When Jeremy Piven dropped out of Speed-the-Plow today and cited a "high mercury count" as the reason, we wondered whether that excuse could possibly be topped. As it turns out, it could!

Entertainment Tonight is first with a press release from Piven's doctor, Dr. Carlton Colker, that plays like near-parody (yet isn't ridden with the telltale typos that plagued the Blind NBC Spoofer). First, Coker says how disappointed Piven is that Hollywood has not rallied around him during this "health crisis," and then there's this:

"Jeremy has been an avid sushi eater for many years, regularly eating sushi twice in one day. He has also taken certain Chinese herbs, and that, in combination with the frequent sushi consumption, could have led to these elevated mercury levels," Colker explains. He goes on to inform ET that a test revealed that Jeremy had the highest level of mercury that he has ever seen, which amounts to six times a healthy amount of mercury, in his system.

A Hollywood Elsewhere commenter mentioned that Colker is the "same ASSHOLE who I worked with on a reality television show a few years ago. He was an insufferable, egomaniacal douche bag and one of the worst people I ever had to deal with in the six years that I worked in the entertainment industry. Go do some more roids, Colker, you imbecile." This prompted us to do more digging, where we learned that Colker is not just a Fox News-vetted doctor, but a professional bodybuilder who "competed in power lifting in Israel"! Surely, this is the man we would trust when he says, "Take five Chinese herbs and five hundred unagi rolls and call in sick in the morning." [ET]