Quite possibly the stupidest statement of the week, edging out many memorable lies emanating from Washington, was actually in the local paper.

A local 11yo sixth grader had been restricted because of poor grades. When his father told him he couldn't watch television or use the computer until he improved his grades, he fixed them. The boy asked his teacher for permission to return to her classroom after the class left for a lunch break, went to the teacher's desk, got on her computer, found his name, and changed five grades. Another teacher caught him at the teacher's desk. In yet another zero-tolerance idiocy, the child was arrested, taken away, in handcuffs no less, to the Rock Road jail, and later released to his father. The family's attorney, no less, came out with this pearl.

"I guess it's a sign of the times," attorney Robert Udell said. "When I was growing up, we would have handled something like this without an arrest, but then again, nowadays people fly planes into buildings."

So changing grades is the moral equivalent of mass murder? Or is life such a slippery slope that one puff of marijuana leads to a life of heroin addiction, one traffic ticket leads to death row, and hacking (no, that is too strong a term to use for using an unsecured computer) will lead straight to the camps of Al Qu'ida. Thank God we have the school board and Mr. Ashcroft watching over us.