• Two college students in their early twenties file a lawsuit against the favorite campus drinking hole for failing to get them elegantly wasted one Saturday evening as part of the college’s Homecoming celebration. The owner of the bar settled out of court at an alleged $10,000 a piece, to cover emotional and social distress. It was the first weekend that the students had been home before 3:00 AM on a Saturday night in three years...
• A man in Tulsa, AZ sues a nationally-branded hotel chain after nearly putting his SUV through a utility pole because he was so mesmerized by the animated marquee attached to their sign that he had forgotten that he was driving.
• An elderly woman in southern Florida is awarded a $25,000 settlement by a local grocer after accidentally purchasing a brand of peanut butter which she was specifically allergic to and suing the store for attempted murder and conspiracy by placing all of the brands of peanut butter together in the same section of the super market...because all of the damn brands look alike!

For most of us, the whole concept of these baffling lawsuits first came to light back in 1992 when an elderly woman decided that McDonald’s was responsible for her clumsiness after she spilled a cup of hot coffee on her groin and received third-degree burns which required eight days of hospitalization and skin grafting to remedy. Of course, since then the fast food industry has become a haven for idiot savants in search of a free ride – Burger King and Arby’s have both dealt with dissatisfied customers recently, ranging from allergy conflictions to one gentleman’s qualms about the brand of toilet-paper provided in the bathrooms. Everybody’s favorite Mexican eatery, Taco Bell, saw a particularly atrocious charge back in 1998 when a Hindu man was accidentally given a beef burrito instead of a bean burrito and proceeded to violate the sacred symbol of his religion by ingesting it with extra cheese and a spicy hot sauce, resulting in emotional distress, loss of wages, medical expenses, and even requiring him to make a special trip to England to perform the necessary cleansing rituals. And if that’s not bad enough, a mere three years later the city of Houston spent a day in court after they fired one of their ambulance drivers for making a donut stop while transporting a patient back to the emergency room. Hey, everybody is entitled to their two fifteen-minute breaks, right?

It’s always been an ongoing pet-peeve with me that people no longer feel the need to take responsibility for their actions. Thanks to the supreme idiocy of our nation’s legal system, being a uncoordinated klutz, the town nincompoop, or even simply having the mental capacities of the average rock are no longer just cheap sources of amusement for your buddies, but in fact actually quite the profitable of dysfunctions to possess – we should all be so lucky! Sure, it may hurt for a second or two as you stab that steaming-hot french fry through your eyeball, for the several-million-dollar settlement that you’ll be seeing soon enough (no pun intended...), you shouldn’t have any problems paying somebody else to do all of that pesky looking around for you!

I guess I really don’t ask that much of my fellow man these days – fill out your slips before pulling up to the ATM, don’t try to take more than ten items through the express lanes at the grocery store, and most importantly, don’t try to pawn the blame off on anybody else for your moronic mistakes. Mind you, this not only includes holding candy manufacturers and burger joints responsible when you gain three hundred pounds by eating their products and expecting compensation from your coaches in high school when you don’t play well enough to get any athletic scholarships, but also even being stupid enough to let your child screw around at the local water park after-hours and then later suing the owners after your kid falls into the ice-cold waters of the killer whale tank and dies of hypothermia. To sum things up, pretty much just don’t be an idiot – is that really too much to ask?!

Well, according to the Internet, apparently it is, but maybe you guys could at least try a little harder, alright? I know that it’s going to be tough, but just take your lawyer’s cell phone number off the speed dial, put down the hard liquor, and go watch Jenny Jones – everything’s going to be ok, I promise! And even if it isn’t, just feel free to have your lawyer call my lawyer and I’m sure we should be able to get your mental anguish from reading this column taken care of right away...just keep in mind that I am a writer, so I might not be able to pay you the entire settlement at one time. In fact, if I could just bum a couple of bucks so that I can pick up some Ramen on the way home, I’m sure that I should be able to pay you back in a week or two, tops...

And by the way, for those of you who are going to ask, my absolute favorite frivolous lawsuit that I came across while researching this column:

A Philadelphia man sues U.S. Airways for negligence, along with mental and emotional anguish, after awakening in the middle of the night still on the plane long after the rest of the passengers and crew had gone home. It seems that they had simply forgotten about him, but he claims that after assuming that the plane had crashed, he didn’t know if he was alive or dead... Unfortunately, though, only part of him was...

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