Glum Whitey Cornered by The Sister of Sanchez!

Oh! What a happy day was had in the Sanchez household! For the material items of the Wiper?who, the attentive reader remembers, plummeted to his death in last week's column?were split equally among the Wookie and the Sister of Sanchez. Shafted Sanchez, naturally, didn't get any of the Cross Colours or Karl Kani from the depths of the Wiper's closet (it appears the Wiper's wiggerdom ran deeper than the Indian Ocean), nor a single pair of Cazals eyeglasses found in a drawer absolutely brimming with them. However, not-entirely-unlucky Sanchez did manage to score the Wiper's old VHS copy of Cobb, which is a terrible film that happens to contain the two single greatest lines of movie dialogue of the millennium; in the first, the guy who played the cafeteria chef on A Different World shouts "My ass plays better baseball than you!" to Tommy Lee Jones. In the second, Robert Wuhl enters from a snowstorm to find Mr. Jones standing there glowering at him. "Good news, Stumpy!" Jones as Cobb tells Wuhl as Stumpy. "We're goin' to Reno! I'm horny!"

The Wiper's replacement, a sallow sad sack we'll call Glum Whitey, seems to have picked up an addiction to NyQuil somewhere on those highways and byways he once rode as a hired second gun in a major label band. Glum Whitey sports the bovine stare of a guy who's spent too many months sitting on a 12-bunk Prevost ("The yawning Sister of Sanchez pffts at her sibling for suffering such a need to look like a music business insider that he must type '12-bunk Prevost' rather than 'tour bus,'" pfffted the yawning Sister of Sanchez). As it turns out, Glum Whitey's band did rather well on the radio last Christmas with a bouncy pop song entirely at odds with its musical legacy of doom-laden tunes. However, the label could not get its shit together to actually sell records off this unexpected windfall of airplay, and after the holiday season?that being the time of the year when pretty much anything with a trickle of exposure sells like mad?when the band was done spending the holiday season buying their family and friends the sort of gifts R. Kelly probably buys his mom, the band was informed that, well, as a matter of fact, actual people don't like their music, only people who work at radio stations do. This line is one of Sanchez's favorite boilerplate show business lies, perhaps one he enjoys as much as, "Oh, the radio station is playing the record, they're just not reporting it; that's why it isn't charting."

His glumness did not save him from being drawn by the Wookie and the Sister of Sanchez into their reindeer games. Once they'd had enough fun going through the personal items of a dead man, they got a copy of TV Guide with its cover story "TV's 50 Greatest Characters Ever," and a couple of old towels that they rolled up into rattails. Then they made Glum Whitey open up the pages to a random entry and call out the character and program.

"Urkel, Family Matters," said Glum Whitey glumly.

"Seven!" yelled the Wookie.

"'Nineteen!' yells the Sister of Sanchez," yelled the Sister of Sanchez.

"Urkel is, in fact, the 27th greatest tv character of all time," said Glum Whitey, holding up the magazine to display Jaleel White's fictional creation wedged between Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous at number 28 and Roseanne from Roseanne at 26, and SMACK! smacked the towel of the Sister of Sanchez on the ass of the Wookie.

Perplexed Sanchez is happy to report that Spin has discovered emo?almost six years after the release of Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary. While busy Sanchez has not actually read the Spin piece, he imagines that those people shed a tear every time they discover another strain of smart guy rock that's not particularly popular, yet nonetheless still didn't give the writer enough space for either a comprehensive history of the non-genre or a comprehensive list of all the bands one might contemporarily throw into that non-genre. Elsewhere in Spin, a dirty-legged Tori Amos lays down in the forest, gripping a tree between her thighs with great enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, curious Sanchez checked out former Spin owner Bob Guccione Jr.'s new way to kill time and hire interns, Gear, the cover of which trumpets stories about Method Man and Redman and Belle & Sebastian, as well as the names of David Bowie and Trent Reznor in small print, but is dominated by a photo of VH1 VJ Madison Michele snapping her panty-straps with her thumbs. Observant Sanchez notes that she is identified as one of the "women who rock." Disappointed Sanchez has always wanted to rock but doesn't own any panties, and so he stayed depressed until he reached page 40 of the magazine, on which it is claimed that before 1985 it was possible to obtain ecstasy with a credit card at bars in Texas. Elsewhere in Gear, dull and highly embarrassing sex columnist Eurydice asks the reader to say, "I love masturbation," aloud. "'The Sister of Sanchez would love to know the precise Greek myth to which the columnist is referring and then make tepid Ezra Pound jokes,' sighs the melancholy Sister of Sanchez," the melancholy Sister of Sanchez sighed, "but she knows if her brother is too lazy to walk across the room, pick up the Cobb tape, fast-forward to the credits and find out who the chef from the aforementioned Lisa Bonet vehicle is, he sure won't take the time to look into a little Greek mythology."

The Sister of Sanchez brightened suddenly, then slid a little closer to Glum Whitey on the couch. "'Care to look into a little Greek mythology?' the Sister of Sanchez inquires of her brother's new roommate," the Sister of Sanchez asked Glum Whitey.

"Ulp," replied Glum Whitey.

NEXT WEEK: Comprehensive reviews of new CD releases off of which Sanchez didn't even bother to remove the cellophane!