Bob Dylan Knighted By Wasted Guy Outside Night Club

ock musician and poet Bob Dylan received the ultimate honor Friday night from an unknown fan believed to be under the influence of several chemical substances. For all his years of service in changing the face of modern music, Dylan was knighted in a brief ceremony behind the Homebrew bar and grill that took only a couple minutes.

Dylan, who was performing an unannounced set at the Homebrew promoting his new album, was extremely surprised and delighted by the honor.

"It was very cool," said Dylan. "You don’t get into this life with thought of major rewards like being knighted. You do it for the music, or maybe the money. This is quite a big moment for me and I’d like to thank the drug-influenced guy who bestowed this upon me, wherever he is."

Dylan was on his way to the parking lot of the club with friends when the unidentified high guy stopped him in the alley, proclaimed Dylan the man, and knighted him with a very quick tap on each of his shoulders with an empty Thunderbird bottle, pretending it was a sword. He then pissed his pants and stumbled back into the club. Surprised but happy with the honor, Dylan continued on to his car.

"I thought about trying to find the guy, but I didn’t want to insult him after he had just done this very great thing for me. I was also a bit shocked by it all. Even if you expect this sort of thing is going to happen, some alley behind a club is about the last place you’re ready for it."

Columbia Records, Dylan’s label, has jumped all over the high-press event. New releases of all Dylan’s previous albums are being issued with a royal seal on them under the artist heading of "Sir Bob Dylan."

"Everyone at Columbia has always known America has a special genius in Bob Dylan," said Columbia V.P. of Advertising John Bonlee, "and now people everywhere will know that. The dude on heroin or crack or whatever behind that club knew it, and recognized Dylan for his years of service to the music industry and world as a whole."

Sources report that if the blitzed night club rambler can be found, Columbia Records would like to have him knight Dylan again, just for the sake of press, on a two-hour TV special with friends and fellow musicians playing songs in Dylan’s honor. Dylan, who has written rock ’n’ roll and folk staples like "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man," "Blowin’ in the Wind," and "Like A Rolling Stone," could not verify the possibility of a two-hour TV event, but said he would definitely not want to air opposite Friends and Survivor.

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Contrary to popular belief and a lucrative office pool, Omar Bricks will one day again own a car. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day and for the rest of my goddamned life, even if I have to stick a wheel up Henry Ford's ass and ride him to work like a unicycle. It will come to pass.

Seeking to end the Curse of the Bricksmobile once and for all, I set out this weekend intending to play the field and test drive a few of the many suitors for the title of Next Bricks Ride.

At first I was really excited to test out one of those new electric cars, thinking that would be a blast in the pants. But of course that turned out to be a crock, turns out just because it's electric doesn't mean it can defy gravity like those slot cars we had when we were kids. You know the ones I'm talking about, they would race up the wall and back down, unless of course you took the very top piece of the track out, in which case they would race up the track and knock a picture frame off the wall, leaving a bitchin' electric burn mark on the wall like Frankenstein's undershorts. And the best part was you could do it again, after you found out where the car ricocheted behind the toilet in the bathroom. That was my favorite toy when I was a kid, and I spent countless hours figuring out the different angles you could put the track at to get the car to shoot toward a friend who was swinging a whiffle ball bat, or to see if you could smoke one by the mailman's head. Tyco missed the chance to make a freakin' mint by marketing those things as a Thelma and Louise playset back in the 90's, I'm telling you.

So anyway, after that it's the usual bullshit about "You wrecked our car into a bank," and all that "he said, she said" nonsense. I say if you're going to let people test-drive fruity electric cars next door to a bank with a giant sloped façade, well you wrote your own script for that saga. But you know how people are, always carping about some imagined offense and looking for a chance to sue.

Personally, I don't think electric cars are ever really going to take off until they make them more like bumpercars. Because that one I drove was flimsy as shit. I rammed this guy because he was wearing a 49ers hat, and when I got out to say "Don't worry dude, it's an electric car!" I realized the thing was nearly totaled. Whatever the master craftsmen who made those bumpercars knew about durability has clearly been lost to the ages. They must have opted to start from another branch of electric car evolution, the golf cart. And fun as those things are, only a jackass would ram two of those things together as a funny joke. They need to go back and start from scratch with the original bumpercar as their model, and just make them faster. That'd be badass. They can even keep that big pole that sticks out of the back, it'd be perfect for a flag or hanging wet laundry. By the time you got anywhere, your clothes would be dry and would smell like the city as a free bonus.

