Well it's been about three weeks since I have officially been on MySpace.com.

I have to say, that when I was in junior high, I never had so many people who wanted to be my friend as I do now -- who are in junior high.

My wife was going off on me. She said, "I can not believe you are on My Space talking to eighteen year old girls!" To which I said, "First off, I am not talking to eighteen year old girls. They are sixteen... Secondly, if i am going to talk to members of the opposite sex, the smartest thing I could do is talk to members of the opposite sex who are under age. Cause nothing is going to happen. Why? Because yeah, I am afraid of getting divorced, but even more than that, I am afraid of going to prison! -- And in prison you have very little space. And the guys there want to be more than friends! And you have no option of approving whether they are your friend or not!"

I jest of course... about talking to underage girls. Not about prison. The only underage girls I have on my friends list and have chatted with on MySpace are my two nieces; and even then we don't chat anymore on MySpace. I posted a few comments on their profile page and they got upset because they said having an old guy make comments there was not cool and I was cramping their style.

There's been some stuff in the news about older, perverted guys, hooking up with underage girls on MySpace. Then of course people run around screaming about how MySpace is so evil. Here's what I don't get. If my nieces think it's not cool and embarrassing to be talking to me on MySpace, because I am so old, who are these kids that apparently are into talking to old men? And what is it about the old men they are so interested in? Maybe if the old guy had a profile name like, "Buys beer for minors" --but that would be about it.

And how do the old guys find these young girls? Have you seen the average teenage girl's profile page on MySpace? It looks like a scrap booking store threw up. I went to my niece's page and my eyes hurt from trying to read through all the sparkling animated Macromedia flash glitter floating all over the place. The colors were too bright and bled over the words. And I had to scroll left and right and up and down like three feet to see these huge ass pictures. Basically all I could make out was the large image of someone's tongue up someone else's nose. I might have been the same person's tongue and nose, but I couldn't tell. I didn't have time to scroll back the other three feet.

The whole thing just made me nauseous. The blinking, spinning images, and the loud music. It was like riding the loop d' whorl at a carnival. That's fun as a kid, but you just can't do it when you get older. So you'd think that alone would deter these MySpace old farts from cruising for young girls. 

A lot of the responsibility about teaching and monitoring the kids about this stuff falls on the parents. I know parents in my neighborhood are doing a good job. I took my son to the park today and there were six other kids of various ages there. I was the only grown up and these kids looked at me just like we all look at a middle eastern dude riding with us on an airplane. They never took their beading, suspicious eyes off me. I've never committed any kind of a crime in my life, but at that moment just being an adult male made me feel guilty.

I think we could use MySpace in a good way to help kids; we can post on My Space the pictures of kids we normally see on the back of milk cartons. My son asked me about that other day. He wanted to know who the picture of the little boy was on the back of the milk carton. I said he was a boy who was missing. My son wanted to know if the boy was missing, why was he smiling? I told him that they took the picture of the boy before he went missing. Now they are using it to find him. My son then asked how did they know the boy was going to go missing.

But it made me think of another idea. When a sex offender registers as a sex offender, we should put their pictures on the back of milk cartons. It's right there for the kids to see. Some kid comes running into the house, "Mommy! Daddy! I was at the park and I saw the bad man on the back of the 2 percent!"

And, I think as part of their sentence, they should have to work at a diary. That way they'd have to face themselves everyday.

It's inevitable though there'd be people upset and speaking out against it. I am sure once a black sex offender showed up on the back of a chocolate milk carton, the ACLU would be screaming racism.

I thought of putting their pictures on cereal boxes too, but that might get confusing. I don't want some old guy who looks like the Quaker Oats man getting falsely accused. Or some innocent midget who looks like the Lucky Charms dude.

But we wouldn't have to worry about any of this if we could just protect the kids. Personally, when it comes to the net, I think there should be legislation passed to connect MySpace with the DMV. Everybody's default picture would have to be their driver's license photo. People would be a lot less inclined to try to hook up with someone on MySpace if all they had to go on was a person's driver's license photo.