ans of the unskippable clutter clogging the front end of most commercial DVD releases received great news this week with the announcement that all major movie studios will begin releasing films in the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats later this year, allowing studios to pack even more commercials, trailers, multi-language legal disclaimers and FBI warnings onto their future releases.

The new formats were developed by a consortium of consumer-electronics giants in response to studio complaints that current DVD technology only allowed studios to force the purchasers of their DVDs to sit through about twenty minutes of unwanted content before getting to the main feature. HD-DVD will feature a 30GB capacity, enough for fifty trailers showing coming attractions, seven FBI warnings, twenty-seven commercials for other DVD releases and Pillsbury crescent rolls, and “The views and commentary reflected on this disc do not reflect…� disclaimers in forty-seven languages. The rival Blu-Ray format, developed by Sony, is expected to nearly double that content, leaving the actual main feature as a virtual afterthought printed on the biodegradable glue between disc layers.

“These new formats are a godsend for our industry,� explained Paramount Pictures head Sherry Lansing. “Last year we had to cut ten minutes out of Top Gun just so it would fit on the DVD between the trailers we wanted to include for our seventeen most exciting upcoming releases. This time next year, our biggest problem is going to be finding a way to make sure consumers aren’t napping through the two hours of product placements and trailers we’ll be able to fit before the movie. We’re already working on a feature that will crank up the television’s volume for the trailers, in such a way that you won’t be able to turn it back down.�

Other studios are said to be working on similar DVD technologies that would insert commercial breaks into DVD movies, add CGI product placements to films according to real-time sales figures, and one that would go so far as to turn on a consumer’s television at pre-programmed times and play time-sensitive advertisements from the DVD.

Though the movie studios are understandably excited about these technological advancements, consumer advocates question why consumers would shell out big bucks to replace their relatively new DVD players with an even more abusive technology. But Hollywood studios remain unconcerned.

“Well, they bought DVD players, didn’t they?� asks Twentieth Century Fox head Hutch Parker. “Damn did they buy DVD players. I mean, with VCRs, you could just fast-forward past all the crap at the beginning, or just never rewind the tape that far. People obviously prefer being made to watch this stuff, so we’re adding more. After all, adding commercials before the half-hour of trailers we show in the movie theaters sure hasn’t kept people from shelling out $10 at the movies, right?�

“They’ll buy them,� agreed Lansing. “We’re going to say the new Blu-Ray shit has twice the ignots or something, make something up. ‘High Definition,’ whatever that means. ‘Crystal-clear picture and bone-rattling sound,’ that sounds good, right? We’ll say they make the old DVDs we were hyping last week look like burnt turd, and those geeks will eat it up.�

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Seems like we spent our entire childhoods preparing for things that never happened. How many hours did we waste watching filmstrips on not accepting rides from strangers, or classics like "Don't Play with Rover Foamymouth" that taught us the virtues of staying the hell away from dogs with rabies? How many sleepless nights spent worrying about total global annihilation from a nuclear war with the Russians? By that I mean other kids staying up all night worrying about nuclear death, God knows Omar Bricks didn't lose any shuteye over foreign policy issues. I was way too wrapped up in my plans to order a money printing press from an ad I saw in the back of a Casper comic book. I schemed for a year to get that damn money-mill, and then it finally came in the mail and it turns out the friggin' thing prints toy money! I shit you not, ten-dollar bills with a picture of a walrus on them. I could have shit, I was so mad. I might have. Gone were my dreams of printing up enough currency to buy every toy in the store and to build a functioning car out of Legos, with which to drive to Sea World. I'd have to wait until Christmas (and 1995, alternately) like all of the other kids, like a shmoe.

I guess every little kid had to have some major disillusionment when they were young, like having their parents die or ordering Sea Monkeys. I'm sure you know the drill: ad in the back of your comic book looks awesome and makes you think you're getting a clan of human-sized merpeople in the mail, and that in no time you'll be frolicking in their underwater kingdom and cutting deals to have the Sea Monkeys blow up your school and stuff your Social Studies teacher into a steamer trunk headed for the Dutch East Indies. Then of course the package comes in the mail and it's an ant farm and a packet of dust. Since you're a kid and therefore gullible as a mail-order bride, you follow the instructions, add water, and hold your breath to see if this chintzy crap will somehow transform into the awesome experience you've been envisioning. Instead, it ends up looking like that Watersquirtz ring-toss game you've had since you were five, the one that got all leaky and mildewy after it spent a few years at the bottom of your toybox. It dawns on you then that the only way you could use these "Sea Monkeys" to get back at your Social Studies teacher would be if you put them in her coffee. So you get mad, and stay that way for the better part of seven minutes until you realize that you're missing the beginning of Diff'rent Strokes, and it's the one where Willis tries to grow a goatee.

