HBO CEO CHARGED WITH ASSAULT

Chris Albrecht, CEO of HBO, has been forced to resign after being charged with assaulting his girl friend in a Las Vegas parking lot. Mr. Albrecht said that he was an alcoholic, and that the incident had occurred while he was under the influence.

There has been a lot of that sort of thing going on lately. When he was stopped by police last year, actor/director Mel Gibson unleashed a flood of anti-Semitic invective against the arresting officer. Later Gibson said he was not an anti-Semite. It was the booze talking. Then there was former congressman Mark Foley, who had been chair of the house caucus on missing and exploited children. He resigned his office when it became known that he had tried to exploit teenage male pages himself. The problem, he said, was that he was an alcoholic. He checked himself into a alcoholism treatment center.

Sadly, Dr Carl Perrin, usually a mild-mannered English professor, has also been charged with assaulting a clerk at Wal-Mart. It all happened when Perrin asked the clerk where something was. The clerk, according to Perrin, “a slack-jawed Neanderthal with purple hair and ring in his eyebrow,” answered, “We ain’t got none of them things no more.”

Perrin, who spent a half a century trying to teach numbskulls how to write a literate sentence, admits he just lost it. He picked up a pad of paper and hit the clerk over the head with it. He was going to have the clerk write, “We don’t have any of those things any more,” a hundred times, but he was escorted out of the store by security.

“I probably wouldn’t have done it,” Perrin said, “but I am a chocoholic, and I had just eaten a large sized Hershey bar with almonds.”