Bush Unveils Martyr Prevention Hotline

April 15, 2002

Washington, DC

Ansel Evans

The president, curious as to what everyone's reading beneath his head

n the face of wildly escalating violence in Israel and Palestine, political commentators the world over have been looking to American President George W. Bush for a sign as to the path America will take in dealing with the Mideast crisis. After making an early dismissive statement about how at least the Palestinians don't have flight schools, Bush had been conspicuously quiet on the issue. Some observers theorized that the president was carefully weighing America's options before he made a public statement, while others argued that his attentions had been split between a new model train set and the Fox prime-time drama 24. Today's announcement might have proved either side correct.

In a press conference this morning, Bush unveiled plans for a new Office of Martyr Prevention, headed by syndicated radio call-in therapist Dr. Judy Kuriansky and manned by a staff of 300 licensed suicide-prevention professionals who will be available via a toll-free telephone number 24 hours a day.

"I have created the OMP in response to the internationalary outcry for American action to address the Mideast peacelessness," Bush stated. "Suicide bombers are threatening world peace and the time has come to find a solution. These young men and women need to be shown that there are other, better ways to express their anger and frustration than blowing up a Circle K with explosive underpants.The answer is not to perpetuate terroristical attacks of an inhumanitarian nature. I understand that the people of Palestine, and other miserable places I need not mention by name, need a shoulder to cry on. Now they know that America is there for them, over thousands of miles of telephone wires. No need to come here, we'll pick up the phone bill. There's nothing to blow up here that you couldn't blow up back home, anyway. Operators are standing by."

Dr. Judy Kuriansky accepted her appointment with a brief speech on the Mideast situation. "It's time to break the cycle of violence. The time has come for Palestinian youth to understand that the dark, dead pit of bile in their chests is not the bitterness of living in a relocation slum or the dull ache of hunger, nor is it some tiny embryonic Jew implanted in their chests that's gnawing at their internal organs, regardless of what their newspapers tell them. It's the all-too-familiar ache of feelings yearning to be expressed.

"What we need here is communication. Palestine needs to stand up and say to Israel: 'It hurt my feelings when you kicked the snot out of our armed forces back in 1967.' And Israel needs to say to Palestine: 'Hey, asshole, if you hadn't attacked us then you wouldn't have lost all the land you're bitching about now. What's your freakin' problem, anyway?' And Palestine needs to say back to Israel: 'Listen, we never agreed to let you guys move in here in the first place, and now you're trying to force us all to move to Jordan. Fuck Jordan, Jordan sucks.' And then the UN needs to come over and slap them both on the back and say: 'Alright, you're all a bunch of assholes, but we need to do something about this or the rest of the world is going to run out of explosives.' Then the UN can take them both out and get them drunk and hope they have sex together and we end up with a bunch of Jewrab babies so nobody can tell who they're supposed to blow up any more. But my point is that communication is the key."

National reaction to today's announcement has been typically harsh, with many critics pointing out that there aren't any Circle K stores in the Middle East. At press time, OMP staffers had received three phone calls: two wrong numbers looking for Sears AutoCenter and a call from Iowa asking if it was possible to overdose on mini-marshmallows.

Reactions from Palestine have been even less promising, with Hamas leader Zaccaria Walid Akel promising a large cash reward for the family of the first suicide bomber to blow up OMP headquarters.

the commune news is currently involved in a less-than-holy war with the staff of Crochet! magazine, who just moved in on the floor below us. Lil Duncan is the commune's White House correspondent and one fine-ass reason to come to work in the morning.

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May 26, 2003

Bricks on the Fourth of July

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I definitely need to hire out as a Fourth of July consultant. If you think you don't need a Fourth of July consultant, you've never experienced a Bricks Fourth of July, end of story.

It's about a month away, I know, but when you want to make it a memorable good time, you've got to plan well in advance. It's just not smart to put a houseful of fireworks and a truckload of Miller Genuine Draft together without more than a little planning. Now usually I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy, even if the ass of the pants rips out and you get kicked out of the kid's birthday party, but hey, it's not like I knew the kid anywayâ€”nothing ventured, nothing gained; but when it comes to Fourth of July, Omar Bricks turns into a rocket scientist of event planning.

