My plea on 9/11

Dear 9/11 Conspiracists:

If a caveman were to look at a modern skyscraper and see it on fire, he would think that a giant, perhaps a god, was very angry. This is what you are doing every time you talk about how steel can’t melt at 1500 degrees or whatever. You don’t know what you are talking about. Physically being inside a tall building on a few occasions isn’t enough expertise to qualify you to theorize on what would make it fall down. Please stop. You are wrong and you are causing damage and pain to the people of this country.

Thank you.

My $50,000,000 lawsuit

“Marco!”

“Polo!”

“Marco!”

“Polo!”

And on and on it went. Their high-pitched voices like nails on a chalkboard. And not fingernails. Real nails, the kind you hammer with.

It started around eleven in the morning, waking me from a deep slumber. I laid in bed, trying to ignore it, to somehow get back to sleep.

“Fish out of water!” one of them screeched and then they all yucked it up.

I lost it.

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up, you fucking kids! Shut up now or I will shut you up! Forever!” I yelled out my window.

Silence. Then crying. Lots of crying. And the sound of an adult male getting really worked up about what I had just said. Woops.

“No, I’m not gonna calm down. Who the hell does he think he is? Yelling at my kids like that? I don’t care, Barbara, I’m gonna go up there and give him a piece of my mind!”

“Yeah, you come up here, toughguy, I’ll kick your fucking ass!” I thought, as I instinctively pulled the covers up a little higher.

“OK, well when you get back, I have to go out to the van and change Rashawn’s diaper,” replied the woman.

Rashawn?? Oh shit, was this a black guy? Why couldn’t I have just kept my mouth shut? Or at least gotten out of bed and closed the window? I’m sure that would have cut down on the noise by a pretty significant amount.

BANG BANG BANG!

“Hey, asshole. Open up!”

Judging by his voice and the force with which he knocked on my door, I figured I was in trouble.

“C’mon, toughguy. You were talking all big before, let’s see what you got!” He persisted.

Well, certainly, he would give up and go away, forgetting all about this after a few minutes, right? I mean, Rashawn’s diaper needed changing!

But no, he kept at it. Knocking and banging and yelling and making all sorts of crazy threats.

I crept up to the peephole, indeed, he was a very large man. I’m not sure if he was black or hispanic or what, but he definitely wasn’t white. Maybe Samoan or something?

“Hey, I see the light of the peephole, I know you’re looking at me, asshole! Come on out here, so I can kick your ass!”

Busted. Great. Time for some fast-thinking!

“You’re gonna kick my ass?” I asked, meakly.

“That’s right, bitch. Now open up. I can wait all day.”

My thoughts drifted to poor Rashawn and his poop-filled diaper, but I figured it was best not to provoke him anymore.

“You’re gonna kick the ass of someone with cancer?”

Silence. That seemed to work!

“Well, I…” he stammered.

“Look, I didn’t mean to yell at your kids, but the chemo pains are really bad, especially in the morning,” I offered, as way of a semi-apology.

“Oh. OK, look, I’m sorry. I’m not gonna beat you up. I’ll have the kids keep it down. Sorry. Bye.”

And off he went!

Now, if I had chalked this up to dumb luck, learned my lesson and went on my way, I might not be writing this blog from the sling I have to sleep in, standing upright, so that my vertebrae will heal correctly.

But never one to learn my lesson, I went about my life, pretty much the same way, just on the look out for any big Samoan-looking guys around my building.

A few weeks later, I was playing touch football with some friends in the park.

Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a ton of little dipshits running around all over the place, interfering with our game. No parents in sight.

I was right in the middle of my patented play-action fake when this little bitch runs right into me, fucking the whole thing up.

She starts crying. So I demand some accountability from someone.

“Whose fucking kid is this? We’re trying to play a fucking game here!”

“It’s my kid, asshole!” came the booming, familiar voice, from behind me.

Before I had even turned around, I knew who it was. I also knew I was in for some serious shit.

“So you’ve got cancer, huh, dicklick?”

“Dicklick??!” How dare he!

As he shoved me backwards, a good fifteen feet or so, I decided that he was, in fact, definitely Samoan.

