the commune, 10/26/26: You'll learn to love it or die trying

America Trapped in Shitty Groundhog Day Nightmare

March 8, 2004

Washington, D.C.

Mrs. Bird, Graphics Dept.

Bushes, and Kerrys and Nader oh my!

merica awoke this week to find itself trapped in a shitty Groundhog Day nightmare, thanks to a recent AP poll showing that if the election were held today, President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry would tie, with human Muppet Ralph Nader playing the spoiler once again by garnering 6 percent of the vote. These results were eerily and shittily similar to the 2000 Presidential election, when Bush won despite losing the popular vote, thanks in part to Nader siphoning off liberal voters and Bushâ€™s brother Jeb taking a big, wet crap on the Constitution to ensure his brother would carry the crucial state of Florida.

Within moments of the Associated Press poll results being made public, Americans everywhere were comparing their feelings of nauseating year-2000 dÃ©jÃ vu to the 1993 Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a news weatherman doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. How this phenomenon might be possible for an entire nation on a four-year scale is not yet understood, though faerie magic has yet to be completely disproved. Regardless of the cause, non-Republicans everywhere agree that America needs to make some kind of major soul-searching change to prevent waking up in 2005 to hear â€œI Got You Babeâ€ playing on clock radios across the country.

â€œFuck! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!â€ fumed an epileptically frustrated Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe upon hearing the results of the poll, a replay of the 2000 election searing his brain stem like a cattle brand. Similar sentiments echoed across the nation this week as Democrats and the non-rich envisioned a bizarre replay of the last presidential election, with Gore being swapped out for Democratic nominee John Kerry like some kind of bad Hollywood script for a time-traveling comedy.

â€œI donâ€™t know if Kerry will be able to pull off what Gore did,â€ mused confident-sounding political pundit Prance Nancley. â€œAl Gore could have won that election in his sleep, after all he was running against a Mr. Potato Head doll. But Gore still somehow managed to drop the ball and kick it all the way down the street, allowing so-called adult George W. to sneak into the White House while the door was ajar and Gore was off looking for his ball. I donâ€™t think Kerry has that kind of comedy in him. He is rather dull.â€

Still, the possible scenario of an election repeat has haunted more than a few Democrat dreams this week, with Kerry taking the place of Gore as the respectable, though thoroughly boring democratic hopeful who somehow loses to Bush on a technicality, after Floridaâ€™s governor declares that blacks donâ€™t have the right to vote in his state any more.

The lone encouraging note in all this is that according to the same AP poll, politics arenâ€™t the only area in which America is trapped in a loop of dÃ©jÃ vu, as the AP cites â€œcurrentâ€ top-grossing films The Grinch, Cast Away and Mission Impossible 2, and has â€˜N Sync, Santana and Eminem topping the album charts, which clearly isnâ€™t true.

Is it?

the commune news had this exact same thing happen once, except we kept getting arrested for watching our next-door neighbor get undressed through binoculars. Lil Duncan is the communeâ€™s Washington correspondent, and she experiences her own kind of painful dÃ©jÃ vu whenever she hears a man say â€œThat sounds like my wifeâ€™s car!â€

Cheney Vows to Stay Course: Will Shoot Hunting Partner Again

Christina Aguilera announces engagement to manwhore

MasterCard issued to Donald Trump in hopes of spurring economy

Super Bowl Advertising: Fat guys with Nike T-shirts to get $1.8 mil

February 18, 2002

Welcome to My Nightmare

º Last Column: Home for the Horrordays
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I've had more than my share of ups and downs in my twenty-four years on this planet. After the life I've led, I'm sure you can imagine how happy I was to get a regular gig writing for a well-known respected news source. Then those dildos at Entertainment Weekly bounced my ass back into the street. My luck always turns its nose down, given enough time. But you know the old saying, every time God farts he opens a window, and things are steadying for me again as the folks at the commune have brought me aboard to publish my column Child Star.

For anyone who doesn't know me, I'll spend this column on the long version of the introduction.

The name, for those of you who can't read bold print, is Clarissa Coleman, and as I mentioned, this column is called Child Star. I plan it to be about the perils of being raised "in the business" as those of us in the business describe itâ€”shit, how you like that? I used the phrase while describing what it means. But picking up where I left off, this column will cover everything from my rise as a child star (see column title) to my plummet to where I'm at now. And if there's any justice, it will also chronicle current happenings as I again rise to some middling degree of sanity or something. Warzy, eh?

I may not look immediately familiar, but be assured, at one time my little dimpled face was like a machine that printed its own money in Hollywood. I first gained national attention as the little girl in the GermanhÃ¤us baked potato commercials. Does "I gots butter on my tummy!" ring any bells? I thought so.