It's more than just explosions and drunken fight after drunken fightâ€”shit, if I didn't have that on a daily basis I'd hang up my hat and go home already. The way I see it, Fourth of July is the world's celebration of pure, uncut freedom, and for me there's nothing better worth celebrating. Hanging out with buddies, sipping beers, and trading swimming pool-building tips is like a fart in freedom's face. Omar Bricks don't fart in anyone's face unless they personally asked for it or take out those little opera glasses in public, which is the same as the former in my book.

It takes more than a month just to save up enough money to rent the arena. Why go through the trouble and expense of renting an arena? Well, you might as well ask what's the point in having a demolition derbyâ€”you can't hold it in your backyard, don't argue with that because I've tried. And the demolition derby is the big part of the Bricks Fourth of July gathering, and in the tight-money times I haven't been able to rent an arena I find an unguarded farmer field is a fantastic substitute. If you check with your friends who fake crop circles on the weekends they can probably tell you which places are frequently unsupervised and have the best tire traction.

Then you have to select the special car, I like to nickname it the "doom buggy". The best way, I've discovered, is to hold a little private lottery the night beforeâ€”if you have one hundred ping pong balls, a giant hamster ball, and a tuxedo, have a little fun with it, it's like a party in itself. Then whatever number wins that's your car, since they'll all have numbers painted on them at the derby. I would recommend keeping it something only you know. Sure, you can let everybody in on the secret, but when most people find out the car's trunk is full of fireworks the volunteers to drive it dry up real fast.

No demolition derby is complete without a lot of beer, whether you're a spectator or a driver. Still, with luck you'll get flipped over by the car with the bulldozer prod welded on the front early and can get a seat right up front in time for the first explosion to hit the doom buggy. Man, that's Fourth of July. Our founding fathers would have been proud enough to piss themselves.

That's just my favorite part, of course. Some Bricks partygoers love shaving the heads of the derby losers. Others love the swimming pool full of Thunderbird, throwing flammable things on the bonfire, or the wrestle Lil Duncan contest. I'm not complaining, I love every part of it, even the swarming of S.W.A.T. team members to close the whole thing down gets me kind of misty-eyed. Like America, there's a little something for everyone. Bricks out.

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February 2, 2004

I Didn't Come Here to Argue Semantics

You say I ruined your life, whatever.

Who gets machine-gunned to death these days, anyway? I mean, seriously. The chances have got to be astronomical. You practically have to be begging to be machine-gunned to death. My cousin was on the waiting list to get machine-gunned to death for three years when he was hit by a train. I'm serious! The way I see it, you should be writing me a thank-you note. I'd call you an inconsiderate prick if I wasn't certain you'd take it the wrong way.

Ruined your life, ha. That's rich. I'll have to remember that to tell my ex-wife, she'll get a real kick out of that one. She loves jokes like that, about me ruining her life or sucking out her will to live, all those old chestnuts. She has this great new one about me chewing up the best years of her life and spitting them out like tobacco juice, it goes over really well at parties.

Because really, how do you ruin somebody's life? Seriously. I can't even fathom it. A priceless Faberge egg, now that's something you can ruin. You can't play catch with one of those things without ruining it completely, trust me on that one. Friendships? Yeah, I suppose you can ruin a friendship. Especially if it's with a stuffy Faberge egg collector who doesn't keep his house locked securely at night. Those are both ruinable, I'll admit. But an entire life? Keep dreaming.

So what, so you have to get all your sustenance by licking pulp off the filter screen from...

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Milestones

1965: commune columnist Rok Finger coins the slang term "Dingleberry" at a father-son picnic attended solely by his numerous illegitimate offspring.

Now Hiring

Doormat. Co-dependant with poor sense of boundaries needed to do the work of three men and two women, allowing the commune to do our part in this jobless recovery. Cot in back available for qualified applicant.

