n the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the currentmath of Hurricane Rita hot on Katrina’s high heels, elderly southerners who’ve been there before are offering a reassuring voice of bitter calm to troubled Americans across the South.

“Today’s hurricanes aren’t worth a hot goddamn,� groused Boca Raton resident Carter Dunlop, 88. “You all can quit your bellyaching. Back in the day, we had hurricanes to remember. I don’t recall their names or any details, but you can rest assured these latest pipsqueaks are even less noteworthy. Trust me, you’ll all hear Carter Dunlop scream like a woman when a real hurricane hits.�

“Category 5? Pssh, they’ll call any old stiff breeze a hurricane nowadays,� griped Biloxi native Ted Knuck. “Back in my day, you wouldn’t cross the street for anything less then a Category 15. And that was only because it blew you across the street.�

“And they call this a hurricane,� sniffed Elmer Controse, 76, of Wicker Falls, who had his entire house flattened by Hurricane Katrina. “Blew my house down, big whup. This is nothing. Back in ’56, Hurricane Chuck blew my house down, then re-arranged it and blew it back up again so that everything was inside-out. All my pictures were hanging on the outside of the house, and my toilet and stove were on the outside, it was like some kind of crazy doll house. But inside, everything was all aluminum siding. Creepy as hell. Now that was a hurricane.�

“Today’s hurricanes aren’t worth shit,� opined Daisy Altamont, 91, of Baton Rouge, who had her wedding ring blown up a cat’s ass by Hurricane Beauregard in 1949. “Get back to me after we’ve had the kind of hurricane that ends with you giving an enema to a housecat. But a word to the wise: if that does happen, I’d advise against telling anyone what you did. Apparently it’s illegal to enemize a cat.�

the commune was unable to verify the legal status of giving a cat an enema, but we did discover that it clearly violates American Show Cat Association guidelines, as it can apparently harm a cat’s self-image and lead to problems with bulimia.

Thus far, a consensus of scientists have been unable to confirm the elderly’s claims of mega-hurricanes from the past, arguing instead that hurricanes have been at about the same strength throughout history, and incidentally, the scale of hurricane categories has always gone from one to five, no higher.

“Bullshit,� disagreed longtime Hollywood, Florida, resident Angus Roper, 95, in spite of not having heard the previous paragraph. “When I was a boy, Hurricane Delphina blew my dog inside-out like a sock, right before it blew my grandmother through an oak tree. Not the branches, mind you, the trunk. Granny was never the same after that, chirping like a chipmunk whenever the barometer dropped. You don’t see hurricanes like that anymore.�

“Absolutely,� agreed Cape Hatteras, North Carolina’s Archie Slobertson, apparently displaying some kind of cross-state old-person telepathy. “Hurricane Dandy, now that was a… well, a dandy. Back then the hurricanes didn’t blow sideways like they do now. Nope, hurricane blew straight down. Pushed my whole town underground, no foolin’. Don’t believe me? Look on a map for North Jigglebarrow, you won’t find it! Better get yourself a shovel if you want to visit. Still folks livin’ there from what I hear tell. Yep.�

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"When I was a young boy, I believed I could make myself invisible at will. Whenever I was stuck in a predicament that called for not being seen, or else was just in the mood to go invisible on a lark, I would squint my eyes closed as tight as I could and hold my breath until I saw multi-colored sparks and small explosions in the darkness before me. Soon after I would hear a loud popping noise, and that's when I knew I was invisible.

I did it the first time when I was four, out of some kind of collective unconscious instinct response. My mother came home unexpectedly from the store to find me naked in the kitchen, covering myself with papier mache made from pictures I'd cut out of the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. In a panic I clenched my eyes shut, and to my surprised delight heard my mother searching around the house, asking "Where's Sampson?" and "Have you seen Sampson?" while I invisibly ran out to the back yard and hid inside a discarded tire.

My talent for going invisible came in handy over the years. I used it sparingly whenever mom caught me with a girl in my room or I was pulled over for driving under the influence. I'm sure mom and dad had to wonder why naked girls kept sneaking into my bed while I was out, or how my car drove itself into a ditch so many times, but I don't think they paid it much mind since they had their hands full with Goose's Tourette's Syndrome, which at the time was known as Sailor's Mouth.

