Bad Boy Congressman Can't Drive 55

e's brash, he's young, at least in comparison to some other congressman, and he's dangerous. Really dangerous. Seriously, he was recently charged with manslaughter in the death of another motorist. He's South Dakota Representative Bill Janklow, and he's emerging as one of a new breed of rebellious new legislators everyone's talking about.

Authorities charged Janklow Friday with second-degree manslaughter following an Aug. 16 accident when the congressional hellion ran a stop sign traveling at speeds in excess of 70 mph in a 55-mph zone. Whether Janklow was speeding to a hot-to-trot lobbyists' convention or fleeing a savage pack of political paparazzi could not be discerned at press time, but rumors abounded.

Janklow is one of a bold new wave of congressmen creating new political fads. In modern America, where the average fair-weather voter is stuck in the middle of the road and too overweight to drag himself out, Janklow and his posse all have their staunch far-wing opinions—just don't ask them what they are! In fact, Janklow has refused to even identify where he stands on major issues to his own constituency—preferring to sell them the new favorite platform of improved standards of living and honesty and integrity in representation, as long as they don't want details on how we get those things. But make no mistake, his voting record demonstrates he's a Republican—hardcore, motherfucker! Janklow may be the quiet, shy type, but he's not afraid to tow the party line when it comes to the voting floor.

The South Dakota legislator has earned the nickname among associates as "Bad Billy" for his spotty driving record, his pro-GOP voting record, and his hygiene. Consumer activist and delusional Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader sent a strongly-worded letter to Janklow requesting his resignation. The incident was described by Nader as "the taking of life by a driver relentlessly bent on turning his vehicle into a lawless, dangerous missile," the Unsafe at Any Speed author wrote in his trademark prose bursting with sensuality.

"Dangerous? Definitely. Boring? Never!" sassed Belfront Herb, responding to questions no one asked. The gossip columnist and Washington (D.C.) insider is also the editor and only contributor to the underground political scandal zine Filibuster, and they've made Janklow their "Hunk o' the Month."

"He's not all talk like those stodgy old senators, and he may not be on the popular committees, but he's hot stuff in the 108th!" claimed the girlish fop. "A lot of naysayers will tell you he's another blend-into-the-background representative, and all his misbehaviour is a failed attempt to stand out. But I'm telling you, and you heard it here from me first, Boomer—we've got another Ted Kennedy on our hands. A future Bob Dole or Jesse Helms. I would say one day the name Bill Janklow will hang in the Congressional Hall of Fame next to Henry Clay. But since they're all in alphabetical order that will really throw the whole scheme out of whack."

This reporter attempted to remind the funny-but-not-in-a-ha-ha-way Washington insider the congressman is facing felony charges with a 10-year minimum sentence, but he refused to address the issue. Unwanted sexual advances forced the interview to conclude early, and the calls at the commune offices have yet to stop.

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Buddha?

Buddha who?

Indeed. Well, it's time to set the record really straight, like Tom Selleck straight. Because I'm tired of people on the street arguing with me that Buddha was one of the original members of Cypress Hill. So strap on your thinking caps boys and girls, we're embarking on a magical journey to the Land of Not Being So Stupid.

For starters, you probably know Buddha as that big fat Oriental guy smiling and giving the thumbs-up in ads for Chinese restaurants across the country. What few know and may be surprised to learn is that he was also the father of a worldwide religious movement, sort of like Jim Jones without all the mass suiciding. Or think Eddie Murphy in that Holy Man movie. I haven't seen the movie, but it seemed like it had something to do with religion.

The problem with the Buddha is that everyone has their own idea who the man was. For some, he's known as the source for the famous philosophical quote "It ain't easy, bein' cheesy." For others, he was an inspiration to the morbidly obese worldwide. Others are just crazy.

Case in point: feminist voice Liz Gromer of the Humboldt, California Daily Bitch.

"If you want to buy into the bullshit Hollywood image of Buddha, you go right ahead if it helps you sleep at night, thinking of Buddha in this glamorized image of some great big fat fucker from China. But the truth remains the truth, and the truth is Buddha was an 87-pound woman from Chicago, and she had an ABORTION. That's right, and I hope it rocks your pathetic little sanctimonious world, you fucks."

On this side of crazy, the real Buddha was born in Northern India in 565 B.C. as Siddhattha Gautama, which isn't that bad once you consider that this was a country where people were naming their kids things like Dikshit and Assum. Gautama was born as royalty; real royalty, not the crap we have now like Paris Hilton or a bunch of inbred Brits. As a child he rode around on pygmy elephants and his feet weren't allowed to touch the ground until he was seven, that kind of thing.