Top 5 commune Features This Week

1.	Lying Your Way to Love
2.	Porn Stars Model the Latest Kids' Fashions
3.	Uncle Macho's Ballsack Franks
4.	Embrace the Whiney Bitch Within
5.	Decorating Your Storage Unit

North Korea Pissed Their Real-Life Hunger Games Nowhere Near as Popular as Movie

BY Roland McShyster

7/21/2003

Glad you finally came around, America, welcome back to Entertainment Police. What have we got for you this week? Well, before we get to that, you ever notice how I always refer to the column by "this week" when we all damn well know it only runs once every two weeks? I'm sure you were wondering about that, unless you just take everything you read at face value and figured your brain was probably freaking out every other week and giving you a dÃ©jÃ vu of the previous week's column on a rhythmic schedule, which is pretty bizarre but people believe in Scientology, too. But anyway, yeah I know it only runs every two weeks, I'm not trying to fool anybody there. That's as often at the commune publishes, which is fine since they still pay us every week. Though come to think of it, paying us only on new-issue weeks sounds like exactly the kind of crap Red Bagel would try to pull, so don't anybody read this column to him lest he gets any ideas from it. But the real reason I say "this week" is that there's just no good way to refer to this two-week period without sounding like a complete nerd. You start messing around with terms like bi-weekly and that just sounds too much like a lesbian magazine title to me. So unless you want me to start saying "this half-month" like some kind of bed-wetting science fiction geek, I recommend you just take a chill pill over the whole thing.

So anyway, back to the original question: What have we got for you this week? What are you, slow to catch on? Movie reviews, dumbass!

In Theaters

Bed Boys II

It's nice to live in an age when big action stars aren't afraid to acknowledge the homoerotic undertones of the typical buddy action picture by ceasing to beat around the bush (the pun wasn't intended but I'll take it) and just doing a gay action flick every once in a while. For the longest time people acted like this was some huge deal, like you couldn't have a couple of gay guys running around, shooting people and spouting catchphrases. Kudos to Will Smith and funnyman Laurence Fishburne for taking that bold step in style. True, this way neither of them can win the girl in the end, but it's a nice change of pace when the filmmakers don't have to staple a pair of boobs to a flimsy sketch of a character to give the heroes motivation. After all, what could be more crowd-pleasing than having the two leads go home together at the end, without having to watch some girl pretend like she can shoot a gun? Kudos and other snack products to you, Hollyweird.

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Rock the Cradle of Love

Virtual sex bomb Angelina Jolie reprises her role from the popular Billy Joel video "Rock the Cradle of Love" in this feature-length shake of the moneymaker. Few thought she'd have much of a career after that video, unless Winger got really popular again, but she's done all right for herself. I guess it pays to be able to do a serviceable fake English accent; smart pinup girls should take note and work on that. Though that's kind of like saying fat Olympic divers shouldn't do the cannonball, probably doesn't come up much. This film another shameless example of the trend toward giving movies titles that are longer than Ron Jeremy's wang, but even at that it's still better than the original title: Lara Croft Who is the Tomb Raider Stars (and By Stars We Mean She Both Kicks and Shows Some Ass) in The Cradle of Love: A Rocking Titfest. The longer title might have brought more pasty teenagers into the theaters, but the trailer for this film (available now on DVD as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) has the same effect without using all those words.

Seabiscuit

As anyone who's seen Caddyshack knows, a "seabiscuit" is when you take a shit in a swimming pool, which obviously makes this a very bizarre name for a movie. It's even more bizarre that Tobey Macguire is starring in this one, though the make-up people did a pretty great job of giving him a dorky red wig that does make him look like a seabiscuit. It takes a brave actor to wear something like that. Kind of reminds me of when George Clooney dressed up as a Latino pimp for that goofy Yo Brother, Where's the Party? movie. This movie isn't nearly as fun as that one, though, despite the hilariously inappropriate title. Personally I found it hard to follow, in part because I kept wandering out of the theater to see if there was anything better going on outside.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over

After all these years, Hollywood finally gave me an excuse to drag my old 3-D glasses out of the bedroom closet, dust them off and cart them gingerly out to the metroplex for the first time since Jaws 3-D sucked all over the big screen. These actually aren't even the glasses they gave me for that one, I have a free promotional pair from 7-11 from when they inexplicably showed Terms of Endearment in 3-D on Fox a few years back. It sucked, too, but it was fun to wear the glasses. Actually, all 3-D movies ever have sucked, including this one, but really they've always been thinly disguised excuses for people to get to wear the fun glasses. You can try to just wear them out and about town, but after about 20 minutes if you haven't walked into a bus yet you'll have a headache the size of Chinatown and your rods and cones will be all mixed up like they were a crazy breakfast cereal.

That's all they paid me to write this week, America, so you'll have to turn elsewhere to quench your passion for numerous letters strung together into pretty words, if this wasn't enough to keep your boat floating. Until next time, America: Get out!