he world said a collective "huh" March 22^nd when director Steven Spielberg hamfisted his cutesy 2-hour plush toy commercial E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial back into theaters to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of Spielberg's vanity project.

In the movie, a flawless alien midget is left behind on earth by a superior alien race who have never heard of a head count before departure. The alien befriends foul-mouthed American kids and endorses M&M-style products and Pepsi before faking his own death in an elaborate intergalactic insurance scam and escaping in a flying bike, leaving the evil government agents to wonder: Why didn't he do that much earlier?

The film is a re-telling of the familiar friendly-alien-meets-asshole-humans story. "Re-telling" being Hollywood code for updating old scripts with modern slang and improving the special effects by leaps and bounds.

Spielberg started out in Hollywood making enjoyable adventure movies with low marketing tie-in potential such as Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Having invented the summer blockbuster, Spielberg went on to cut himself a slice of the pie with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. He would later perfect action figure merchandising with Jurassic Park, after the dismal failure of his The Color Purple doll line.

To keep his product fresh for a new generation with more hyper-sensitive parents than his own, Spielberg digitally replaced rifles in the arms of federal agents with walkie-talkies. The director also changed the audio for a line spoken by Dee Wallace in which she tells the children not to go out dressed as "terrorists." Since no one in our current generation hates and fears terrorists, Spielberg wisely changed it to "hippies."

Also removed from the film: Scenes in which E.T. tries to eat a cat—better done on Alf; a scene where E.T. and child friend Elliot get hammered; two scenes where Drew Barrymore does a line of coke (interfered with Pepsi tie-in); and instead of building a phone out of household items, E.T. e-mails his alien friends using free webmail at Hotmail.com.

Digitally added into the film: Child actor Henry Thomas is replaced with modern acting wunderkind Haley Joel Osment; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson from TV's The X-Files have a quick cameo; and E.T. is digitally altered so he's always wearing shorts and a bow tie, so as to dispel questions about his genitalia today's more mature generation will be quick to ask.

"I lacked the vision and technical skills to make the perfect film I wanted to make at the time," said Spielberg in a press conference the media were court-ordered to attend. "Now, thanks to modern technology and 21^st century revisionism, I can do it."

If E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial proves profitable the second time around, Spielberg has other plans on the table. He reports it recently occurred to him Jaws would have been much more fun if he had replaced the shark with a big, cuddly bear ala TV's Gentle Ben.

Also, said the director, Schindler's List would have been more effective if the Jews had won against the Nazis.

It was so vivid, I could almost swear it really happened," said Littlehead City resident Wyatt Touchdowne about his recent dream involving prominent musician David Byrne. "I mean, we were hanging out together just like we'd been friends for a long time. It was really cool."

Touchdowne, 32, a systems analyst for a California software firm, admitted that in reality, the two have never met.

"But in this dream I had the other night, not only did I get to meet David Byrne, but we spent what seemed like a whole lot of time together, just talking and doing things and stuff. First, I was just kind of walking along this beach, and I realized there was this guy right beside me, and when I looked, it turned out that it was David Byrne, former leader of the band Talking Heads. So we were just walking along, and we were talking and everything, and then pretty soon we were riding in a car together. We got to this house, and I realized in the dream that it was the house I had lived in when I was a teenager. And then David Byrne came into the house with me! He was actually in the house I used to live in!"

"I remember we talked about music and all kinds of stuff, and he was really friendly, just very low-key and casual, and it was just a really very pleasant encounter. At one point I told him that sometimes when I listened to his music, either the things he said or the way he said them just made me laugh. I couldn't help it, I said, I just laughed. He thought that was pretty funny, and he told me in the dream about this part of one song that he sang by calling over the phone and then holding the receiver up to the microphone. That part was really amazing, you know? I mean, how many people get musical tips like that in their dreams from someone like David Byrne?"

"Anyway, so there we were in the living room, and then my mom and my sister came in the room, and then I think they asked me to go to the store or something, because the next thing I knew, the dream kind of shifted, and I realized I was at the mall, but I was standing there naked in front of the Hickory Farms store, and everyone was looking at me. So of course David Byrne was gone by then, but still, it was pretty cool that we got to hang out together."

