Shooting Turns Comic When Bumbling Teens Shoot Each Other in Hilarious Double-Homicide Hi-Jinks

high school lunch room in Mattawusk, Maine got downright goofy Monday when two teen-agers killed each other in an accidental double-homicide called by witnesses, "Just too damn funny."

The two teenagers, Rupert Harvey and D. Johnny Watkins, two seniors described as "Prime wedgie material" by athletes across the school, were popular victims of practical jokes and teasing for being so unpopular. As convoluted as that statement may sound, one thing was clear--with Harvey and Watkins, sooner or later, something was going to break. Who knew it would be our funny bones?

"They came in and Watkins told everybody, 'Get down!'" said senior and witness Glenda Berman. "At which point Harvey just started to dance, doing the Running Man and then Cabbage-patching. It was so fucking funny I nearly choked. Then Watkins smacked him with his sailor hat."

Watkins, apparently the smarter of the duo, then told everybody they would die for their cruelty, at which point Watkins tried to fire the gun but the safety was on. He looked down the barrel, according to junior Darryl Hardin, who said he could barely contain his laughter since he could guess what would happen next.

"Sure enough," Hardin said, "Watkins blew his own damn head off. That shit was hilarious, I was howling for minutes. It was like Looney Tunes or something. I halfway expected the gun to say 'Acme' on it."

It was at that point, witnesses said, Harvey began to fire his machine gun in fear. The repeating weapon, aimed at the ground, was powerful enough to levitate him feet off the floor as he tried in vain to control it, much to the bemusement of the onlooking not-quite-terrified student body.

"Eventually, Harvey just shot himself in the foot," Principal Don Stewart said. "He was howling and bouncing up and down when--" Stewart took several minutes to keep from crying as he laughed even harder. "He shot Watkins again, in the balls, and Watkins, with his dying breath, tightened his grip on the trigger finger and blew Harvey's head off."

No longer able to restrain his tears, Stewart wept openly. "It was so fucking funny I shit my pants! I swear."

School shootings have steadily been on the increase since 1990, but this was by far the most hilarious incident reported. Hollywood has taken notice as well, already planning a wacky sitcom tentatively titled "Shoot the Mooks" and famed teen scribe John Hughes has reportedly been asking how old Anthony Michael Hall is now, since he would "make a perfect Watkins."

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It seems like you can't open an unrealistic women's magazine or go game hunting in a daycare center these days without hearing about the nation's weight problem. And it's true, America's been packing on the pounds like a newlywed in Wisconsin since the late 1970's. Why didn't we hear about it until now? Thanks to thinning vertical stripes going out of style a few years ago, we're just now realizing how fat all of our friends and neighbors really are. It's like a Viet Cong of fat ambushing us in the jungle. And the current fashion trend toward Hamburgler-style black and white horizontal stripes certainly hasn't helped, amplifying girth that needed no help and creating a big fat optical illusion at the same time.

But how can a nation seemingly so obsessed with fitness and unattainable standards of beauty also be so hilariously, belt-snappingly fat at the same time? In order to understand this paradox, we must take a look at how America's diet has changed in the last thirty years, the era when America went off its diet like a berserk funnycar and decided nobody could tell it not to drink fat through a straw.

Not long ago was the day when the nation's diet consisted mainly of grain, potatoes, and gas station ham sandwiches. Though not exactly the fish-rice-seaweed trifecta that kept the Japanese wafer-thin and efficiently evil for years, it did well enough and the only fat people back then were those who vaingloriously attempted to live on gas station ham sandwiches alone. Even those fat individuals were a tiny minority, however, since most Americans assumed there must be something in the bible against that kind of thing. Americans did drank a lot of beer, but anybody who tells you beer makes you fat is trying to sell you Lite beer.

Over the years, as technology advanced and Americans sought out new and exciting ways to supplant missing parental love, people began to eat more and more processed foods. Which is industry jargon for remaindered textile wastes and ground up Frisbees. Convenience, plus the thrill of eating something out of a brightly colored box like Crackerjacks used to come in, led to a larger and larger proportion of the American diet consisting of food-shaped industrial byproducts. And as Americans came to demand more convenience, food processors began to shy away from using any actual foods at all, which start to taste funky after being vacuum-sealed in a Mylar bag for three years. By the mid-80's, most of the food Americans were eating consisted mainly of ground carpet remnants coated in flavorful lard. Which sounds awful until you hear what they put in dog food.

The fast food industry accelerated this process, serving up colorful fat-delivery vehicles devoid of depressing nutrients and vegetables in portions big enough to satisfy Uganda. Americans couldn't buy it up fast enough, falling hard for the food-like entrees and pleasantly fabricated environment, a place where The Man wasn't hassling you about eating fiber all the time. The various fast food chains went to great lengths to lure glazed customers their way by offering everything, including napkins, with bacon, and coating the handrails and table tops with a thin layer of rendered cow fat that was absorbed through the skin.

Of course, other factors besides diet have contributed to Americans' booming waistlines. High tech stretch fibers being built into clothes have made being fat more comfortable than ever. In addition, television remote controls, home video pornography and the abolition of sidewalks have nearly eliminated conventional exercise from the average American's daily life.

Perhaps the biggest symbolic blow to a thin America, however, came when Marlon Brando showed the American people that even the beautiful and talented can fall on a fat grenade and blow up like a microwaved marshmallow, so what chance does the average shlub have to stay thin? The sound of French-fry crunching surrender could be heard all across the land, a whisper that has grown into a deafening roar in our current "what the hell" national climate. But is there any hope for a thinner future?

Are you kidding? The only vegetable Americans will eat has to be soaked in oil, fried, and then dusted with pulverized beef balls before it can sneak into our stomachs. We're screwed. Fat and screwed. Sleep tight.

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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.

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