Yes, Virginia, people really are morons...

All right, I really need to be cheered up today, and, thank goodness, people do not disappoint.

My mother, who is an occasional reader of this blog, lodged a complaint recently when she objected to me saying "Most people are morons." It's not polite, she said, and I should refrain from doing it, unless people really are being morons.

Mom, this one is for you.

OK, so these two guys in St. Louis are at a party and, as one would expect, drinking heavily. As the night moves on and they run out of things to drink, they begin doing a practice known as "drunk dialing", which is basically the process of calling random people and yelling obscenities into the phone until they hang up. It's a little more advanced than "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?", but not by a whole lot.

At about 2:45am, one guy suggests that they call this girl that he knows, and they do, only they get the answering machine, instead of a person. So they leave this long, extremely obscene and vaguely threatening message on the machine, and then hang up, laughing hysterically.

But it is not the intended girl who hears this message. It's her father who hears it.

Her father, the circuit court judge. This is what is known in the business as Bad News No. 1.

The judge calls the police. The police then come over to the judge's house. They listen to the message, then use all of their crime-solving techniques at their disposal, and dial *69. Our heroes pick up the phone, and the police, while not identifying themselves, strike up a conversation with the dialers, and get invited over to their party.

Hey, do you hear knocking at the front door? Oh, that's right. That must be Bad News No. 2.

The judge, who somehow did not find this anywhere as amusing as I did, threw the book at these guys, and sentenced them to 80 hours of community service, and also they both must write a 10 page report entitled "How Practical Jokes Have Serious Consequences." The letters in the reports must be in 12-point type and the margins may not exceed one inch.

Oh, and I already checked: "drunk-dialing" is not one of the subjects covered at www.termpapers.com.

Bad News No. 3.

You morons.