Asked if it was common for him to have dreams about celebrities, Touchdowne admitted that he had also had dreams involving personalities such as Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Nixon and Cameron Diaz, among others.

"One of the strangest ones was where I was hanging out with Harry Nilsson," Touchdowne said. "Harry was really cool and everything, but I kept remembering in the dream that he's really dead in real life. So in the dream, I kept saying, 'But aren't you dead? You're dead, aren't you?' He never answered me, but that particular dream never seemed as real as most of the others. Because how can you hang out with a dead guy, you know?"

When this reporter pointed out that Richard Nixon is also dead, Touchdowne replied, "He is? Really? Wow, when did that happen?"

Despite repeated calls to his publicist regarding Touchdowne's dream, Mr. Byrne was not available for comment.

Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last twenty years doesn't need to be told this, but just in case I have any hermit crabs among my readership, let me state this loud and clear: Omar Bricks is not afraid of a controversial tee-shirt.

And if there really are hermit crabs among my readership, I encourage you to drop an email and let me know what the hell is up with that. I'm serious, that's some crazy beer commercial shit there.

But speaking of tee-shirts: I don't mean the generic, run-of-the-mill "controversial" tee-shirts that you see every fifteen year-old wiseass with thirty bucks and a smirk wearing at the mall. This column has no time for Big Johnson, Osama Bin Hidin', or any of that immature teenage shwag. And if your shirt's asking a question, it sure as hell had better not be about how the daschunds got in the pool, or however the song goes.

Nor am I specifically addressing the clever subversion of corporate logos that say Fuct instead of Ford or McDahmer instead of McDonalds or the many clever variants on Pepsi, though I do think those are pretty sharp. And believe me, Omar Bricks is all about those corporate scumbags getting their just desserts via a clever tee-shirt.

What I'm talking about here is the holy hell I recently had dished to me after I started wearing my new shirt that has a picture of a Chips Ahoy bag on the front, but it says Tits Ahoy instead. And before you start in with your weekly "Omar is a sexist smear of dick-drizzle" letters and your lightly perfumed feminist mail bombs and your diatribes about how I wasn't breastfed, let it be known that this particular shirt was a gift from my own mother, the venerable Mama Bricks herself. If you want to take up your sexism campaign with her, I say go right ahead, but be warned that she's highly paranoid and quick with a pair of nunchucks.

Now, I'm sure some would argue that I was just looking for trouble when I wore that shirt into the NOW convention last week, but anybody who's read the police report knows that I stumbled in there looking for a place to pee. A string of words to the wise and heavily inebriated: don't stagger into a feminist convention with your little benny hanging out unless you're wearing a Lillith Fair tee-shirt or have a Little Orphan Ani Difranco tattoo on your forehead to make everything balance out. You'll thank me for that one later.

But the thing that this ballroom full of garden-shear-wielding feminists didn't understand (besides the fact that screaming "Holy Shit, it's Axl Rose!" before you run away is the oldest trick in the book) was that they're barking up the wrong tree when they get their estrogen up over a simple celebration of femininity like a classy Tits Ahoy tee-shirt. What really should have worried them would be if I had staggered into that ballroom wearing an Oklahoma! tee-shirt and a hoop earring or something, because that would mean their mating pool just got one guy smaller. And if I were a lady I'd be watching what I said very carefully, lest I pushed the male sex over the line and found myself home alone on Saturday nights while all of the guys were out at a Freddie Prinz Jr. movie, if you know what I'm saying.

But some people just don't get it, and they're going to drone on about how my shirt's degrading to women, and blah blah blah. Reality check: what's really degrading are those Tom Cruise haircuts, ladies. Have you looked in the mirror lately? You look like a bunch of junior-high kids on a debate field trip. And those business suits should be the next to go. Nobody in this reality wants to make time with a lady dressed like Lee Iacocca, and you're going to liberate yourself right into a personals ad.

In the end, this is just a long way of saying that the emperor's new clothes are here to stay, at least until this shirt picks up a chili stain or two. Of course, both my secretary and the commune's mail clerk quit the first day I wore it to work, though not for the stick-up-the-ass reasons that you're thinking. I guess that last mail bomb just scared them more than they let on at the time. Needless to say, I think I'm going to have to put the temp agency on speed-dial. Bricks out.

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