So he kicked my ass, but I got some good ones in there too. I mean, it was pretty even for a while, until I accidentally hit his four year old daughter in the face with a stray punch. After that, he kinda lost it.

So really, if you think about it, I lost one fight, but I won the other, which means everything evened out.

I mean, sure, I’m in the hospital, but his daughter almost died!

Did you like this? Then be sure to follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hollywoodphony.

A life less (extra)ordinary

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been envious of all those athletes, at the top of their game. Victorious over all rivals, they raise their trophy high above their heads and look into the camera and say those words I was so jealous of: ‘I’m going to Disney World!’

Now, I know that I’ve got a debilitating genetic defect that makes me extremely vulnerable to injury and susceptible to massive bleeding and I’m also terribly awkward and uncoordinated with little to no knowledge of the game of football, but I’m not going to let that stop me from–”

Reverend Johnson looked up from the piece of paper he had been reading from. He took a look at the assembled crowd, drew a deep breath and continued.

“I’m not going to let that stop me from trying out for the New York Giants. I’m confident that I’m ready and that I will make the team, we will go all the way, win the Super Bowl and I will finally get my free trip to Walt Disney World Resort!”

As he finished this, several people in the audience began sobbing and wailing.

“Well, that’s all there is. Unfortunately, we know how the rest played out.”

The Reverend bowed his head and stepped to the side, as my grieving friends and family came up to my tiny, one foot-long coffin and paid their respects.

The reason my coffin was only a foot long is because after I caught the ball, the impact from the players who tackled me was so intense that my bones were actually vaporized into dust. My internal organs and blood were pulverized into goo, which leaked into the playing field of Giants Stadium, causing a bio-hazard emergency that shut down try outs for several hours.

Actually, when they dug that part of the field up, they stumbled across the remains of Jimmy Hoffa, mixed in with the obliterated traces of my corpse. So, it wasn’t all bad news.

In fact, my parents were able to successfully sue The Walt Disney Corporation for making their theme park so fantastic and awesome, as to leave little choice in their son’s mind that I would have to hatch this scheme, in order to be able to visit, due to the state of my finances at the time.

They won a record settlement of over five hundred billion dollars, which lead to the bankrupting of the whole Disney company and the closing down of Walt Disney World. The land was later turned into a giant medical/industrial park owned by a Chinese conglomerate which specialized in turning cute little puppies and kittens into fuel sources for tanks and ICBM launchers.

Unfortunately, being the inbred rednecks that they are, they spent the lump sum on five hundred billion scratch-off lottery tickets. Seeing as everybody (but them) knows those are the biggest ripoff around, they barely won back enough money for my funeral and tiny coffin.

All in all, though things didn’t work out exactly as planned, I have few regrets.

Mostly, I just regret trying out for the New York Giants and getting killed and not getting a free trip to Disney World and having Disney World get shut down because of my stupid parents and their lawsuit.

But other than that, I have very few regrets.

The world’s longest Scooby Doo joke

When I was a kid, some neighbors of ours had one of those bathrooms where the vanity had mirrors on either side of the sink, parallel and opposite to each other. It was a 70’s thing, I guess.

When you looked to the side of you, you saw the reflection of the other mirror, which created an infinite hallway effect. I always thought this was really cool and I would spend 20-30 minutes in there, trying to move my head really fast so that I could see around my own reflection, repeated thousands of times down this tunnel of light.

My parents would bang on the door, telling me that my dinner was getting cold and I was being rude to our hosts, but I didn’t care. I barely even heard them. I was in my own world, wondering what the houses in those bathrooms looked like, what the other Erics did for fun. Maybe the dad in parallel dimension number six let his son have a dog!

Eventually, my parents had a falling out with these people, probably because they were sick of inviting me over and having me spend hours in their bathroom. I grew up and forgot all about that infinite hallway.

That is, until I was at a party, a few years ago.

I went to take a piss and halfway through, I looked over at the sink and saw it. They had one too! I was so excited I walked over there, mid-stream. I got urine everywhere, but I didn’t care. Once I was done, I absent-mindedly pulled up my pants and stared in child-like wonder.

