M-TV Accidentally Honors 9/11 Hijackers

he 20th Annual M-TV Video Music Awards, held last Thursday night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, served up its usual yearly helping of toned abs, wild costumes and music playing somewhere in the background, as expected. But viewers and M-TV executives alike were also treated to a surprise that few could have anticipated.

The show’s highlights were many and varied, including Madonna swapping STDs with Britney and Christina, rapper 50 Cent being shot 15 times during the ceremony but still returning for his musical performance, and Johnny Cash pulling a no-show, doing little to dispel most viewers’ assumptions that he died ten years ago. Host Chris Rock kept the show moving along at a rapid clip, and kept it funny by refusing to pretend that any of the nominated acts were any more than marginally talented.

In fact, the show took on such a party atmosphere that few even noticed when a diminutive Arab man named Sheik Omar Bakri accepted the award for Best New Artist for his album “Magnificent 19,� peppering the crowd with epithets during his acceptance speech in an accent so thick it could’ve shrouded an iceberg from an ocean liner. Many assumed Bakri was simply rapper Eminem’s newest protégé, failing to recognize him as the head of the radical Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun.

“That Sheik Omar was ate up,� gushed Smurf-like crooner Justin Timberlake. “Boy was so drunk he was talkin’ in tongues and shit. I can see why his fans is mad for him, that was righteous.�

In actuality, Sheik Bakri’s speech was the culmination of several months of planning by Al-Muhajiroun, whose members had infiltrated M-TV as interns and were able to slip Bakri’s non-existent album in as the Best New Artist winner in a tribute to the 19 hijackers who died on September 11th.

“The word magnificent is to attract if you like really the attention of the people to those particular 19 Muslims who in our eyes we see as Muslims what really they are — they are more than magnificent,� Sheik Bakri said, sort of in English. “In our eyes, they are the people who sacrifice their own life and that’s the most valuable thing and they offer it. It must be for a good reason. It must be for divine reason.�

Bakri may have misinterpreted the Video Music Awards crowd’s reaction to his remarks during the show, saying “the many Muslims present celebrated the comeuppance of the U.S.A.,� when in fact the crowd was cheering because Britney Spears’ cooch was momentarily visible on the big screen.

Bakri also considers his Best New Artist win to be sanctioned by God, explaining “If God did not permit that to happen, it would never happen,� and has thus far refused to return his moon-man statuette. Sheik Omar did, however, express regret that there was no Best Cover Art category, which could have honored the bizarre “Magnificent 19� album cover he had mocked up at great personal expense.

Network executives at M-TV seem alarmingly unphased by the incident, claiming that most of its viewers are too young to remember the September 11th terrorist attacks.

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Johan Emmanuel Wiesel was an eccentric Hungarian immigrant who ran a pharmacy in New York in the 1830's. An amiable fellow with an impenetrable accent, Wiesel was fond of saying "Piss on Earth, and God wilt tard men!" which got him a lot of strange looks and the occasional thump on the head. When he wasn't busy "pepping up" the prescriptions he filled with copious amounts of cocaine, Wiesel occupied his spare time by inventing beverages. However, most of his inventions were completely impractical as beverages for actual humans, since they were all heinous in flavor and some ate through the bottle in less than a day's time.

But through some whim of serendipity, in 1845 one of his concoctions actually turned out to be fairly tasty, and only mildly corrosive. Wiesel was pissed, since he took this to mean that his arsenic had gone bad. But when he tested the drink on a young boy who he paid a quarter a year to do all the menial work in his pharmacy, he was surprised to find that the boy loved it. He burped until he threw up and suffered second-degree burns to his sinuses, but he loved it.

Wiesel decided to try selling his new beverage to customers in his pharmacy the very next day. He dusted off an old machine he had invented to dispense mustard into several pairs of shoes simultaneously, and in that moment the soda fountain was porn. Born.

The drink was a huge success, and before long his customers were demanding, sometimes at gunpoint, that Wiesel make his soda available to the wider market. Wiesel responded by buying a gigantic sack of empty beer bottles from a local orphanage, then filling them all with cole slaw. He was almost there. Realizing that this in no way addressed his soda-selling needs, Wiesel dumped out all of the cole slaw and filled the bottles with his sizzling new beverage instead. Despite the objections of absolutely everyone else involved, he insisted on naming his beverage Wiesel Piss, and it accordingly sold like sacks of dead leper babies.

Wiesel eventually went broke trying to sell Wiesel Piss, and died alone in the gutter after being stabbed in the ankle by a drunken orphan. His lone living relation sold the rights to the soda to a flim-flam man named Flannery McIntosh for one dollar. McIntosh renamed the drink Scrud and sold it as both a digestive aid and a carburetor cleaner. His memorable slogan, "Keeps your tummy firing on all cylinders," is still remembered to this day by people who are incredibly old and anal.

