McDonald's coffee is HOT, STDs are NOT

You've all heard of those bogus lawsuits, right? The kind where Mickey D's ends up paying some yahoo a million bucks because he was dumb enough to stow his (obviously) hot coffee between his legs while driving, and reaped what he sowed: a burnt private area. (You'd think a nurse could come up with a better term than "private area," wouldn't you? Sorry.) Or, my personal favorite... the guy who got up from the driver's seat of his RV and went to the back to make himself a sandwich or something, and after the vehicle ran off the road and he sustained some injuries, sued the RV company for not clearly stating in the manual that you can't leave the driver's seat while the vehicle is in motion.

Duh.

Honestly, I feel like this type of lawsuit represents all that is wrong with our nation; however, my post today is regarding a different type of lawsuit... outlined briefly here. It's the story of some poor middle school girl whose classmate was able to get a pretty inappropriate message posted on the Jumbotron (or whatever it's called) at the Cardinals' stadium while on a class trip to the ball park. She just phoned it right in, and it was posted. Now I know for a fact that other ball parks have a policy where your message must be submitted x number of days in advance of the game at which you'd like it posted. This seems reasonable, and I imagine the logic behind it is to prevent foolish things like this story from taking place. But in St. Louis, apparently it's a free-for-all.

I don't know. I guess I'm kind of torn. There is a piece of me that says, "This was really dumb. Sorry about your humiliation, kiddo, but it's not worth $25K. Middle-school girls will be middle-school girls (which unfortunately means, middle-school girls are the spawn of satan)." Then the other part of me kicks in and says, "This was really dumb. And really, really preventable. And besides, I don't care much for the Cards. Stick it to 'em." It just seems ridiculous that this could ever happen. I mean, someone has to actually type those letters in, to form words and sentences that make sense. There was ample opportunity for this to have been avoided.

You watch, the Cardinals will soon have some written form for requesting Jumbotron messages that must be filled out weeks in advance of your chosen game, and will soon be employing a team of reviewers and editors to ensure that something like this never happens again. Cards fans will be forever annoyed by the red tape created when middle school girls were allowed to run free on a field trip.

But enjoy that "hot" disclaimer on your coffee, folks.

I feel like disregarding the message on my new curling iron, and touching it after I have allowed it to become hot.