I was 8 years old again, sticking my head in there real fast and pulling it out again, to try and catch a better look.

Way down at the limits of my vision, I saw something that looked different. It was maybe the 27th iteration of me. The 26 in front of it all moved exactly the same, but that one was a little… “off”, I guess is the word.

Reluctantly, I put up my hand and waved. I had let my mind play a trick on me, because now he was in lock step with all the others.

I felt ridiculous. If anyone had walked in there, they would have thought I was retarded, waving to my reflection and pissing all over the floor like that.

I put my hand down, grabbed a towel and wiped the stray droplets off my pants. As I turned to leave, I saw him.

It was number 27 again. And this time, he was definitely waving back at me!

When I looked again, he was still there, waving. I tried to see around the 26 versions of me that were in front of him, but they all moved as I did. But not him.

Then he stopped waving and walked out of my field of view.

“No way!” I said, in a breathy whisper.

There definitely was an empty space where he had just been, I could clearly see the miniature copies of me that were behind him, now that he had left.

But then he was back, only he was in the 26th spot now, with the 26th version of me!

Number 26 eyed him warily, as he tried to keep mimicking my breathing, but when number 27 pulled out a knife, he broke character and tried to defend himself, but it was no use! I saw him go limp and fall to the ground, the knife still in his chest.

Then, number 27 picked up the towel that was the 26th parallel version of the one I had just used to wipe piss off my pants and began to write something on it with number 26’s blood. He held it up for me to see, but it was too far away.

“I can’t read that!” I yelled into the bathroom, my earlier self-consciousness had long since faded away. Witnessing yourself being murdered by yourself will do that, I guess.

“Sorry, hold on!” he shouted back.

He said something I couldn’t hear to number 25, I think it was, “Hey, pass this up there.” Well, number 25 did his best to ignore him and maintain the illusion. Then number 27 was gone again and suddenly next to number 25, stabbing the shit out of that poor bastard! Well, you can believe number 24 wasn’t going to make that mistake and did as he was told. They passed it up, along the line.

When it got to number 7 or so, I could plainly see what it said: “You’re next!”.

“OK, I get it. But how can I be “next” if you’ve already stabbed someone else?” I shouted.

He threw up his hands in exasperation and left the home of number 25.

He didn’t come back right away, though, like he had before.

I was wondering what to do, as I stared down the mirrors and saw the sequentially smaller and dimmer versions of me mimicking my every move. Minus the three empty parallel dimensions, of course.

I was concentrating pretty hard, scanning the mirror for any sign of number 27, so you can imagine my pants-shitting horror and surprise when the door to the bathroom opened and in walked an exact facsimile of myself!

“Oh god, don’t kill me!” I shouted at myself as I put up my hands to protect my beautiful face.

“Kill you? What??” He seemed genuinely offended at the suggestion.

“But you said that I’m next!” I said, now drawn up into the fetal position at the foot of the sink.

“You are next! They’re waiting for you to take your turn.”

“What?” I put my arms down slightly to look him in the face. He was ruggedly handsome. Perhaps the most striking-looking man in the world. He could easily have any woman he wanted. And they would be lucky to have him!

“Out there,” he motioned towards the door, “it’s your turn. Scrabble? Remember?”

Oh shit! I had been so caught up in the drama in the mirror that I had forgotten all about the game I had been playing with my friends.

“I thought…” I began.

“You thought I was gonna murder you or something?” he asked, with a laugh.

“Well, I guess so…” I said, sheepishly.

“How could I do that to such a perfect specimen. You’re easily the best-looking man I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’m not gay or nothing.”

“What? No. I mean, yeah, no. Of course not. Me either.” I added, just to be safe.

He started to look around the bathroom, awkwardly.

“I just thought, since you killed those other guys…”

“Oh, well that’s different, those are just reflections, they’re not real people. I figured you getting skipped when you had such good letters outweighed a few reflections getting stabbed, is all.”

Made sense to me. Except…

“Well, if they’re reflections, then what are you?” I asked, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

He started to think it over before vanishing in a puff of smoke, just as the door opened again.

Only this time it was my Scrabble mates.

