although many N.O. refugees arrived at Disneyland with little more than the shirts on their backs, most have since loaded up on Disney souvenirs dwarfing their previous collections of personal effects.

“We don’t have any way to carry all this stuff,� complained Ted Mooney, gesturing toward the generous heap of Disneyland merchandise he and his wife have had to rent two baby strollers to carry. “Now my wife wants one of those Goofy hats with the long ears. How are we going to carry that? Tell me, President Bush, where are we supposed to fit that?�

Others have grown disenchanted with New Orleans Square since local retailer La Boutique de Noel ran out of Disney-themed Christmas ornaments earlier in the week.

“I’m not going back,� explained a proud Chandra Miller of Bywater. “We’ve made a new life for ourselves here in Toontown. Why would we want to go back? Sure, maybe to visit, and ride Pirates. But live there? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… You know how the rest of that goes.�

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Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last twenty years doesn't need to be told this, but just in case I have any hermit crabs among my readership, let me state this loud and clear: Omar Bricks is not afraid of a controversial tee-shirt.

And if there really are hermit crabs among my readership, I encourage you to drop an email and let me know what the hell is up with that. I'm serious, that's some crazy beer commercial shit there.

But speaking of tee-shirts: I don't mean the generic, run-of-the-mill "controversial" tee-shirts that you see every fifteen year-old wiseass with thirty bucks and a smirk wearing at the mall. This column has no time for Big Johnson, Osama Bin Hidin', or any of that immature teenage shwag. And if your shirt's asking a question, it sure as hell had better not be about how the daschunds got in the pool, or however the song goes.

Nor am I specifically addressing the clever subversion of corporate logos that say Fuct instead of Ford or McDahmer instead of McDonalds or the many clever variants on Pepsi, though I do think those are pretty sharp. And believe me, Omar Bricks is all about those corporate scumbags getting their just desserts via a clever tee-shirt.

What I'm talking about here is the holy hell I recently had dished to me after I started wearing my new shirt that has a picture of a Chips Ahoy bag on the front, but it says Tits Ahoy instead. And before you start in with your weekly "Omar is a sexist smear of dick-drizzle" letters and your lightly perfumed feminist mail bombs and your diatribes about how I wasn't breastfed, let it be known that this particular shirt was a gift from my own mother, the venerable Mama Bricks herself. If you want to take up your sexism campaign with her, I say go right ahead, but be warned that she's highly paranoid and quick with a pair of nunchucks.

Now, I'm sure some would argue that I was just looking for trouble when I wore that shirt into the NOW convention last week, but anybody who's read the police report knows that I stumbled in there looking for a place to pee. A string of words to the wise and heavily inebriated: don't stagger into a feminist convention with your little benny hanging out unless you're wearing a Lillith Fair tee-shirt or have a Little Orphan Ani Difranco tattoo on your forehead to make everything balance out. You'll thank me for that one later.

But the thing that this ballroom full of garden-shear-wielding feminists didn't understand (besides the fact that screaming "Holy Shit, it's Axl Rose!" before you run away is the oldest trick in the book) was that they're barking up the wrong tree when they get their estrogen up over a simple celebration of femininity like a classy Tits Ahoy tee-shirt. What really should have worried them would be if I had staggered into that ballroom wearing an Oklahoma! tee-shirt and a hoop earring or something, because that would mean their mating pool just got one guy smaller. And if I were a lady I'd be watching what I said very carefully, lest I pushed the male sex over the line and found myself home alone on Saturday nights while all of the guys were out at a Freddie Prinz Jr. movie, if you know what I'm saying.

But some people just don't get it, and they're going to drone on about how my shirt's degrading to women, and blah blah blah. Reality check: what's really degrading are those Tom Cruise haircuts, ladies. Have you looked in the mirror lately? You look like a bunch of junior-high kids on a debate field trip. And those business suits should be the next to go. Nobody in this reality wants to make time with a lady dressed like Lee Iacocca, and you're going to liberate yourself right into a personals ad.

In the end, this is just a long way of saying that the emperor's new clothes are here to stay, at least until this shirt picks up a chili stain or two. Of course, both my secretary and the commune's mail clerk quit the first day I wore it to work, though not for the stick-up-the-ass reasons that you're thinking. I guess that last mail bomb just scared them more than they let on at the time. Needless to say, I think I'm going to have to put the temp agency on speed-dial. Bricks out.

