CHICAGO – General Motors Corp and popular Internet personality Martin Sargent said on Monday that they would end their endorsement deal at the end of the year.

GM, which has warned it will soon run short of cash and is asking the U.S. government for financial support amid the economic slowdown, and Sargent, who was recently laid off by Revision3 and has already run out of cash and faces eviction, called the arrangement “mutual and amicable,” though at a press conference Sargent could clearly be heard saying “whatever, fuck cars” under his breath.

They cited a desire by the Internet Superstar to spend more time at this filthy tavern where he routinely embarrasses himself, as well as a need for GM to cut costs as it struggles with declining demand in the U.S. market.

“In light of the news coming out of Washington, this decision is the result of discussions that started earlier in the year, and the timing of this agreement with these other activities is purely coincidental,” said Mark LaNeve, GM’s North American vice president of sales, in a statement.

Added Sargent, “Meh. Cars are gay.”

The Detroit automaker has been slashing marketing costs across all venues, previously disclosing reduced spending on motorsports, as well as eliminating television ads next year during such events as the Oscars and Emmy award shows and the National Football League’s Super Bowl championship game, and ending its estimated $10 million per year subsidization of online personality iJustine’s pancake makeup.

Terms of the arrangement were not disclosed although GM spokesman Pete Ternes said it ends the automaker’s five-year deal with Sargent a year early. Sources say Sargent will continue to drive his 1984 Cadillac Eldorado until it completely shits the bed, predicted to occur in early 2009.

Well I had had just about enough of that!

I mean sure, when you live in a building in the misty shadow of a freeway overpass in a post-apocalyptic looking stretch of Old San Francisco Town, a crippled pigeon’s hobble away from the old, burnt out docks, you have to expect some ne’re-do-wells to come creeping around from time to time to cause a little mischief. It’s part of the charm! But my 1984 Cadillac Eldorado, an American classic that one would think even the most desperate, rock-hungry crackhead would respect enough to limp by at a wide berth with little more than a reverential whistle, had been broken into for the fourth time, and its interior had been stripped of pretty much everything except a few swaths of fine faux wood paneling.

I had to take action. Immediately.

I considered staging an all night stakeout with my blowgun in the bushes across the street from the gravel lot where I park and dart the next infidel who dared enter Sarge’s golden chariot, but there was a double episode of “Deal Or No Deal” on so that wasn’t an option.

Instead, I decided to lay a trap, literally. And believe you me, this trap I had in mind would teach my burglar such an awful lesson, I knew he’d be down to the closest public library to make a HotJobs account first thing the next morning. I was going to send that bitch on the straight and narrow.

I went to the store and bought a can of olestra Pringles, the fat free ones that warn that they’ll cause whoever is foolish enough to enjoy them “loose stools.” And as I watched some idiot who had just explained to Howie Mandel how she needed to win at least $300,000 to pay for a crucial medical procedure for her mom and to one day send her wild children to college decide to go for the million dollar top prize after she already had over $400,000 in the bank, I started eating those Pringles. Eating them with abandon, more or less drinking them right out of the tube.

When I got about halfway through the can of delicious potato flake crisps, and the greedy idiot woman had lost all of her money to that evil banker, I felt a rumble deep in my bowels.

My plan was working.

I carefully removed the remaining half of the Pringles from the can to keep their uniformity from being compromised and hunched towards the bathroom with the empty tube.

And then, just like the label warned, my bowels began to go slack. But rather than deposit their troubled contents into the toilet bowl, I shot them into the bottom of the Pringles can, filling about a quarter of the tube with a fine brown froth before setting it aside. Once my bowels had finished uncoiling in the toilet and I knew I was in no danger of leaving the safety of the bathroom, I cleaned off my war torn ass, picked up my defiled Pringles can, and headed back to the living room, where the rest of the chips lay in wait.

I then carefully placed the uneaten chips back in the can, making it look like a mostly full tube of delicious Pringles. I replaced the cap, waited for a commercial break, and took my creation out to the Cadillac, placing it right on the dashboard with the doors unlocked.

About an hour later, after some other nitwit had greedily bet away a life-changing sum of money on “Deal Or No Deal” I heard a blood-curdling scream from outside my window, followed by several minutes straight of stomach evacuating retching.

My enemy had taken the bait, pressing his luck with the contents of my beautiful car one too many times, going for the crackhead equivalent of the top prize and losing it all, and I haven’t had the Cadillac broken into since.

Yes, once you pop, you can’t stop, that is until you realize that that last Pringle you just ate was sitting on a polluted sea of Martin Sargent’s wrath. And that won’t just make you stop eating Pringles, but stop everything and completely reevaluate your fucked up life!

Hey Troopers! Thanks for reading my first entry on SargeWorld since July 6, 2007. That was right around the time I excitedly moved from Santa Monica to San Francisco to join a promising online television network called Revision3. A week ago today, my tenure with that company ended as I and a goodly number of my colleagues, including my impossibly gifted co-host Jay Speiden, were laid off, the victims of this unfathomably constricting economic environment.

But I think the public statement regarding my dismissal merits a tiny bit of clarification.

According to a blog post on the Revision3 site explaining the network’s decision, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback stated that my show, Internet Superstar, along with Sarah Lane’s show, popSiren, were canceled because they “never really found their audience. And Jim, who has always treated me even-handedly, even generously, and towards whom I bear no malice, is absolutely correct in that my show’s numbers didn’t consistently approach those of Revision3’s most popular show, Diggnation, or some of the more technically oriented programming on the network, such as Tekzilla.

But find an audience we did. A passionate, vocal, loyal fan base that, over the past week, has festooned the Internet with message board postings, blog entries and tribute videos of protest and praise, and flooded my inbox with heartfelt notes expressing loss, thanks and encouragement.

Wow. Your sentiments haven been a true balm, and I can’t thank you enough for expressing them, as well as for watching the show when it was on. Yes, we found an audience, and it was the best audience a show host could want.

So, what’s next for Internet’s Martin Sargent? Now that I have the time, I’ll be updating SargeWorld regularly with news of what I’m up to. But if all goes according to plan, I’ll once again, in the very near future, involve myself with a new project that will preoccupy me to such a degree that I might go another year and a half without posting here.

At least let’s hope so. Stay tuned!