he White House announced a daring new plan this week to address the nation's ballooning health care costs, which are crippling employers and causing otherwise sensible Americans to talk about national health care like dirty fucking socialists. By making poor health a law-enforcement issue, Washington hopes to get tough on the sick with bold mandatory sentencing for citizens convicted of harboring cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

"It's time to stamp out this national cancer," announced President Bush to a menagerie of stuffed animals standing in for reporters who thought the subject of the press conference tipped off an obvious gag invite. "And that's a convenient metaphor, or Similac, because I'm actually talking about cancer. And diabetes. Uh, heart disease… what are some of the other ones? The shits. Definitely got to stamp out the shits."

The new "War on Illness" will integrate aspects of several national programs aimed at ending GDP-draining sickness, including "Get Tough on Cancer," "Zero Tolerance for Juvenile Diabetes" and "Not in My Neighborhood: StrokeBusters." Supporters hope the new initiatives will sweep America's streets clean of the sickly and infirm, and keep future generations safe from the social decay caused by sick people.

"If you choose to get terminally ill, well, that's a mistake you're going to regret," crowed Judge Thomas Redbone in support of the plan, posing with an impressively oversized gavel. "No longer can we tolerate this blight on our neighborhoods or the threat it poses to our children."

Under the guidelines of the new plan, a first offense for harboring cancer, diabetes, pneumonia or other Class 5 controlled illnesses will trigger a mandatory five-year sentence, with repeat offenders coming out of cancer remission to receive life without the possibility of parole. The death penalty remains a possibility should the disease be diagnosed as fatal. Even more controversial is the plan's call for strict "Three Strikes and You're Out" sentencing for perpetrators of mental illness, to deal with wayward individuals lacking the willpower or strength of character to stay sane.

While predictably receiving criticism from the sick and terminally liberal, Bush's plan is already garnering widespread support from Americans tired of worrying about their kids falling victim to this societal scourge, and those who worry they themselves could one day be robbed by a sick person desperate for health care.

"It's a tough law, but fair," conceded June Striber, a former cancer sufferer now in remission. June hopes that with God's help, she'll remain on the right side of the law.

Critics question how Bush intends to implement the plan without addressing the problem of our nation's already overcrowded prisons. The president quelled these concerns with news that the incarceration overflow will be handled by converting schools closed due to recent education cutbacks into prisons, as well as GM factories shuttered due to overseas outsourcing and museums no one was visiting anyway. According to the president, even further room for sickly inmates can easily be found in abandoned K-Marts and in failed dot-com office space nationwide.

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I just returned from that commune retreat thing, where I had a lot of fun. I know everybody else got back about three weeks ago, but like I said, I was having fun. As far as I'm concerned, I decide when the retreat is over. It's not very cool to invite me to a relaxing retreat and then decide I'm relaxed before I decided.

But it worked out pretty sweet. I had a lot of fun, set fire to a few things, got into a few scrapes with wild animals, all the things a good vacation should be. I had a chance to do some real soul-searching, and scored a few wallets, too. It's not very Bricksian, I know, but I had to ask myself where my life was going. No car, no love in my life, working for the commune—some people might consider those things setbacks. All in all, I'm happy, don't get me wrong, but since I don't have a family, I thought maybe it was time I did something to gain me some immortality points.

Now, I know a lot of people can do different things for immortality—paint pictures, donate money to hospitals for a building in their name, or spray paint your name on a wall. But I wanted to do something with children, since the courts are always telling me I've got a lot in common with them. Kids are cool, unless they're complete shits, but you have to make that distinction on a kid-by-kid basis. So I wanted to give back to them. Help shape the future by doing something today. Or not today, you know, but in the next couple of years or whatever. Introducing (drum roll) Camp Bricks!

You heard right, boys. Camp Bricks. I got the idea while we were on that retreat, how it was almost like a really boring touchy-feely camp for adults. But being close to the woods brought out the real Omar, and I thought if I could do that for kids, that shit would kick.

Well, I suppose I also got the idea partly from Meatballs, 1 and 2. 2 was pretty crappy, but it wasn't too bad. 3 was awful, so I wouldn't want my camp to be like it at all. Mainly I just figure kids need a place where they could come and get into races and all sorts of athletic competitions against rich kids and find a way to win using their own weirdness to their advantage. And they can talk about jacking off and swim across the lake to hang out with girls and stuff. I wish I had the chance to do some of that stuff when I was a kid. I could swim across the Hudson River if I wanted, but that's got a pretty strong current. And there were plenty of girls on this side of the River to hang out with, so it seemed pretty pointless.