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It's a question that has boggled the bungs of humanity for well over sixty years, and that routinely keeps schoolchildren up on sleepless nights, dooming them to academic lousiness. You may have even blown a couple grand on a research grant yourself, who can remember? It's a question that's stealthy like a porcupine yet insidious as a Mylar toupee: Just what on God's green earth is nougat, anyway?

Sure, it makes candy bars delicious, but where does it come from? Alien DNA? Idaho? Jimmy Hoffa? Who milked it from the space mother's ample tit?

Few will be surprised to discover that nougat is a French word. However, anyone who isn't currently in the process of throwing up will likely be shocked to learn that it's French for "cat's nuts." Can this be correct? Choke back your half-digested Milky Way bar my friends, it's true.

I called the main Hershey's plant in Hershey, PA to confront the chocolatiers with this awful truth, but the representative I spoke too steadfastly denied my allegations, shouting "You are sick, sir! The Hershey's Corporation would never condone such disgusting behavior!" Or at least that's what I think he said, it was hard to make out over the cacophony of cat noises in the background.

Looks like the French have had us again. First it was Speedos for men, and now this nougat. Actually, the nougat joke goes back much further, but to our credit we figured out that they weren't serious about Speedos fairly quickly. Except for our Olympic athletes, but we've always known they were a little fruity themselves.

As with most mysteries, once the main question is answered, it only leaves one with a cluster, or at least a clod, of related questions that spring up from knowing the truth and having the truth be really icky. For those of you who are still reading this after discovering the answer to "WHAT is nougat?" it's time to delve into the sticky conundrum of "HOW is nougat?" For the record, we're not going to get into "WHICH is nougat?" because that phrase has been optioned as a gameshow title by CBS and I don't want to get into any legal trouble here.

Candy bar manufacture is a delicate and fascinating process that dates back to the early 1990's. Some may argue that candy bars were manufactured before then but I assure you that's your memory playing tricks on you. We all like to fondly remember the candy bars of our youth, and few want to confront the fact that our parents just gave us dates and figs and told us they were candy. It's okay, we were naïve then but it's time to move on. Most of our parents have had strokes by now and I'm sure they've learned their lessons. Let's stay strong and discuss candy bar manufacture like adults.

The first step in making any candy bar (and I'm not talking about Almond Joys here, I said "candy bar") is preparing the chocolate. In the early days of candy bar manufacture this was accomplished by having armies of third-graders chew up chocolate Easter bunnies and spit them back out onto a conveyer belt. Things have come a long way since those days and now the process is much more automated, now that we have machines to take the Easter bunnies out of their wrappers and insert them into the third-graders' mouths. Once the third-graders have made the chocolate soft and malleable, it is conveyed to a storage tank to await the preparation of the other candy bar ingredients.

On the other side of the factory you have two rooms: the peanut room and the nougat room. Inside the peanut room, scores of workers in white hairnets toil endlessly, picking peanuts out of chunky peanut butter and tossing them down the peanut chute. Across the isle in the nougat room men with goggles and wooden mallets go in one end, bushels of live cats go in the other, and the only thing that comes out is nougat. Perhaps one day Oliver Stone will make a film about the mayhem that takes place inside, but until then I say we leave it alone.

The nougat center is first formed into very large slabs, which are cut to size after being strafed by the peanut gun. After the centers are formed they are coated with thick, rich milk chocolate, through a process called "enrobing." The actual enrobing process begins when the centers pass through an explosive shitstorm of liquid chocolate, which coats the top and sides of the bar. At the same time, a rotating chocolate-covered collie beneath the mesh belt coats the base of the bar. To ensure an attractive, glossy, smooth coating, the bars are continuously licked by Swedish children throughout the entire process. The fully enrobed bar is then cooled and prepared for the wind tunnel.

So the next time you're strolling past a vending machine, stop for a minute and think of all of the hard work that's gone into the candy bars you see displayed before you. Not that you'd actually eat the nasty things, but you could at least observe a moment of silence for the cats, and the Swedish children destined to die of "Black Tongue" just so we can have our Snickers.

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