“Yeah, he’s passed out or something. Oh shit, he pissed himself again!” said someone.

“And it smells like shit, too!” said another, holding her nose.

They all piled into the bathroom, looking down on me with scorn.

“What? I didn’t pass out!” I protested, “there was this guy in the mirror!”

I pointed towards the mirror, but this just seemed to aggravate things.

“What the fuck did you do to the mirror?! There’s blood everywhere!”

“No, that’s from the guy in parallel universe number 27, he stabbed number 26 and number 25 because he had to tell me that I was gonna miss my turn!” I explained. I pointed again, just now noticing the broken glass stuck in my bleeding hand.

“Jesus Christ, nobody touch any glass, someone get him the fuck out of here!”

A few of my friends roughly picked me up and started to carry me out of the bathroom.

“Wait! Didn’t you see the guy who looked exactly like me walk in there right before you did? The really handsome guy?” I protested.

“Party’s over. Eric ruined everything. Again!” said the host; a rude, coarse fellow.

Someone was standing behind me, shoving me towards the door. I stumbled, as I was really drunk and also fucked up on some pretty strong mushrooms.

I struggled to get up, until someone I couldn’t see gave me a hand. I stood up and looked into the faces of my friends, who were now frozen with terror.

“What?” I asked.

I turned around and saw at least 37 exact copies of myself, standing behind me, looking pretty pissed off at the rough treatment I had been given!

“And then everything went black, Officer. So as you can see, I’m clearly not guilty of any of these murders you’ve accused me of,” I said, a note of triumph in my voice.

The Police Officers looked at each other and then at me for the good part of 30 seconds.

“Alright, sounds logical. You can get your stuff from the deputy. It’s clear we’ve got the wrong man.”

“Thank you, Officers!” I said, rising from my chair.

Justice had been served. Or so I thought!

As I collected my belongings and was getting ready to leave, a free man, I heard a great ruckus as nearly fifty of my dopplegangers were brought into the booking office, all handcuffed and led in by the Sheriff and his deputies.

“We caught these guys headed for the state line,” the Sheriff told the Officer I had just been speaking to.

Well, when those parallel dimension Erics saw me, they began to point and shout.

“That’s the guy who made us do it!” They all said, in unison.

I ran for it, but was tackled before I got to the door.

Later, I sat and listened as they gave their matching testimony about how I had set the whole thing up, planned it for months, thought up the whole Scrabble game night and lured my friends into meeting at the house with the promise of free booze.

“And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for these meddling clones!” I yelled, suddenly a crotchety old man who runs a theme park.

There’s something about Tony

“…and if my wish came true, there would never be anymore war, or people dying from hunger and people would live together in harmony and peace. The end.”

The young girl put down the piece of paper she had been reading from and smiled. There was some polite clapping from the rest of the class as the teacher, Miss Mitchell, said, “That’s very nice, Amanda. You may sit down now. Who’s next?”

She scanned the students to see who hadn’t gone yet. As her gaze fell on a particularly dumb-looking kid named Tony, who seemed to be considerably older than the other children, she saw that he was looking at something on his desk that he was trying to shield from her. She surmised it was another one of his pornographic magazines that he was always bringing to school.

Not in the mood to deal with it right now, she instead called on him to read his report.

He let out an exasperated sigh, this was clearly putting him out a great deal and dramatically rose from his seat, as if it took a huge effort.

He shuffled his feet and walked to the front of the class with his piece of paper. He started to read in his nasally voice, never looking up at the class.

“What I Wish, by Tony Norton. What I wish is that I could have 146 letters to type my messages in Twitter instead of 140, like everyone else. That way I could be better than everyone else and write more because I would have six more letters than them because I would have 146 and they would only have 140 and that is less than I would have and everybody would be super jealous of me. The end.”

Tony started back towards his seat when Miss Mitchell stopped him in his tracks.

“Excuse me, Tony. Is that really what you would wish for?” she said, wondering if he perhaps hadn’t understood the assignment.

“Yes.”

“But you can wish for anything. Anything. You could be rich or famous, you could help the poor or invent a flying car,” she offered.

