oting the success that Subway Sandwiches has enjoyed with advertising spokesman Jared Fogel, McDonald's announced today that they are looking for a similar type of person to head up a new advertising campaign for them that is still in the works. Applicants for the position are expected to be pale, blotchy, still somewhat soft around the middle, and most desirably, should have undergone a radical weight loss in the last year or so.

"We're ditching the old tired-ass icons Ronald McDonald and Hamburglar and Grimace," said corporate spokesman Andy Lard. "Instead, we're looking for someone who was recently a big fatty, you know, a real tubbo. I mean just a gigantic container of goo. Someone that lost like three or four hundred pounds through an exclusive diet of Big Macs and fries and hot apple pies. We're looking for someone who can hold up a pair of pants big enough to stuff three sumo wrestlers and Anna Nicole Smith inside, but who is now comparatively slim."

Lard went on to say that the person they had in mind should also have "pasty white, preferably kind of blotchy skin, be extremely androgynous, and should still be porky enough as to be non-threatening to our commercial audience. We're looking for a soft, bland kind of non-descript guy, but one who has a real presence, you know what I mean?"

"We want someone who represents the average American who sits on his couch watching TV most of the week and all weekend, except for when he goes to McDonald's, of course, and has that kind of glazed look. We don't want anybody overly bright or too outspoken, just somebody nice and comfy-looking, somebody our customers can identify with. A recent lobotomy would be a definite plus."

Asked how the search was going, Lard admitted that they had not had much luck in the few weeks since it began.

"It's too bad we didn't snap that Jared guy up first," he complained. "He's really the ideal person for what we're looking for. Still, there must be others out there like him. And we're going to keep looking until we find him."

McDonald's shares lost money this past quarter for the first time ever, but Lard discounted the notion that the lack of an adequate spokesman was the reason.

"That may have played a small part in it, you know, us not having a big one-time fat-ass whale waving his drawers around on national TV and telling everyone how he lost weight eating McDonald's food; but the main reason is probably because people are finally wising up to how evil our corporation is, what with Satan holding the board chairman position and all, how nutritionally bankrupt our food is, and how our grand plan is to ultimately poison most of the Third World with our hamburgers. Uh... this is off the record, right?"

Lard then excused himself and said he had a luncheon meeting to discuss using a heavily-sedated Rosie O'Donnell in drag as the New Jared. He mentioned that the meeting would be at Fresh Choice, just around the corner from McDonald's corporate headquarters. Asked why the luncheon meeting wasn't catered with McDonald's food, Lard responded simply, "What, are you fuckin' kidding me? Nobody in their right mind would eat that crap."

an took a collective step backward, arms behind the back, whistling, and rolling eyes when the space shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas two weeks ago. Texans, used to loud unexpected explosions, were slow to realize exactly what had happened, but some analysts are now saying it was the “fuck you� heard ‘round the world.

“Man was never meant to fly,� said shuttle analysts Thursday. “It’s clear the kind of damage that caused the shuttle’s destruction, coupled with all the obvious other signs, that we’ve overstepped our bounds greatly. I suggest we all get used to walking.�

Though the reaction may seem extreme, even for space nerds, others are saying duh—it’s about time we’ve realized it.

Biblical doomsayer and Reader’s Digest editor James Bartle: “It’s taken too long to get this message, folks. All the plane crashes, not to mention the daily hot air balloon disasters that don’t even make the news—hasn’t it been made clear yet? Man was not meant to fly. Even the Wright Brothers plane didn’t fly more than a few seconds. People will say trial-and-error, necessary experimentation, blah, blah, blah. The truth is, we were shaking the apple tree that wasn’t meant to be shaked.â€�

But not only religious weirdoes are preaching this gospel now. In the wake of the loss of the shuttle and seven astronauts, people are reconsidering the 1986 Challenger disaster, which also cost the lives of seven astronauts, and even 2001’s use of aircraft by Allah to smite American capitalists.

“Nobody wanted to believe in the space program more than me,� said NASA helmsman and space aficionado Shansy Miller. “But the loss of countless craft and lives in the space program has finally become too much to ignore. How many times have we lost good people over the course of these fifty years in our vain attempts to exceed our limitations? Ten? Twenty or more? I think it was three, actually, but you get what I’m saying. It isn’t to be.�

Despite the innovations in technology and the potential offered by space travel, many are saying this is the final straw. Man has tried for far too long to explore space and has only gotten so far as the moon, or Mars, if you count unmanned probes, which no one cares about. It’s time to call it quits.

“We had a good run,� according to former astronaut and space cowboy Maurice Graham. “We been up into space, we planted a flag on the moon. I don’t see any point in doing anything more. All we’re doing is putting good multi-ethnic men and woman at risk and providing years of dead astronaut jokes for playground kids.�

“There will be no further shuttles in the foreseeable future,� said a faceless NASA drone, possibly an android. “I hope we didn’t leave anything valuable on the space station because we’re not going back there for a while. Watch out for Predators when we do. That’s all I’m saying.�

Currently, the president will be hearing arguments to ground all earth-traveling aircraft such as commercial jets and military planes, but there is no decision expected until at least after Iraq has been thoroughly carpet-bombed.

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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