That's what I hear anyway, I never ordered the Sea Monkeys myself. My dad had ordered them when he was a kid and his bitter diatribes convinced me that they probably weren't worth the eight bucks. For that same reason we never got to go to Sea World, since there was no way dad was going to shell out his hard-earned money to see a bunch of water fleas swim around in a tank.

Thank Moses I had my dad to impart these pearls of wisdom on my young mind, since school definitely wasn't doing it. They were far too concerned that we were going to get kidnapped from the school parking lot or bitten by a stray dog if we somehow managed not to get nuked while doing drugs. Of course none of it ever happened, and we all survived (except for Tommy Frink, who peed in the sink and later ended up becoming a Scientologist). What the suits didn't understand was that there were far too many Transformers to collect for any of us to blow our allowances on crack pipes. Of course I may be a bad one to ask since I flunked out of the DARE program at the tender age of eight. I passed out when the officers were showing us how to tie off and locate a vein, so during the graduation ceremony I had to sit off to the side with the kid who'd had Mono the whole time.

Seems like they could have been showing us filmstrips on something useful, like not answering cell phones in movie theaters or what to do if the guy next to you on the plane is wearing a diaper made of plastic explosives. I'm pretty sure I know the proper position to be in when you're obliterated by a mushroom cloud, but search me for how you're supposed to disarm a pimply reject in a Korn shirt with an Uzi. Or even etiquette things like the polite ways to turn down a request to join a cult. That would come in handy. And karate. They definitely should have taught us karate.

But, you know, life goes on and some things you just have to learn for yourself. For everything else, I've been thinking about correspondence colleges.

Yeah. I should definitely open one!

Bricks out.

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It's recently been brought to my attention that the commune has not been appearing online for the last, say, nine months, give or take a full-term pregnancy. I guess the saying is true: you're always the last to know when your stuff stops getting published for the better part of a year. Anyway, spilled milk aside, it's clear wherein the blame for this blunder lies.

Gerbil tubes.

I'll be the first to admit I was the one who discovered the tubes, poking out of the walls in every room of the commune offices, including the shitter. I was scanning the walls with a studfinder, looking for espionage-style bugs, rather than the usual food-stealing bugs we've always had, when suddenly, tubes! Had covert, turtle-fighting plumbers snuck in overnight and installed them? Nope, turns out they'd been there all along. No gold star for the commune staff's powers of noticing.

But still, you can imagine our excitement at this discovery. Finally, a way to file our articles and columns without the constant drudgery of saving and emailing. Pneumatic tubes have always been the way of the future, and it was about time the commune got some, or barring that, realized we'd had them since the early 80's.

And let me just say that filing your semi-weekly columns by pneumatic tube is a joy and a pleasure. You crumple that shit up into a ball and stuff it in the tube, pushing aside last week's column, and say asta-la-deadline, asshole. Everything in life should be that easy, and involve crumpling.

Everything cruised along smooth as shit until last week, when Emil Zender got out of the hospital following months of recovery following a complicated tonsil-removal surgery and burst into the commune offices, apparently after driving straight from Vermont in his hospital duds to let us know the commune wasn't online anymore. We all made fun of him for not using the telephone instead, until he pointed out that no one answers the commune telephones and in fact we have them all in a pile on the floor of Rok Finger's office so we can close the door and not be bothered with all that ringing. True enough. So then we made fun of him for reading the commune.

It turns out the tubes actually run to a pet store down the block, and they were installed in the early 1980's after an earlier tenant's stroke of genius about revolutionizing gerbil delivery. So Big Stiff's Pet Pouch has been the sole benefactor of the last nine months of commune wit, wisdom, and panache. And he was using the shit for guinea pig bedding. C'est la vie, but suffice it to say you've missed some all-time classic My Friend Polio columns while you were gone.

Okay, that's not precisely true. Actually I've been mailing it in since around June, writing about shit I found in the trash and why nobody makes a barbecue big enough to cook a dolphin. So in fact you've rejoined us just in the nick of time.

Oh shit, I forgot to bitch about how lousy my Christmas was. Hurry up and join us next time, because I'm out of room and gotta piss like a fish. Bricks out.

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