“No, that’s OK. Can I sit back down?” he asked.

“Yes, you can,” she said. He hurried back to his seat and resumed reading his pornographic magazine.

“Well, it’s almost time for lunch, we’ll get to the rest of the assign–”

The teacher stopped in mid-sentence. She was staring intently at Tony. The other kids turned to him too, but he he didn’t seem to be doing anything unusual, for him, anyway.

“Tony,” she said, “I’m curious, why did you choose the number 146?”

Annoyed, he looked up from his magazine, “I dunno. It’s like more than 140 or something?” His eyes darted from his magazine to the teacher and back again.

“Well yes, but why only six more than everyone else? I mean, if you really wanted to set yourself apart from everybody, why not 300? Why not a thousand? Why not just unlimited?” Raising her voice out of sheer bafflement.

“Cuz that would be stupid,” he said, matter-of-factly.

There were some gasps from the other students as the fire began to gather in Miss Mitchell’s eyes.

“Oh really, Tony? That would be stupid? You’re given the chance to wish for anything in the whole world, real or imaginary and the best you can come up with is six more letters to type out your inane and idiotic ramblings about your pathetic life to a bunch of friends you don’t even have, but that’s stupid, is that right?”

“Yeah,” he said, not understanding why she was so upset.

“You’re stupid, Toby! You’re stupid!” she was now screeching.

“No I’m not. You are,” was his reply.

“That’s it. Outside. Right now!”

He stood up, gathering his things as he did.

“No, leave the magazine!” she ordered him.

He let out a groan and slid his feet back and forth along the floor as he walked to the door, the teacher following him right behind. As they exited, she shut the door.

The door shut and nobody looking, she threw him up against the wall, kissing him passionately.

“Why do you torture me like this?” she asked.

“I dunno,” was all he replied in the same monotone, in between kisses.

She pulled away and ran her hand over his face, caressing it gently and wiping away the pus and blood which had exited one of his many blemishes as they had aggressively made out.

“Do you wish I looked like those girls in the magazines? Is that what it is?” she asked, in a teasing voice.

“Yeah. You should be hotter,” he stated, honestly.

“I’m sowwy,” she was in full-on baby talk mode now. She took two of his fingers and put them in her mouth and began to suck on them, suggestively. As she did so, he let out a loud fart.

“Pull my finger. Huh huh. Get it?” They both laughed at his joke.

She had fully taken her shirt off while she sucked on his fingers, right there in the middle of the hallway, which was now no longer deserted. Vice Principal Anderson had just come around the corner and spotted the two of them cavorting. In horror, Miss Mitchell saw him, spit out Tony’s fingers and began buttoning up her blouse as fast as she could.

“Miss Mitchell!” roared Mr. Anderson, “Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

“I’m sorry, we were discussing the lesson plan…” she stammered, red-faced and embarrassed, trying to collect herself.

“Miss Mitchell, this is highly inappropriate. Please, go to my office and wait for me there. Son, are you OK?” he asked Tony, as Miss Mitchell ran away.

“Yeah,” said Tony, again, completely unfazed.

Mr. Anderson watched Miss Mitchell turn the corner and then his whole demeanor softened as he put an arm around Tony to console him.

“Did that mean wadie hurt ooh?” he asked Tony, in a baby-talk voice similar to Miss Mitchell’s, as he began to caress his own bosoms through his shirt.

“I farted earlier and I think poop came out,” admitted Tony.

“Oh, you dirty boy! You need a spanking!” said Mr. Anderson, with delight, as he started to undo his tie.

Meanwhile, Tony had taken out his Blackberry and was on Twitter, eager to tell his followers how he had just pooped his pants, when he stopped and frowned.

“What’s wrong” asked, Mr. Anderson with concern, momentarily giving his sore nipples a break from all the vicious pinching he was inflicting on them.

“I’m trying to tell everyone that I pooped, but I ran out of letters,” said Tony, showing Mr. Anderson his phone.

“Awww, I’m sowwy. And you only had six characters too many!”

What the rock?