When I was seventeen my brother Goose, who I'd just caught in a compromising position with a bottle of Coke, broke down told me that I'd never really gone invisible. Turns out the family had always humored me and played along because when I closed my eyes, mom would run and empty out my piggy bank while she was pretending to look for me. Later, she'd use my allowance to take the family out for ice creams while I was at school, which explains why Goose never finished the tenth grade."

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With all the fervor about cloned cats and cloned pigs and cloned sheep burping too much methane gas into the atmosphere lately, we've almost forgotten to consider the inevitable future of sci-fi bullshit come true: human cloning. Fertility researching eggheads have announced that an impotent husband's DNA sample fuel-injected into his wife's attention-starved egg can result in her giving birth to an exact clone of the husband, lousy slacking-off sperm and all. No shit! And word on the street is that human cloning has already occurred, and that they're a boy band named O-town. I've never heard of them, but I wouldn't put it past whoever would be in charge of that kind of thing.

Some are calling this the next frontier, as they talk into women's leg razors painted black and make strange hand signals to their other dorky friends. Personally, I think they've jumped the gun a bit: I say the real future is in celebrity cloning. What woman wouldn't pay through the nose to have her son turn out like Robert Redford instead of her boring husband, who's a nice guy and all, and has a great head of hair… on his back! Yeeeeick. I think the number may run in the millions.

Because of this, you have to assume we're going to see a booming market in confiscated celebrity biological material in the future. You won't be able to go to a benefit for Tibetan date rape victims or a boat show without seeing people fist fighting like wild dogs over discarded celebrity eyelashes and toenail clippings. Mark my words, eBay is going to have to create three different categories for nose hair alone.

I mean, what kind of loser spends her time pouring over old issues of People magazine for blurbs about Brad Pitt when, with a dash of ingenuity, she could have a little Pitt growing inside her? Then she's just a wig of Chinese women's hair and a name change to "Jennifer" away from being shot dead in the shower whilst clutching a Ginsu, making that beautiful dream complete.

Finally we won't have to put up with the disappointing progeny of celebrities any more, sucking their way through life and failing to live up to the talents and all-around fabulousness of their revered parents. No more eagerly waiting, with baited breath, for them to show some glimmer of hope that they'll be just like their parent, only young and sexy again. No more crushing disappointment in them turning out spoiled, odd-looking, untalented and arrested for drugs in an unexciting fashion.

In this brave new world, once Brad Pitt is too old and fat to titillate our feminine sides, we can just turn our attention to the eldest Mini-Pitt clone, who will just be coming into his prime hunky years without having to get his cock stuck in A River Runs Through It to get our attention. Thank God.

Granted, few celebrities will welcome being replaced by a younger version of themselves who they can't control or smother with unwelcome affection after a lifetime of childhood neglect, like they do with their kids. Undoubtedly it will become the in-vogue thing to see celebrities walking around in ridiculous baggy moon-suits to prevent having any of their DNA stolen. Photographers will swarm around anyone they see in a moon suit until they read the ID tag on the lapel and realize it's just Buzz Aldrin.

As a result of this, the majority of stars will request that they be replaced in their movie roles by computer-generated facsimiles of themselves, since except for a few isolated examples, most roles would require them to take off their moon suits. And fat chance of that, lest some intern on the set has dreams of selling lip skin he scraped off of coffee cups on eBay. Understandably, this will give new meaning to the term "phoning in a performance," though of course the lingo will be updated to the techno-chic term "downloading." "Did you see J-Lo in the new Farrelly Brothers movie? Boy did she suck." "No shit, she must have downloaded that one while she was having her butt waxed."

Obviously this will cause a huge shake-up in the Hollywood power structure, with whiz-kid programmers coming into high demand and replacing acting coaches to make sure that even CindyCrawford.exe can turn in a convincing performance as something other than an overpaid bimbo. Granted, there will still be problems, like CatherineZetaJones.exe conflicting with all of the other software, MarlonBrando.exe being too large for system memory and RobertDowneyJr.exe showing up all corrupted and with the wrong drivers. But I have great faith they'll iron out all of these problems in time to make another great buddy cop picture, which is what it's all about in the end.

In the mean time, Omar Bricks has a trend to head off at the pass. If you hear in the news next week that some mustachioed mystery man has made off with cells from Balthazar Getty's stomach lining, just smile knowingly to yourselves and wish me good luck on my yacht shopping. Bricks out!

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