From there, of course, I went on to play baby Alfie on everybody's favorite soap opera of 1983, Search For An Exit. They only gave me one line a week to start, but soon I had more lines than that one disagreeable kid played by three triplets. The whole soap thing was never too serious, just a springboard to other things. Just as planned, it helped me get a sweet sitcom deal when I became the starring kid on Who's Your Daddy? with beloved actor Brad Van Danner. As you might guess, it was the gravy train from then on. Until it wasn't, which is where I'm at now and why I'm writing this column to make ends meet.

Well, eventually, even the biggest hit show can only run so long. We were canceled two years later, a year and a half if you subtract the long hiatus while the network was trying to decide to bring back the show or not. "Washed up at 9," the headlines all read about me. Or at least that's what my mom said, I wasn't literate at the time and couldn't read the headlines.

Naturally I descended into depression, booze, and drugs, though never all at the same time. All the tabloids you read about me? Some true. Some not. Most true. Some not. I'm sure I'll get the chance to explain everything through the span of this column, assuming of course the folks at the commune aren't as cancel-happy as some dildos at ABC.

I want to say, too, that I'll be dedicating this column to someone special in my life. Someone who's worked harder than anyone I know, struggled uphill through countless battles and always comes back for some reason I'll never guess. Of course I'm talking about me. My column, for me, I damn well deserve it at this point.

Thanks for reading and piss off if you didn't.

º Last Column: Home for the Horrordays
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September 30, 2002

I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham

º Last Column: Wasted Away in Mormonville
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Few were happier than good Samaritan Rok Finger when Lee came out of his coma. Sure, Camembert appeared happy about itâ€”a little too happy, if you ask me. But I was the one who had loaded him up with alcohol and convinced him real men can knock back a few dozen Harvey Wallbangers and then drive with no problem, so the guilt was more than enough to make me hope for him to pull throughâ€”and when he did, I expected a few questions. Where am I? How did I get back here? Why didn't you take me to a hospital? Why can't that kid walk? But this is not what I expected.

Lee after the crash did not really seem all that different from Lee before the crash (let's refer to him as Lee B.C.). Yes, he's taken to speaking in rhyme and wearing a three-foot peppermint-striped hat, but I thought it a phase we all go through. What really bothers me is he won't answer to Lee anymore and insists I eat rotten meat and eggs.

Okay, they may not actually be rotten, but they're bright green. You tell me what your first assessment is of the quality of this ham and eggs he's pushing. I wake up, my first guilt-free sleep in a week (besides my afternoon naps), and find Lee cooking breakfast. Fantastic! It appeared at first the crash actually improved himâ€”the old Lee never cooked breakfast, woke up early, paid rent or bathed. I considered taking Camembert for a ride like Jeff Bridges took Rosie Perez in Fearless, hoping for the same great results as with Lee; or Rosie Perez herself, if I could get her in the car. That is, until Lee revealed his true colorsâ€”bright green.

I politely refused to eat his foul-colored eggs and porkskin, but that wasn't enough. He kept offering to make the setting more presentable in any way to make me eat them. A bigger or shinier plate, a glass of milk, bringing a fox to the table or threatening to trap me in a box. I'm not sure what either of those would do to improve my appetite, but he was pretty insistent. He already had the fox locked in my bedroom. I still tried to politely reject it, then I resorted to the F-wordâ€”flatulence; odd-colored food makes me gassy. But he would not be thwarted.

Even going to the office didn't stop him. He popped up in the backseat of my car and tried to shove them in my mouth. I later found him stuffed inside a drawer of my desk, which at his full 5'5" height made it uncomfortable for him, I'm sure, yet he still was trying to force these emerald eggs and bacon down my gullet. I told him I wouldn't even eat them on a train, or on a planeâ€”though it looks an awful lot like travel food. I beat him to the punch as well by telling him I wouldn't eat them in the rain, a sewer drain, off a yellow stain, if served by Billy Zane, while listening to the Clash's "Train in Vain," wrestling Tom Payne, or if I was insane. This impressed him to no end, I believe.

Then, finally, just to be left alone, I tried them. Nobody was more surprised than I was.

I was made horribly, horribly sick. They rushed me to the emergency room and pumped my stomach, and when they found green meat and eggs, let's just say the doctors and nurses chided me into humiliation in front of the whole emergency room. They said it was obvious Lee had a severe head trauma and needed medical attention as well. And me, well, I was just an asshole for eating green eggs and ham offered by a man with a critical concussion.

So I've learned my lesson. Or maybe I haven't. I won't eat any food that isn't the right color anymore, I know that. Sometimes your instincts are dead on, and men in peppermint hats can't be trusted.

º Last Column: Wasted Away in Mormonville
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Quote of the Day

“It is a wise man who makes a career of providing quotes, for the dollar-to-word ratio is fantastic. Eat your heart out, novelists.”