The crowning achievement of cool, in my young life, came in the form of attending a Poison concert with my mom and two of my friends. I was 11 or 12 and after I made them pour out the wine they had somehow managed to siphon into two, small Oxy 10 bottles, my friends and I hopped into my mom’s car for the drive into Hartford.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Why Eric, that isn’t cool at all!”

Yes, you are right and that is the point, but stop interrupting me, it gets worse.

Things really hit their apex during one of the band’s popular songs, “Don’t Need Nothin’ But A Good Time.”

The lead singer, Bret Michaels (see photo above), you see, he decided to change some of the lyrics, to make them more bawdy!

Instead of singing, “Saturday night, I’d like to make my girl, but right now I can’t make ends meet,” he sang, “Saturday night, I’d like to fuck my girl, but right now I can’t make ends meet!”

Do you see what he did there??

Yes, I know he ruined whatever cleverness or wordplay was in there, but he also used a swear word! Which, when you’re 11, is pretty fucking cool! The place went nuts!

And I was there!

I mean, I thought I was cool when my older cousins gave me a Def Leppard Pyromania Tour t-shirt for Christmas one year. I told everyone in school that they got it when they actually went to the concert! I was so proud!

Later (and by later, I mean 3 months ago) I spoke to my cousins about it and they admitted that they actually got it at Spencer’s Gifts as a goof on me, because Def Leppard is so lame.

You know what, Stacey and Siobhan? You’re lame!

No, that’s not true. You guys are cool, I didn’t mean that.

Which got me thinking, because of radio censorship, I’d imagine a lot of songs were originally written with the word ‘fuck’ in them, only to have it taken out and replaced with something else.

And then I started thinking some more. There were a lot of songs with the suspicious use of the word ‘rock’ as a verb.

Rock.

Fuck.

Phonetically, very similar, no?

These I will focus on here. I say ’suspicious’ because if you accept this premise and then do some translating, sometimes the results are a little surprising.

OK, so if you take the song to mean “Let’s get fucked”, then Def Leppard has got some ’splainin’ to do!

But maybe that’s what my cousins meant, by saying Def Leppard is ‘lame’? If that’s the case, then they are homophobic.

At one point, he sings, “Let’s get the rock out of here!” which I feel translates much better. This is a clear-cut example of what I’m talking about. “Let’s get the fuck out of here” is a familiar phrase, but one that’s admittedly not radio-safe. Switch it out with a similar-sounding one. I get it.

Everybody knows this one. What you might not have caught was “I’ve seen a million faces and I’ve rocked them all!” meaning “Hey, I’ve gotten a million bj’s on tour, because I’m a rock star. Fuck you and your shitty job, dickweed.”

Bad form to brag like this, Bon Jovi. Bad form, indeed.

I was going to do “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by the Scorpions, but they won’t let me imbed the video. Those guys are German or Swedish or something, so they can be forgiven if they mess up the language a little bit. They way it’s phrased, it sounds more like he’s telling someone off. “Here I am. Fuck you. Like a hurricane.” Foreigners!

Here’s another popular song, but unlike those Scorpions, the band Kiss can’t be forgiven for making so little sense. You’d think people from Detroit would be better educated. “I wanna fuck and roll all night”? What the hell does that even mean?

Well, that’s all I’ve got. What about you? I’d like to see your examples in the comments. So do it.

Alf kills.

“Hey, it’ll be great, you’ll be Alf today! It’ll be hilarious! What could possibly go wrong?”

What, indeed.

I jumped right into that little game my friend Skeeball had come up with. Head first, without looking.

The rules were simple: I would pretend to be the fictional TV alien life form from the planet Melmac all day long. No breaking character. NO MATTER WHAT.

At first, my coworkers expressed mild amusement, which was quickly followed by annoyance and then finally, angry frustration. Whatever. They need to learn how to chillax.

Skeeball had brought a stray cat from the alley up to the office, setting it loose to watch me chase it around, claiming I was going to eat it. You see, because that’s what Alf did. On the show. Get it?

Anyway, around 3 PM is when everything started to go to shit. I had just been chewed out by my supervisor, Linda, for having an unprofessional attitude towards work.

It was mere formality, when your father owns the company, you know you’re not going to get fired. Not for pretending to be Alf, anyway. But more on that, later.