Kids need a way to build up their self-esteem. If you watch shows about kids these days they're all idiots. They dress like they get prizes for conforming and they worry about getting into college when they're 9. That's bullshit. I say if you're not on a first-name basis with a court's juvenile case worker, you're not getting the full childhood experience. They need a role model, and I don't see why it can't be me. Anything's got to be better than those Malcolm in the Middle posers.

I should say that I won't be messing around with teen-age girls. Anymore. Fool me once, shame on me, all that, and the cops are watching me pretty closely about it all. But I figure I can take care of the boys, there's got to be someone cool enough to handle the girls out there. Not that I'm against dressing up and pretending to be a counselor named Edwina. If nothing else, it would make a really good chapter of my autobiography, and they could make it into a movie called Big Sister, but right now I'm strictly looking for the genuine female variety of counselor. Let me know if someone cool comes to mind.

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On the evening of Saturday, November 10th, 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver of Zackary Farms shot a pigeon in the ass. At the time, he was out pot-shotting on The North Slob by the river Stanley, in the easterly westness of Southern Ireland. The shot traveled through the pigeon, and carried on to hit a dove sitting on a nearby fig tree, two butterflies on the wing, and the neck of his hunting partner, Sir Edmond Wistledick III. Later that evening at the hunting lodge, Sir Hugh marveled at his highly unusual shot while Wistledick gurgled along in agreement, holding a mottled kerchief to his punctured esophagus.

This quickly started an argument at the lodge over who held the record for the most things shot at one time. Sir Hugh thought he might have set a new record, while other drinkers weighed in with fantastical stories of shotgun mishaps at the rookery or the time Walter Cranabble shot an entire tank of lobsters during a melee at a seafood restaurant.

Dissatisfied with his inability to prove the greatness of his shot (in addition to the tiresome and endless debates with his wife over whether or not she was the fattest person in the world), Sir Hugh went to his friends at the local fact-checking agency, Crampit & Crammit, with his idea for compiling a book of world records for doing stupid things. Though they never doubted Sir Hugh's expertise on the subject, Crampit and Crammit thought his idea of publishing the book on the backs of a collectable series of beer cans was a bit tacky… even if he did work for Guinness. They agreed to participate, as long as the book was published on paper. Sir Hugh reluctantly agreed, even though paper doesn't hold much beer at all.

The first edition of the Guinness Book of World Records was published in 1954, and most of its 198 pages were devoted to records held by Sir Hugh Beaver himself. The rest was dedicated to records Sir Hugh wasn't competing for, but still followed closely (Biggest Tits, Most Times Falling Down the Same Well, Most Likely to Have Sex with Sir Hugh Beaver if He Asked, Class Clown, etc…). Realizing they had a goldmine on their hands, but for the huge jackass blocking the shaft, William Crampit and Arthur Crammit locked Sir Hugh in a pantry and told everyone he'd gone on safari. Over the next few years they refined and expanded the Guinness Book, developing it into a perennial bestseller that would eventually rank behind only The Pop-Up Bible and The Lose Weight Doing Nothing Diet on the all-time bestsellers list.

Crampit and Crammit proceeded to travel around the world, noting records where they found them and taking pictures of anyone they could find wearing weird extendo neck-rings and fat people riding motorcycles. When they got back to their offices they were greeted by a man who was, for no discernable reason, pulling four loaded buses with his teeth. They weren't sure what the buses were loaded with, and were understandably afraid to ask. The man was so frightening, in fact, that they put him in the book immediately just to get him off the premises. Little did they know they were opening some kind of freak-filled floodgate, and within the week their offices were stuffed to the rafters with every no-hair-cutting, long-fingernailed, lightbulb-eating mental patient in twelve counties.

Crampit and Crammit, no fans of having their spleens eaten or their eyeballs pulled like taffy, folded like a laminated map. Before they knew it, all of their precious "Fastest Bird" and "Tallest Post Office" records were pushed to the back of the book, buried under an avalanche of morbidly obese twins, turban-wearing weirdos who have sat in the same spot their entire lives, and insomniacs who stay up all night writing thousands of words on a grain of rice.

Every year since then the famed Guinness Book has grown like a weird tumor that started out interesting but is now placing its own orders for take-out. Determined and unbalanced individuals the world over have spawned new categories yearly in an effort to be remembered for anything at all, even if it's eating a shopping cart while wearing a beard of bees. As an interesting side note, Sir Hugh Beaver re-appeared around this time, claiming the record for most years spent living inside a pantry.

Eventually Guinness sold its rights for the book to the Robert Ripley Corporation of Believe it or Not! fame, a natural fit since they had more experience and expertise in freak-wrangling. Fans rejoiced as the long-standing bans on ant eating and penis size records were finally lifted, and Crampit and Crammit regained use of their hot tub at long last.

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