he Bornean junk monkey, Stevensons' slug, Malaysian sitting bird and the world's largest species of blind sea trout are in grave danger of extinction, the World Conservation Union warned an assemblage of world leaders on Tuesday to the sound of one tiny violin playing sarcastically. Also among the newly-threatened species nobody has ever heard of are the shovelnosed arctic frog, the smoke weasel, the Andean left-handed dolphin and the three-toed nervous elephant of lower Peru.

All are among 13,279 varieties critically endangered and possibly-imaginary animal, plant and water life precious to bleeding-heart liberals the world over. Many are new to this year's edition of the group's list, a yearly "wake-up call to the world" that unless serious changes are made to environmental policy, the earth's biodiversity might one day shrink to comprehensible levels.

This year's list, like all that came before it, has drawn a collective boo-hoo from the planet's human inhabitants.

"Excuse me, but what has the Columbian rice shrew ever done for me or my family?" questioned an indignant Don Cloyd from Williamsburg, Virginia. "My uncle lost a logging job because of some stupid owl that didn't want to live at a box at the zoo or something, so sorry if that ruined it for all the other creatures out there, but I still say animals that don't taste good can kiss my ass."

Various world leaders questioned about the organization's list issued similar mock-sincere statements, vowing to halt all future economic progress in order to make the world safe for such hilariously improbable creatures as the Chilean trouser trout and the loud Spanish jackass.

Over 762 animals have gone extinct worldwide since various governments and the NRA began keeping records in the 1600's. Among the beautiful creatures the earth will never again know are the Tittleosen snot sloth, the North American windshield sparrow and the sickly cave bear of Nepal.

Perhaps the most stirring symbol for lost species is the majestic dodo, a once-useless bird that wobbled off into the history books in the early 17th century when Dutch sailors visiting islands in the Indian Ocean discovered the birds, whose strange compulsion to hop into cooking pots and offer themselves up for soups and other entrees led quickly to their extinction.

According to the WCU, thousands more creatures will join these ranks shortly if steps are not taken to slow the destruction of their native habitats in industrialized and developing nations. Saddest of all may be the possible fate of the Scottish brownie hound, once numbering in the thousands but now thought to be down to the last one and a half specimens in existence. Even that shocking number is sinking fast as scientists are unsure of how long you can keep half a dog alive in a cooler full of ice.

In delivering the study to world leaders, WCU Director General Achim Steiner also pointed out the success of recent efforts to save formerly endangered species such as Arabian oryx and the white rhino, news which inspired several unimpressed heads of state to mouth the word "super" while mimicking the jerk-off motion with their hands.

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OH MY GOD SNOW

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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Recently I was navigating the vast, frozen expanse of the Internet in an attempt to find out what exactly Ma Bell knows about yours truly. I'd heard some scary shit from Griswald Dreck about how people online know everything about your life, from how much mustard you like on your pretzels to how many times you've shaved your sack. I've always been a man who protects his privacy, unless there's a free prize involved, so I was curious to find out what exactly the nosy world knows about Omar Bricks.

My first stop was the Internet search engines, which proved fruitless as lunch at Arby's. The only match that even came up was for a building material wholesaler in Texas. To be honest I was a little disappointed, I'd been hoping for maybe a real-time webcam that showed me sitting there at the computer, looking at a real-time webcam that showed me sitting there at the computer… and on and on endlessly like that Pink Floyd album or that time in college when I put two mirrors really close together and stuck my head in-between them. But instead, nothing. No credit-card numbers, no lists of my favorite CDs, and no photos of me hang gliding naked in Mexico. I've never actually been hang gliding, but I thought someone might have spliced my face into an awesome photo of some crazy fucker freeballin' it over the desert cliffs in Cancun, you know? I could have gone for that.

After my rich fantasy basically had its underwear yanked up the asscrack, I decided to check out some alternative sources of information. Next came the online white pages. I figured maybe my home address would be up there somewhere with a link to a map and a note about the spare key that's hidden on top of my doormat. Some kind of scary invasion-of-privacy shit like that to really make the search worthwhile, you know? Well fill out that fantasy in your own heads as you so desire, because it turns out I'm not even listed. Apparently as far as the Internet is concerned, Omar Bricks isn't worth stalking or roping into a pyramid scheme. It's like I don't even exist in their eyes, which makes me feel kind of like a time traveler with no identity and it makes me wonder what I could get away with. I could probably paint my name in block capitals on the side of the bank after I walked out with my pants stuffed full of cash, and it wouldn't matter. What are the cops going to do, look me up online? Shit.

A funny thing did come up when I was searching the white pages, though. I wasn't in there, but I'll be goddamned if there wasn't another Omar Bricks listed! No lie! Some lucky bastard living out in Sudsbury, MA. What kind of bizarre mind-bending shit is that? Could we have been separated at birth? Just thinking about how I'd lived my entire life not knowing that there was another Omar Bricks running around kind of creeped me out. What if he was out there wearing a Thompson Twins tee-shirt or something and making me look like a total dink? This was a serious liability, the Omar Bricks street cred was in the hands of some guy who could be into collecting dolls for all I knew.

This needed to be investigated with a quickness, so I sent Omar a post card and before I knew it we had exchanged several letters about what it's like to live the Omar Bricks life. Turns out he was a pretty decent cat, maybe a little too into the quarters from all of the different states, but to be honest I was just happy he wasn't a famous ballet dancer or anything. Before long we made plans to meet in person and I flew out to Massachusetts for the weekend.

And it was a great trip, Omar and I hung loose and had the kind of fun that only two people with the same name can have. We went to the airport and had ourselves paged, then got into a fake karate fight at the ticket desk after a long staged argument about who was the real Omar Bricks. After security escorted us out we went home and Omar had a great idea about calling a radio call-in show. I went out to the phone in the hall and called the same show, and we spent a half an hour arguing for and against abortion with the show's host. The dude almost went out of his ass between the fact that both of his callers had the same name and were calling from the same town, and the fact that they probably don't get a lot of calls about abortion on AutoTalk.

After that we were pretty strapped for ideas until Omar realized we could really raise some hell by trading lives for a month and acting like nothing had happened. I thought it was a great idea, but Omar's girlfriend got all uptight about the whole thing and we had to settle for setting Omar up with double food stamps at the local welfare office. Not quite the grand caper we had envisioned originally, but still pretty handy when you need some baby formula or a rack of lamb or something.

After the weekend was over I had to come home, I think to the relief of Omar's girlfriend. I returned to a world that felt a little smaller and a little less Omar Bricksish. But although there's only one Omar to carry the load in these parts, it gives me peace to know that there's another O.B. out there, somewhere, keeping it Bricks. Not to mention that I started a couple of credit cards in his name while I was out there. Voice-activated deck chairs, here I come! Bricks out.

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