the blog quebecois

and once he's caught by the law, he can't go to jail
cause he's nothin but a little piece of matter for sale
usin' people like pawns in the game of chess
and he is the king, more powerful than the rest

kool moe dee

(To get pedantic on yo' ass, the Queen is considered the strongest piece; the King the weakest, because it cannot be put in check without immediately defeating the threat or the game is lost. But I digress.)

You might remember this story from a couple of days ago:

Yahoo! has shut down its user-created chat rooms after a TV station reported that some of them were being used by adults to promote sex with minors.

The chat rooms were shut down in the last week but Yahoo!'s other chat rooms are still up, according to a Yahoo! spokeswoman.

I was listening to a typically reasoned ("They're coming for our children! Aiieeee!") discussion of this on the radio when one participant said that "chat rooms are the crack cocaine of the Internet."

Uh-huh. I preferred Dave Barry's description of them: "CB radio with bad typing."

What perked my ears up, though, was his use of the phrase "the crack cocaine of" which previously I'd heard almost exclusively referring to gaming machines, as in, "Video Slot Machines are the crack cocaine of gambling."

Thinking I might have caught the leading edge of a trend, I searched for "the crack cocaine of".

I really must get out more. Here's the first page that Google returned:

Porn is the crack cocaine of political hearings

Spam is the crack cocaine of modern advertising

Big Brother is the crack cocaine of reality television

Fox news is the crack cocaine of TV

Cyber-sex is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction

Anti-drug legislation is the crack cocaine of politics

Oil dependence is the crack cocaine of the US economy

white bread, peanut butter, and mashed banana: the crack cocaine of sandwiches

There are another 2,680 citings if anyone cares to find out what they are. As for me, I'll just note that it seems that crack cocaine is the crack cocaine of cliches.