Tom Cruise's Shit Don't Stink

ccording to a troubling new study published today, Canadian scientists have found the shit of American actor Tom Cruise to be totally lacking in the offensive odor usually associated with common man-scat. The discovery raises a host of disturbing questions, not the least of which is what Canadian scientists were doing smelling Cruise's shit in the first place.

"We've long suspected Mr. Cruise might have descended from a higher odor of stenchless man, and these findings have merely confirmed the innate superiority we've long gathered from Tom's demeanor and public statements," explained Dr. Remus Rooney of the Manitoba Center for Deep Thinking. The center, housed in a building once famously occupied by vice pioneer Brooks McNally's "assembly-line" brothel during WWII, is known around the world for investigating questions of general scientific interest such as what those letters on zipper tabs mean and why some people insist on calling it "double-yew double-yew eye eye."

"When Tom looks at you, you can just tell his shit doesn't stink," added Rooney. "And now we have the research to back it up."

But how did this unusual study come about?

"Tom contacted us, actually," elaborated Dr. Rooney. "He was concerned that the cigar boxes of shit he was mailing to a local rival might not be having the intended effect, and sure enough it turns out the guy was using the stuff to insulate his house."

Rooney is careful to point out that Cruise's fecal matter is not odorless, which would just be creepy, but rather carries the robust odor of roasted almonds, a scent most who come in contact with the shit find pleasing. Through a series of tests at the Manitoba Center, Cruise's diet, lifestyle and religious practices are being examined as scientists attempt to probe the inner workings of the sweet-smelling actor.

"I hear he eats nothing but honeydew melons and bee larvae," insisted local roughneck Denny Lopez. "No shit. Or whatever they make that bee jelly out of. That shit's expensive. Damn but I'd like to get me some. My shit stink like death, yo."

"The defining characteristic of shit is that it stinks," explained leading fecalogist Roger Burns. "Which is what makes this case so unusual. If it doesn't stink, is it still shit? Or is Mr. Cruise instead shitting out something else? And if this is the case, is he still shitting it out, or do we need to come up with another verb for defecating a substance through one's anus? This is truly a heady day for science."

"Just a sec, I gotta take a shit," added Burns, excusing himself.

"Why don't you leave one instead?" countered Dr. Rooney, in jest. Both doctors chuckled heartily.

"That one never gets old," admitted Burns.

Appeals Court Rules Hilton Legitimately Too Pretty to Survive Prison

Climatologists Cross Legs Uncomfortably at Mention of Bangkok Conference

Merck: “Crazy-Ass Brazil Giving AIDS Drugs to People With No Money”

Poison Probe Reveals 90% of Packaged Foods Actually Dog Food

Nothing can distract you from your miserable, carless existence better than a new watch. Especially a really bitchin' new watch that does shit.

Most people are happy to settle for watches that don't do a goddamned thing other than tell the time and look swanky on their wrists, but not Omar Bricks. I've always demanded more from a wristwatch. Over the years I've had watches that said the time out loud (to save my valuable looking time), watches that told the temperature, the direction, the altitude, my heart rate, and watches that recorded me saying some spooky ventriloquist shit that I could play back during meetings when my mouth obviously wasn't moving.

I had one watch that worked as a remote-control for the TV. This was pretty sweet, but what I really wanted on that worked as a remote-control for a remote-controlled dune buggy. That would have been the cat's ass. But I guess I was a little ahead of my time in that desire because they never made one.

As a kid, I'd generally been satisfied with lame-assed time-telling watches, until the third grade when I collected enough box tops and sent away for a watch that played the video game Frogger. Holy shit, I thought at the time, now there's a watch. My current green plastic watch was clearly in need of replacement, as the picture of Fozzie was badly flaking off. Most kids were going the Swatch route, since those things came with some gay-assed band of plastic that kept the front from getting all scratched and kept you from having to figure out that arcane hand-based system of time telling, since the protective band blocked your view of the rest of the watch anyway. A few others had thrown their lot in with the Mickey Mouse watch, but I knew that was verging into ass-beating territory in the higher grades so I steered clear of any of that happy bullshit.

Nope, the Frogger watch was the one for me. As the six to eight weeks of estimated shipping time dragged by, I daydreamed about school days spent Froggering away in the back of the class while the rest of those dopes learned fractions. And they'd never be the wiser, since it's not like I was dragging a full-sized arcade version of the game into the classroom with a coat thrown over it or anything. No way man, I was on the low-down, for all they would know I was back there trying to adjust for daylight savings time or jerking off or whatever. It was the perfect plan.

After seemingly forever, the watch finally in the mail, in a bubble-wrap envelope no less. Talk about Christmas coming twice in one day, the long-awaited watch and bubble wrap. Shit. I busted the watch out, laughed at the Taiwanese instructions, and within minutes I was in Frogger heaven. Or something. In actuality, playing the watch wasn't anything like playing Frogger, but it had some stickers of the frog from the game on it, and that was pretty cool. And if you had an active imagination, you could imagine that one of those black dots that was blinking on and off was the frog from the picture, sort of, and it was kind of like what playing the game would be like if you had severe brain damage.

And hey, it was on a watch, and pretending it was Frogger was a whole hell of a lot better than studying the Spanish Civil War. So I was on sunshine street for about three days, until one day the watch took a hit during a tetherball grudge match and that piece of shit fell apart. Then, to make matters worse, that little asshole Toby Sklar got a PacMan watch out of a box of Kix as if on cue and everybody was lining up to kiss his ass after that. Everyone could see that the actual game looked exactly like the Frogger watch game, just a bunch of black dots blinking on and off, but there was a Pac-Man sticker on the wristband and Pac-Man had always been more popular than Frogger. And it wasn't broken, he definitely had me there.