She was right, of course. I did have a big stack of requests sitting on my desk from patients all over the country, waiting on my approval for their life-saving surgeries, but then again, there was never really an episode that explicitly stated that Alf would know how to do that kind of thing… so…

Anyway, Linda goes back to her work and I’m sitting around in the break room, brainstorming funny things for Alf to do to his co-workers when Jerry from accounting comes in and grabs a stale bagel and starts absentmindedly chewing on it while he talks on his cell phone to someone about some insurance company gibberish (remember, I’m Alf, so I don’t know what any of that stuff means, so it sounds like gibberish to me, Alf.)

Me and Skeeball are so into our Alf pranks, we don’t even realize the guy’s been choking for at least a minute or so. Skeeball panics, he doesn’t know what to do, because he didn’t attend the mandatory CPR thing we were all supposed to attend.

Fortuntaely, I did.

Unfortunately, “Alf” did not.

Not only that, but I imagined that Alf’s fingers are too furry to dial 911, but even if they weren’t, the emergency number on Melmac is 58?3P1@1 (Me and Skeeball came up with that one on our own.)

So Jerry died, but even worse, I finally did have to break character when the cops came to investigate, so it ended up being all for nothing.

No wait, the worst part is, my dad ended up firing me because he said he was sick of me and my loser friends screwing everything up all the time. He said we had generated enough bad press for him.

Well, I guess that’s not the worst part, because now I get the same salary to stay home and make sure there aren’t too many leaves in the pool. I have a net on the end of a long pole and if there are too many leaves in there when my dad comes home from work, I get in trouble.

But, as I explained to him yesterday, I’m now C3P0 in that part of The Empire Strikes Back where he’s all in pieces and has to be carried around on Chewbacca’s back, so I can’t use the pole right now. Also, he says I’m not supposed to make Consuela carry me around like that, because she’s sixty and she has a bad back. Personally, I think she should probably be fired and replaced with someone who can do the job right, but I guess that’s why I’m only the Pool Leaf Collection Assistant and not the Manager.

Controversy Corner 8/3/2009

The latest season of the Simpsons (Season 20) was not as good as Season 8.

Thank you, the once and forever King of Pop!

This morning, I woke up and was surprised to see upwards of 50,000 hits on my blog in the span of a few hours.

Normally, my traffic is in the hundreds. Confused? To say the least!

It wasn’t until I listened to the backlog of voicemails from my friends on the east coast that I figured out why.

Latoya Jackson had mentioned my blog, hollywoodphony.com, as one of her brother’s favorites on the Today Show!

This floored me. I was so honored, I almost started crying. I had no idea that I had affected Him this way, I honestly wasn’t even aware he knew of my existence!

This has been a crazy few hours. It just goes to show you that there’s always a silver lining, even to the worst of news.

Michael, if you can hear me up there, I want to thank you. Not just for the 847% increase in traffic to my site, but for the lifetime of wonderful music you gave to all of us!

Click here to watch the video!

My dog is an a-hole.

My dog has gone Hollywood.

And contrary to what he might think as he stares at himself in the mirror for 45 minutes each morning, it’s not pretty.

I’ve had him since he was 8 weeks old, but in the last few months, I feel like I don’t even know him at all.

It all started a little bit after Christmas. My brother had gotten him a little doggie-sized Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses (that’s him in the picture above.)

Anyway, it actually sat in the box until late January when a friend of mine saw it and said, “Hey, is this for Sparky?”

I hadn’t even thought about it since Christmas, so I pulled it out and put it on him, to see how it looked.

It was pretty cute and I took a few pictures, but thinking that was that, I went to take it off and that son of a bitch bit me!

“Fine! Leave it on! See if I care!”

Well, he did. In fact, the only time he took off that stupid shirt and those asinine sunglasses was when he took a shower. He said he felt naked without it! I tried to remind him that he was just a dog and all dogs are usually naked, but he said those are the gay ones.

“So you were gay until last Christmas?” I asked him. He said he didn’t make the rules, he just stamped them on the ass of every bitch he tapped.