I thought maybe one of those hybrid gas-electric cars would be a better deal, like you could be stealthy silent but still backfire when you needed to, for effect. And I guess the one I drove would be all right, if you were playing a nerd in a movie or something. But for practical everyday use it was pretty weak. That thing was so small I'd have to buy a bike lock to keep some juiced-up ex-con from carrying the thing away while I was inside organizing my pocket protectors. I'm not kidding, I pulled off a Flintstones stop at a light once to impress the ladies and my shoes didn't even smoke.

But the real problem with the hybrid car came when it was time to refuel. Walgreens had a sale on D-cell batteries, so I figured tossing a half-dozen of those in the tank ought to do the trick, right? Well, if you're on the same page with me there don't even think about test-driving one of those hybrid cars, because it's not going to end well, trust me.

After that debacle I decided that gas was going to have to meet my car-propulsion needs for the foreseeable future. And you know what that means; I made a bee line straight for the Hummer dealership. Because if you're going to drive an car that runs on old-fashioned gas, you might as well drive the one that uses the most of it. We don't have time this week to go into how my Hummer test drive went, but tune in next issue when we'll discuss the prosecution's case and why they make those Taco Bell drive-thrus so damned small.

Bricks out.

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Dear readers, I have never been a religious man. I have trouble believing in anything I cannot see, unless it is revealed to me by a trustworthy patron of a familiar bar. But all that has changed—I am now a believer, for I have been touched by an angel. Or not quite touched. Pulverized might be the word for it.

Yes, there is a God, and he deemed I should get the beating of a lifetime to prove it. Or, it's possible, there isn't a God, there's just the dead. Bodiless apparitions hauling ass here and there in our corporeal world, and occasionally taking time out of their schedule to kick our asses. Maybe there's a God, and if that's what he wanted to impress on me, just send me a warning. Not the full-blown throttling I already received, just a slap across the face or something. Just to really drive home the point.

Come to think of it, I'm not really sure what the angel wanted to impart to me. He didn't say much. More of the "talks with his fists" type. But you can't really make a point that way, not a coherent one anyway. He growled and ranted and muttered things here or there, but they mostly concerned some guy named Donnie and the money Donnie owes him. I suppose he thought I was Donnie, it was hard to tell with a ghostly fist boxing my ears.

You may be thinking I have surely seen ghosts before, or had otherworldly encounters—aliens, the sasquatch, time-travelers from the future. And then there's my dead reporter friend Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown, but frankly I've never believed he was really dead, it all just seemed like a tax dodge. None of that prepared me for seeing a real, actual ghost in my bedroom, demanding from me money I didn't have, and then wiping the bedroom floor with me.

It began as a simple enough evening, in my matching red pajamas and nightcap, monogrammed, of course, turning in for bed. I had clapped off the lights and turned my TV to the late-show reruns of M*A*S*H that I so love. I must have dozed off, because I woke up to complete darkness and the sound of drunken mumbling. I could hear also, beneath the drunk talk, the sound of footsteps. I opened my eyes, but could see nothing but darkness. Then, I saw the outline of a hunched-over figure, and heard him dragging his heels toward my bed. At first, I thought it was Rascal, my manservant, playing another prank, but then I realized Rascal is quite the big fellow, and this figure was more of a modest size, like myself. Then I thought it was me, playing some gag on myself, but that made no sense.

Before I could figure out exactly what was happening, a cold hand grabbed my leg. Then, I was yanked out of bed and pummeled. Icy dead knuckles, like the hand of a skeleton, smacked the hell out of my face, fattened my lip, blackened my eye, and held me down against the hard wood floor. I tried to get up, but he couldn't hear my pleas while he was rambling about his money.

Being the investigator I am, I immediately went to find out as much as I could about the penthouse apartment I live in. Quite a fascinating history, if you must know. It turns out a very successful man named Gatsby once lived there, a long time ago, and may have even been the Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald based his character on, at least I've heard great things about him. He was a well-to-do-man, like myself, and very generous, which is where the comparison ends. But those who remember him, like the door man to my building, stress that while Gatsby had been a very generous man, he didn't just give things away. He expected to all debts to be repaid, and apparently had a hell of a drinking problem. I grew excited right away, and was asked to step away from the door. A ghost of a man much like myself! I can't wait to find out more.

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