So I did the only thing a third-grader can do in that situation, I hit Toby in the head with an apple, and when he fell down he landed on his arm and the watch broke.

And that's the problem with watches that do cool shit, those fuckers break like Korean cars. Not long after you figure out how to use all the cool features, you get shut in an elevator door or you get in a construction site fight and there goes the damn watch. You can play hockey with watches that don't do anything, they always last forever even when you don't want them to.

This is a trend that's about to come to an end, however, because I just got the bitchinest watch there is. This thing tells the time, temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, cardinal direction, GPS coordinates, how far away you are from bacon, Sig-Alert status… Hell, for all I know this thing could free South Africa. Plus it's got a nightlight that would blind Stevie Wonder, I don't even think it's night any more when I turn that thing on.

Rest assured that this is now Omar Bricks' Watch For Life, nothing's happening to this bad boy. Plus, the thing's the size of a soup can so there's no way it's going to get all banged up from being worn on my wrist like a common timepiece. I'm thinking of keeping it in the box, that thing seems pretty well padded.

Now I just need find somebody who knows what time it is. Bricks out.

º Last Column: Aye, She Chimmied Me Chonga
º more columns

There was a lot of talk this season about contraction in baseball. In other words, rounding up the teams that are too pathetic to wear the mantle of MLB and having them taken out back to be shot, much like my last three dogs who had the plague and my wife after she broke her leg power-walking. Some say this would be good for the sport: to thin out the ranks so that only the strong survive, and throwing the rest to the wolves of more popular sports, like football and croquet. Others argue that it's just a ploy by the owners, a bluff to get the players to agree to electroshock tracking collars at the next contract negotiation meetings. Everywhere, people are talking about it: from a WWII vet I met in a barbershop on Tuesday to a traveling salesman I met in another barbershop Saturday afternoon. The buzz in the air is palpable.

What do I think about the impeding contraction? Good riddance! The teams most often rumored to be under the axe are the Montreal Expos, the Florida Marlins, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Minnesota Twins—not a half-dozen men between them. I mean that: the Devil Rays are actually a little-league team from Georgia who won some kind of Cheerios Sweepstakes to play in the big leagues. The last time they played the Yankees half the team went home with wedgies and pink-bellies. So they're an easy call.

How about the Montreal Expos? Frankly, I'm surprised a team named after an off-brand of panty hose has lasted this long. No need to worry about protests if we put them out of their misery, a gay pride parade in Nebraska draws more folks than an Expos game. I went to an Expos game one time on fan appreciation day, thinking I'd get a bobble-headed doll or something, right? Wrong. I went home with Vladimir Guerrero, it turns out every ticket-buying fan got a player for the weekend. He sealed my driveway and helped me dredge out the basement: a very nice young man. It was probably our folly in thinking that Canadians would be interested in American baseball anyway, since what they call "baseball" is a far different sport that involves whiskey and chainsaws.

What about the Florida Marlins? Their problem is exactly the opposite of the Devil Rays: the youngest guy on the team is 76, and he's the bat boy. I guess that's what you get for putting a team in a place where the state bird is Betty White. I saw a Marlins game once where the third baseman was killed three times during the game: twice by line drives and the third time he had a stroke during the seventh-inning stretch. They have more EMTs in their stadium than the Cardinals have hot-dog vendors, and their games take six hours because they're constantly having to revive the players (and some fans) with the electroshock paddles. And did I mention that they're slower than David Wells in a Jacuzzi full of glue? The entire team had one stolen base last year, and that only happened because the catcher for the Brewers, Snapper McGee (who had been traded from the Marlins only weeks earlier), died on the play and hence couldn't throw to second.

So the Marlins are out. That leaves the Minnesota Twins. Here's my question to you: has anyone actually seen the Twins in the last few seasons? I don't recall that I have and I'm starting to get worried that they might be buried in the snow up there or may have been eaten by Sasquatches. I recommend we send some St Bernards northward to confirm that the team is even still there before we talk about folding their franchise.

The thing I want to know, though, is why only four teams? Surely these aren't the only miserable excuses for a baseball team that we could rightfully give the ol' Kervorkian treatment to. Are we sure anyone in Anaheim got those flyers under their windshield wipers letting them know they have a team? The last time I was at an Angels game, the team didn't even show up, and I spent the afternoon playing pickle with their coach and a janitor. I heard the Kansas City Royals had to bus in hobos for their games this season, since the only fans that showed up were the players' moms, and they were driving the coaches crazy, loudly second-guessing all of their decisions.

I'm sure we could cut a lot more teams if we were serious about ridding this sport of losers and has-beens. Who would cry a tear for the Verno Beach Needledicks or the Fresno Filibusters? What about the Woody Creek Dirty Liars or the Mason City Menopause? Now that I think of it, I'm kind of tired of the Chula Vista Screaming Dandies, the Eugene Scat-Flinging Apes and the Apple Valley Dipshits, too. I say off with their heads, every last one.

Look, I've got nothing against any of these towns or their fans and I love an underdog just as much as the next guy. I'm just tired of being called on to pinch-hit every time I've sat down and just gotten comfortable with my beer and sausage-dog, that's all.

º Last Column: Aye, She Chimmied Me Chonga
º more columns