• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 4, 2013

Boy kids are dumb, aren’t they?  I mean, in general. Not your kids. Unless you think they are, in which case, I’m sure you’re right. Teenagers and social media, in particular, are such a bad combination it’s astounding. Social media basically allows teens to take all the idiotic things they do as a matter of course, and give those things the gift of immortal life.

Take, for example, 18-year-old Jacob Cox-Brown of Astoria, Oregon, who was arrested after boasting about a drunk driving escapade on New Year’s Eve on Facebook. Cox-Brown’s exact words were: “Drivin drunk… classsic (sic) [winking smiley-face emoticon] but whoever’s vehicle i hit i am sorry. [smiley-face emoticon].” Two people who saw the post tipped off the local police, who then inspected Cox-Brown’s vehicle and matched damage there to the damage inflicted on two other vehicles. Then, they arrested him. In a press release the Astoria police basically begged people to stop being so damn stupid: “When you post…on Facebook, you have to figure that it is not going to stay private long.” Indeed.

The next story is just sad, as well as stupid. Over New Year’s Eve 19-year-old Savannah Ramirez, of Phoenix, and her 22-year-old brother, Manuel Ortiz, were drunk (red flag), posing for Facebook photos (two red flags) while playing with a loaded gun (infinite red flags). Ramirez was pointing the gun at her brother’s head when it went off, killing him instantly. According to the local ABC station, the police found her sitting on the curb, sobbing; she is being charged with manslaughter. If you’re interested in adding some soul-crushing irony to your day, in one of his Facebook photos Ortiz is pictured pointing a gun at his head while wearing a t-shirt that says “Famous.” I guess that about sums it up.

Moving on to somewhat lighter fare, how about these crazy teenage hijinks: two girls in Place County, California have been arrested and charged with drugging their parents to avoid an Internet curfew, which I’m going to go ahead and surmise was probably intended to limit excessive social media use. The drugs, consisting of sleeping pills, were ground up and mixed into milkshakes consumed by the unwitting parents around 10 p.m. They woke up at 1 a.m. feeling like, well, they’d just been drugged with sleeping pills. Suspecting mickey slippage, they picked up a $5 drug test from the local police station and determined they’d been dosed. The teens are being charged with “willfully mingling a pharmaceutical with food.”