McIntosh built a modest empire around Scrud until 1892, when he was sued for being Irish and lost it all. The winners of that lawsuit, Daniel Freebanks and Benneton DuBois, renamed the drink Dope and sold it strictly as a new something called a "soft drink," a term of dubious legality that implied curative properties against erectile dysfunction. Their business grew hand over foot until 1910, when the US government cracked down on Dope since it contained cocaine, strychnine, absinthe, turpentine, a solution of fool's gold and high levels of cootineut, an imaginary ingredient that at the time was thought to quell dark humors in the pancreas.

Freebanks and DuBois went out of business faster than a pregnant hooker, and they were bought out by Farthington McIntosh, the grandson of Flannery. He promptly reformulated the drink in his bathtub, taking out the offending ingredients and replacing them with shitloads of sugar. But he was careful to also slyly rename the soda Coke, so that hipsters and conspiracy theorists would always think it still secretly contained cocaine, promoting sales.

McIntosh built Coke into an empire, branching out across the globe and fending off upstart sodas like Rammit, Jeez, and Wimpo. Though all of the sodas being produced were virtually the same in flavor, McIntosh retained his edge thanks to his uncanny knack for advertising. On top of plastering every vertical surface he could find with the Coke logo, McIntosh's true genius surfaced in his use of radio jingles touting the virtues of Coke. From early gems like…

Buy a Coke,
drink it up,
Buy another coke,
shut up, shut up.

to the legendary…

Buy a coke,
regret you won't,
you had a nickel,
and now you don't!

and finally the immortal…

Buy a Coke, it's nature's drink
Fizzy fizz that helps you think
You probably won't get cancer, too
Coca-Cola is the one for you!

…McIntosh's jingles were on the lips of every boob in the nation. Among other things, McIntosh is remembered for pioneering the practice of marketing frivolous items as if they were essential to the quality of life.

Unfortunately for McIntosh, all of the marketing genius in the world doesn't make you dagger-proof. He was later stabbed in the back by his own son, who sold the company for forty dollars and a magic talking mule.

The new owner of The Coca-Cola Company was Montgomery County shouting champion Eustace Turner, who ruled Coca-Cola with an iron fist for eight months before selling 40% of the company to L.P. Farnsworth, 40% to Jules Mather, 51% to Modest Cinderbrooke, and 117% to a very stupid man named Sty Covington. Turner then skipped town and laughed himself sick, which is more fun than it sounds.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, it's all history, if you want to get technical about it, but the rest of it is the kind of history you don't want to know about since it's is too long and boring to go into. Fear not, you got all the juicy bits. Nothing much else happens until the Cola Wars, and I'm saving that in case my book deal comes through.

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Time to face the facts, Omar Bricks loves Mexican food. I am a certified Mexican Food Freak. Not to be confused with a Certified Mexican Freak, that's some kind of license you need to wrestle down there, keeps them from losing all their wrestling jobs to people from Tennessee. It's all a part of NAFTA.

Part of the fun of Mexican food is pretending you speak Spanish. Because what the hell do those people know, you could be Juan Fuckin' Valdez for all the waitress cares. She just wants to get back into the kitchen to do another line of crank before the buzz wears off. So you can really lay it on thick, rambling off some nonsense about chimichanga presidente allegro amigos. It's a blast. Sometimes you can even pass for a local if you order everything BellGrande and don't ask for mustard. They don't put mustard on shit down there, don't ask me why. Another trick is to put your exclamation points upside-down, if you happen to be writing something down. That doesn't come up much when you're ordering food, I know, but you'll impress the shit out of everybody if you can pull it off.

Sometimes I like to really do it up and go in there wearing a blanket with a neck-hole cut in it and some kind of crazy garage-sale hat. The busboys love that shit, I come in and it's all "Ah, gringo! Chinga tu madre pendejo!" It's like Cheers, it's awesome. One time I came in strumming a mariachi guitar I found in the trash and those guys had to hold each other back from coming over to high-five me. They love it when they see white guys who are down with their culture.

Mexican food is great because it's all interchangeable. You can order anything off the menu and it's no worries because it's all the same shit. They might put the cheese on top instead of on the inside or it might have rice and beans instead of beans and rice, but it's not like they're suddenly going to whip out a tray of duck's nuts or anything like when you're fucking around with the menu at an Asian place. About the worst thing that can happen is you get shredded beef instead of ground beef, I guess they have a lot of problems with turbo-prop planes crash landing in cattle fields down in Mexico or something, I don't know. But overall the risk factor is pretty much no promblemo.

The biggest problem I ever had with Mexican food was one time in a restaurant when I wanted to re-enact one of those scenes from the Westerns where the big fat Mexican guy is sitting there with chiquitas on his lap and he's drinking beer and eating grapes or whatever. You know the guy, always laughing at the white guys, never takes a shower, gets shot at the end. Anyway, I wanted to be that guy for the course of a meal, but the waitress just wasn't down with it. Why she'd rather be busting her ass carrying hot plates instead of sitting on somebody's lap and eating grapes is anybody's guess, maybe she wasn't really Mexican.

Come to think of it, I don't think there are too many big Mexican families in Wisconsin that are cranking out blonde waitresses named Gwenyth these days. Shit. That's the last time I'll eat at Chili's.

"Authentic Mexican" my ass. Bricks Out.

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