Buddhists believe that Gautama was born after having a go at reincarnation innumerable times in an attempt to become the Buddha, or "Bitchin' Guy." In nearly all of the lives he ended up being a gay hairdresser in New York, so he had to start the whole thing over again too many times to count. Eventually, however, he fulfilled the Ten Paramitas, a Mexican entrée that is very difficult to prepare, and was ready to be born as the Buddha.

While she was pregnant, Gautama's mother had visionary dream of a magnificent white elephant handing her a hamburger, which was delicious but needed relish. She took the dream to mean her son-to-be would either be a great success, or would just love bun meat.

A seer who had crashed the party for Gautama's birth told the father, King "Dan" Suddhodana, that his son would either grow up to be a great king or a kick-ass spiritual leader. Dan quickly set out to prevent his son from having any kind of character-building experiences, so that he would go the king route and Dan wouldn't be stuck with a lousy spiritual messiah for a son, forsaking material excess and laying around the house all day.

The young Buddha spent his childhood like any other boy, trying to kill small birds, but because of his wealth he was able to forsake throwing rocks and just paid the birds to fly into the rocks themselves. After seven or eight years he tired of this and turned his attention to spiritual matters. Ten minutes later, he discovered girls, and it is best to gloss over the next several years in the Buddha's biography.

In 545 B.C., Buddha was kicked out of college for boning the Dean's daughter, who was then 16 but had tits like a 24-year-old. A dissatisfied Buddha would drift aimlessly for the next few years on the George W. Bush plan for character development, except they didn't have cocaine back then and you had to juice a lot of toxic berries to get high. Eventually, Buddha was married and had a child in 540 B.C., though he was unaware of either fact and ended up deserting the family he didn't know he had to embark on a pilgrimage to find his lost shaker of salt, i.e., Enlightenment.

On his way out of town, the Buddha famously saw his "four sights": a dying man, a sick man, an old man, and the smug fucker who got the sick guy sick and killed the dying man and who kept pointing at the old man and laughing that he was so old. It was then that Buddha realized the four sufferings of existence: to be old, to be sick, to be dead, and to be an asshole. Buddha decided then and there that none of these were for him.

Gautama wandered in the wilderness for three years and in an act of self-denial, he ate nothing but Pringles the whole time. He would never eat them again. After the Pringles phase he tried eating nothing at all for two more years. After the second year, Buddha realized that denying the body the pleasures of food is "boddhishiti," or "bullshit." He then immediately ate three large pizzas and spent the rest of the week contemplating indigestion. Pretty much from then on the Buddha was Marlon Brando fat, but nobody gave him any crap about it.

Buddha then traveled to Rajagaha and studied meditation under the eccentric masters Alara-Kalama and Uddaka-Ramaputta, who argued constantly over who was uglier. Under their tutelage, Gautama achieved a transcendent state of deep meditative peace, which he summed up as "big whoop," before telling Alara-Kalama and Uddaka-Ramaputta they were both equally ugly and leaving.

Gautama decided he would have to go it alone to find true Enlightenment, and so spent the next four years contemplating why hot dogs come in packs of ten while buns come in packs of eight. After the fourth year spent in contemplation, Buddha realized he didn't even like hot dogs, and was enlightened.

From then on, Gautama was known as the Buddha, or as a bodhisattva, which is Hindi for "Big Deal." He quickly attracted legions of followers, to whom he passed on his wisdom about low-maintenance haircuts and not eating yellow snow. The Buddha would travel the countryside for the rest of his life, enlightening the masses and terrifying All-You-Can-Eat buffets across the land.

Though many in the West have a hard time taking the Buddha seriously as a religious figure because he never wrote a best-selling book (Jesus) or built much of a self-help empire (Hubbard), many slackers have adopted the Buddha as their patron saint, allowing them to camouflage their persistent sloth as a sign of low-grade Enlightenment. But their more-industrious neighbors are quick to remind them that while ancient people had to put up with the Buddha crashing on their couch all the time, at least they got some clever haikus out of the deal.

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Life is funny sometimes.

I was out prowling around and whatnot the other day when I ducked into a store in the mall that had this huge life-size statue of Xena in the window. Now, Omar Bricks isn't a huge Xena fan or anything pathetic like that, but he knows a key piece of interior decorating décor for the Bricks Manor when he sees it.