-Beenjammin Lynn-Frank

Fortune 500 Cookie

You! In the yellow shirt! Youâ€™re going to have an awful week. Move along now. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but your lifetime ban from the municipal aquarium still applies. Those repressed childhood memories youâ€™ve been having about animal abuse and a shady-looking construction site? That was Donkey Kong. Try eating something with at least 17 letters in it this week: mailboxes and Alpha-Bits donâ€™t count. Your lucky dong accessories: ornaments, jingle bells, argyle cock sock, festive wreath, racing stripe, spare donut.

Try again later.

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

BY Roland McShyster

5/12/2003

Time to stretch whatever you need to stretch, America, we're gearing up for the Summer Blockbuster season. Take your time, though, since nothing looks worse on a time-off request form than the term "pulled scrotum." Ouch. Once you're good and loose we'll warm up with a few of the opening salvos in this summer's "War Against Just Staying Home and Downloading MP3s All the Time," as the industry has dubbed it. Or as we like to call it here, "Operation: Rehash."

In Theaters

The Lizzie McGuire Movie

Leave it to Disney to put a happy-assed spin on anything, including the bitch who chop-sueyed her family with an axe and then wrote a song about it. Equal parts American Bandstand Psycho, Britney's Dance Barmitzfa and every Nickelodeon movie ever, the film is a singing, dancing, cute-boy-kissing good time that pauses briefly for ass-chopping parent slaughter mayhem between the mall shopping spree and a hilarious visit to Buckingham Palace. It's all in good fun, but I warn you that if this one does well, an animated Disney musical about the Holocaust is sure to follow. Scoff all you want, but I'd bet cash money they've got sketches of singing showerheads and songs like "Life's a Gas" waiting in the wings.

Owning Mahowny

Eventually you have to stop numbering Police Academy sequels since people are going to start thinking the title refers to the name of a submarine or something and get confused. So you have to applaud the producers of the series for heading that train-wreck off at the pass by naming Police Academyâ€¦ whatever number this is Owning Mahowny instead. Sure, the premise is some bullshit about an eligible-bachelor auction gone wrong, but at least they had the good sense to leave Steve Guttenberg in the deep freeze and instead tap pudgy white chameleon Philip "Feed Me Seymour" Dustin Hoffman for the role. The resulting movie still sucks, but it sucks in a different way than you'd expect.

The Real Cancun

Just when you think the girls have gone as wild as they're going to go, the big smut machine in the sky serves up another steaming helping of underage skank. The real question isn't when we as a culture are going to get enough of seeing the same drunk 17-year-old's well-traveled funbags. It's when are the religious weirdos going to run out of abortion clinics to bomb and have to turn their attention to Sony and Bicardi, the major contributors to this home video skankery? Unfortunately it won't happen any time soon, not while being opposed to anything disgusting is still considered unpatriotic. Instead, I predict 10 years from now we'll have a reality show about these loose co-eds trying to keep their fiancÃ©es from catching wind of the cock-soaked debauchery of their youth at their own bachelor parties. Now there's some potential for drama.

Whale Rider

Probably as topical as a movie can get, this tear-jerker revolves around one grieving family's battle to collect on their departed father's life insurance policy, even though he voided the thing by eclipsing the policy's gross tonnage ceiling as specified in the little-known "Whale Rider" of the title. A probing drama that asks important questions about where to draw the line between just really goddamned fat and legally culpable obesity. In the end, we learn that a person who's made themselves too fat to breathe is still a person, and love knows no gross tonnage ceiling.

X2: X-Men United

Even a cynical Hollywood insider such as myself dropped his Maxim when he heard they were doing the sequel to Spike Lee's Malcolm X as a comic book action movie. That takes some serious AC/DC-sized balls, my friends. Even Ben Kingsley's nasty turn in the controversial Gandhi sequel Sexy Beast pales in comparison to these robust cajones. Man. But in all fairness, when you think about it, the notion of racial justice being restored in America by a crew of ass-kicking circus freaks of confusingly mixed ancestry just seems like common sense. Sure, they made both magnet-assed Malcolm and his wheelchair-bound arch-nemesis Professor MLK a little too white in an attempt to sell them to suburban moviegoers, but if people are going to insist that skin color doesn't matter, then they really shouldn't complain when everybody in the movies is white. That's a little hypocritical when you think about it. Regardless, even with the unfortunate product tie-in angle of making Werewolf a pilot for United Airlines in his spare time, the film did kick a lot of ass-shaped racial injustice.

And that's the that we were here to deal with this week, Americanos. Now you've got only 14 short days to prepare yourself for your next dose of Entertainment Police, so get preparing! If you don't think that's enough time, well that's just tough. I used to accept reader requests to postpone the column in the past, if they were for a good reason, but it soon degraded to requests like "You suck!" and "Up your mother's ass!" so now we just stick to the strict biweekly schedule. Sorry a few rotten apples had to ruin the pie-pocket for everyone.