The University of Idaho Argonaut

The 2002 Adam Sandler film “Punch-Drunk Love” features a subplot concerning Sandler’s character getting blackmailed after calling a chat line. He gets beat up, robbed and harassed just for being a little too lonely and horny one night.
Somebody in Texas must be a fan of director Paul Thomas Anderson because they are using the same trick to beat up unsuspecting, horny guys and steal their cars.
Two men in Baytown, Texas have reported meeting women they spoke to on chat lines and then being assaulted by multiple men before having their cars stolen by the group.

You know these numbers. They advertise late at night and take up space in the back pages of alt-weekly newspapers. They usually show overtly sexual women stating that men can call for free, just to try it out before paying $40 a month to hear messages from guys pretending to be women just to get off.
Women are always free to call.
And men are stupid. Desperate, lonely men are even stupider.

I feel for these two guys, having spent much of my life lonely and horny. But how dumb do you have to be to meet anyone in a dark parking lot, alone, just because she said she’d bring a friend?
The likelihood that the women looked anything like the models in the commercials isn’t very high, either. We don’t know for sure because investigators haven’t released their descriptions.
Girls like that don’t need phone sex lines or Internet chat rooms to meet guys. The only reason girls like that appear in those ads is to build their resumes.
You know, until they can break into porn.

Maybe it isn’t every girl and maybe every guy that calls one of those lines isn’t a moron. Stupidity can hit even the brightest people.
Former president Bill Clinton was a Rhoads scholar, you may recall.
I expect boneheaded moves like this from desperate, horny teenagers like the two 17-year-olds who claim to have been jacked by the same group.
Let’s face it, just because they say “no one under 18 allowed” doesn’t mean underage kids aren’t calling or logging on to these services. We know they are. How do you think “To Catch a Predator” found all their perverts? By exploiting the fact that kids go online looking for things they shouldn’t and finding adults they should never meet.
This is one of those double standards I’m totally OK with. If this was a kid who made this mistake and was kidnapped, molested and possibly killed, we’d be up in arms, torches and pitchforks ready, looking for the sick bastard who did it.
Instead, it’s two guys — four if you count the teenagers — who did something stupid and are now paying for it in ways they didn’t imagine.

Beaten, bruised and embarrassed, they will forever be the known as two guys who couldn’t meet a girl without getting robbed.
As far as we know, neither of them has a wife to go home to and explain why the car went missing or why they were in the hospital.
It’s only politicians, I guess, who bring their wives to their public floggings.
Then again, they’d use the office phone for such things to avoid explaining the bill to their wives.