You might think this was all doggie-bluster, but he had the skills to back it up. One night, I caught him in a six-way with a bunch of dogs from the neighborhood. They must have liked his style, because they’re out there right now, as I type this, barking their doggie-whore asses off.

Things got really bad when he ordered that doggie-sized Segway. He’d roll around the neighborhood, smoking a cigar, casting aspersions on all the other naked, male dogs who didn’t have their own scooter to ride around on and had to walk like every other fucking dog in the world besides my goddam dog.

Sorry, I just get a little worked up, thinking about that stupid Segway.

The other day, I was working on my screenplay, “Decadent Cadence”, when I noticed my hard drive wasn’t getting backed up! I looked and saw that shithead had unplugged my goddamn external so he could juice up his ridiculous and unnecessary Segway! He’s a dog! He doesn’t need a Segway!

If something had happened and my computer crashed, I would have lost like six pages of re-writes! Oh boy, I would have given it to him good! I don’t care how many times he bit me, I’d take that goddamn Segway, the ugly Hawaiian shirt, the 1980’s-style Aviators, the fake doggie-cigar! The whole kit and caboodle!

Luckily, it didn’t have to come to that. That seems to be his way: he rides me just about to the limit, but never quite over. Oh man, he sure knows how to push my buttons!

I just want my old, regular dog back. The one who doesn’t wear clothes or rides a Segway or pretends to smoke a cigar. He got along fine without those things before, why would now be any different?

I’ll tell you why: he’s spoiled!

I feel like Charlie Brown in that Peanuts when Snoopy runs away or something. Only my dog hasn’t run away, he’s still here. He just acts like a dick and treats me like shit because he thinks he’s better than everyone now.

You know what, that picture might be confusing. I know it sounds like I said that’s my brother in the picture, but it’s not. That’s actually Sparky, my dog, wearing the outfit that my brother had given him for Christmas. Sorry, Al, for implying that you were my stupid dog!

Come to think of it, my brother wears Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses all the time and he does have a Segway too, so I take back that apology. That’s still not him, but if you look exactly like somebody and have all the same characteristics as them and wear the same stupid shirts, then you probably deserve to be confused with them in somebody’s blog at some point in your life.

I guess your vacation from the real world is over, Alex. Time to grow up and take your lumps.

Anyway, my dog sucks and my brother is pretty bad too. I should give my stupid dog to my brother, they’d probably get along great! They could ride Segways together and smoke cigars and lift up their Aviator sunglasses (that look like the kind people would win on Double Dare) in a seductive manner to check out “the babes” as they go by on their roller blades in their spandex bike shorts.

Come to think of it, who the hell gets somebody’s dog a Christmas present that basically turns their dog into their own little tiny dog-doppelganger? I mean, it’s possible that was his plan all along, right?

He’s always admired Sparky and on several occasions has expressed his desire to have a dog “just like that one day”.

Well, I guess I’ve been played for a fool. I see now, all too late, that I walked right into this little trap.

I have to ask you, though, Spark, were you just an unknowing pawn in all of this, like me, or were you playing along the whole time?

UPDATE: Well, since I wrote this, a lot has happened. I was able to piece the real story together from fragments of email conversations I hacked into between my brother and my former dog. Even when I thought I “knew” what was up, I was still in the dark. It had been Sparky, not my brother, who had masterminded the whole thing.

Well, I hope you two jerks are happy together. I’m gonna leave this up as a warning (albeit a humiliating and soul-crushing one) to all the people out there who might get a seemingly innocent gift from a trusted family member for your dog. Smile and say thank you so much for the lovely sweater or whatever it is, but the second you’re out of their sight, throw that thing out. Because while it might seem adorable at the time, I’d rather have an ugly, naked dog that all the other dogs take for a gay, rather than a fake, two-timing dickweed who thinks he’s better than me.

SECOND UPDATE: I just realized that’s not my dog or my brother in that picture. It’s that guy from the show “Dog the Bounty Hunter” who bears a passing resemblance to them both. If you saw my brother or Sparky, you’d understand my confusion. I’d replace it but now I don’t have any pictures of my brother or my dog–excuse me, my EX-dog around anymore because I threw them all out in anger.