Thursday, March 15, 2007

Mary Jane found on MySpace

Over here at the CSM, we're starting to feel like we've been picking on Wisconsin a little much recently. It certainly seems like the Dairy State has earned more than its fair share of our attention as of late, although we do have our defences as to why.

1) It's the state where we started out as little Cola-Soaked Minds, and it's always safe to pick on your home.
2) We now live in the Gopher State, and it's something of an obligation to pick on your neighbors. If you want proof, just ask Germany, circa 1940.
3) Some Wisconsinites have done some really dumb things as of late, and there's nothing we like better than someone doing something stupid.

That being said, it should come as no surprise that today brings us yet another Wisconsin story, coupled with the fact that a fair number of people who use computers have proven themselves to be lacking sufficient intelligence to actually operate the machines. We're not just talking about the people who rely on "leet speek" or anything like that. No, we're looking at people who put incriminating pictures on the internet.

A wise person once told us, "If there is a picture of your ass, there's a picture of your ass on the internet." The follow-up adage, as Moua Yang of Sheboygan, WI can attest to, is "If there's a picture of your homegrown pot plants on the internet, there's a picture of your homegrown pot plants discovered by the police." While the police were not specifically looking for information to make a drug bust, they had been using the internet (and sites like MySpace) as a tool into discovering who was behind some gang-related activities. When the cops made the connection to Yang, and discovered the pictures, hilarity ensued, so long as by hilarity you mean criminal charges.

Now we fully admit that we've done some fairly stupid things in our own time, and we're pretty confident that at least one picture and/or story from said exploits has ended up somewhere on the internet. But how intelligent does one have to be to put photos that could lead to criminal charges on their own site? After all, if your friends put pictures of you like that online, it could be passed off as a fairly mean-spirited (but possibly still funny) prank, kind of like on the British version of The Office. If you do it yourself, it makes you a prime candidate for Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? And, as we all know, even 5th graders know enough to keep their pot pictures in shoeboxes underneath their beds, as opposed to plastering them onto MySpace.

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