I was hoisting the Xena statue onto my back when the pre-pubescent store manager asked me if I needed help with anything, like he was going to crap out a disc helping me carry this thing out to my bike. I asked him if he had could get me a dickfour, which I figured would keep him busy for a while. But he was unphased, this cat was all business. We shot the shit for a while, and I was disappointed to find out that this backwoods store doesn't accept SuperAmerica calling cards as a form of payment. No shit! In America no less. It was probably for the best though, since $10,000 for the statue probably would have gone over the minutes I had remaining on my card. I'm not sure, but there's a pretty good chance. Thus began a fruitless bartering session that went nowhere but gave us both a good excuse to yell in public.

I sent the dude to go check with his regional manager to make sure they didn't need a used Nordic Track for the store, and while I was waiting, some salivating dweeb trapped me into a conversation like a sparrow caught in flypaper. He had his retainer all in a twist about some computer program that had just given the King Geek chess guy a wedgie or whatever. Something about chess, anyway. I said I knew what he was talking about, just because the reflection of my face in his glasses was starting to wig me out and also I wanted him to stop talking.

Now Omar Bricks knows a thing or two about chess. For one, there's a dude that looks like a horse, but he's not called a horse. Don't ask me why. I think it's stupid too, but I didn't make up the game. And the other thing is, don't try to mix and match checkers pieces while you're playing, because nothing pisses off chess geeks more than bringing up the subject of checkers.

Since the manager still hadn't come back yet, I was stuck in a socially awkward situation that only wholly unexpected display of breakdancing ability would get me out of smoothly, and I wasn't wearing the right kind of pants for that. So I was trapped like a gimp as the chess guy showed me over to a computer where there was a herd of nerds crowding around, all taking their shot at beating this Deep Fritz genius chess program that had so recently bookslammed the Grand Dragon of the socially stunted chess world. Of course, they were all getting smoked like cloves at a junior high school party and giving each other wet willies for losing and all kinds of retarded shit I don't even want to go into.

Since I was kind of stuck there anyway, I decided to make it interesting and I announced that Omar Bricks had come to kick Deep Fritz in his chess-loving taint, once and for all. The dorks were dubious, but when I stated flatly that Omar Bricks had never lost a game, they were impressed. Or non-responsive, whatever. But technically it was a true statement, thanks to the patented Bricks end move where you "Ah, shit!" accidentally flip the board over with your knee when defeat starts to look imminent. It works in pretty much any kind of board game, though if you're going to pull that during a game of Scrabble, you might want to duck out the door while everyone is confused because that's one mess you don't want to help clean up.

So in the end I knew I had that ace up my sleeve, and I doubted the computer had anything like that to fall back on. Generally computers don't have sleeves to hide things in at all. That would require computers wearing dress shirts and nobody not recently off crack wants that, since at any time you could turn around and find big bird-headed lamps pecking at you and scary pants come dancing out of the closet and then you realize you're in some kind of Herbie Hancock video nightmare and oh shit.

The match started well, with me moving some horses and the computer moving some big dick-shaped things around for a while. I think my concentration may have lapsed because I was wondering if this computer had that naked golf game on it when one of the nerds yelled in my ear "Omart! He's got you in check!"

Now I don't claim to speak chess, but I figured this was probably bad. One of the other geeks pointed out the computer's little castle and how it was lined up to put the smackdown on my bedpost. Shit. NOW they tell me you can move the castle. What the hell kind of unrealistic game is this? No matter, either way I had to move fast. I told the dorks not to worry. Then, when the computer was about to put the "Castle of Death" whammy on me, I jumped up like I had just seen an underdressed high school girl out in the food court and in the process banged my shin like a motherfucker on the computer table. That sent the whole thing down like a pup tent on a Special Ed camping trip, no lie. The effect was basically what I had been after, though with more shin banging than I cared for.

Of course, that's just when the manager shows back up, when there's broken crap everywhere and I'm hopping around, holding my shin and cursing out Bill Gates. The nerds were long gone, off checking the food court for cleavage. The manager kid was going on and on about the broken computer and this and that, and I thought I was going to have to windmill my way out of there after all, but he changed his tune after I threatened to sue the whole mall over their defective computer tables. For a second I thought I might be riding home with that Xena statue strapped to my back thanks to my lawsuit ruse, but finally I had to settle for this little pewter statue of some kind of fat gremlin thing.

Tell you the truth, I don't even know what the hell it's supposed to be. But it sure makes a badass hood ornament for my bike.

Bricks out.

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