Ok, forget drinking and carrying nude pictures of yourself on your cell phone. There is something even more stupid that you can do while drinking, with a cell phone. Drunk dialing, or drunk texting (text messaging) on your cell phone.

Because nothing is worse than waking up the morning after and realizing that you ran up your minutes drunk-dialing everybody you ever knew, especially all of your exes, in a fit of drunken melancholy.

Allegedly.

Except maybe realizing that you sent incriminating text messages during a chorus of "everybody's my best friend, nobody loves me" drunk texting, and those text messages now reside in perpetuity on the recipient's phone.

Until now.

Those crafty people at Samsung, where apparently they know a thing or two about drunken excess, or at least about drunk dialing and drunk texting, have just been awarded a patent for allowing someone to send a "Delete! Delete!" command to a phone to which they have previously sent a text message.

Now you see it, now you don't. Nifty.

Of course, Samsung's patent application claims that the "Delete! Delete!" function is to address "the case where a sender transmits a short message to a unintended receiver (sic)" because "there are no current methods for the sender to unsend the unintended short message. Hence, the receiver reads the unintended short message, which is a waste of time. Moreover, the receiver's mobile phone must store the short unintended message until the receiver reads the short message, resulting in a waste of memory capacity."

But we're pretty sure that this is just a cover-up for the real intended purpose: to help users cover up their drunk texting tracks.

Samsung phones, the cell phone of choice for discriminating drunk texters the world over.

Of course, our friends down under in Australia who use Virgin Mobile's cell phone service don't need to worry about having a special anti-drunk texting phone. They can avail themselves of Virgin's "dialing under the influence" service (yes, really), which allows them to program numbers into their cell phone which they don't want to call during a bender. Those numbers become undialable until 6:00 a.m. the following morning.

According to a survey done by Virgin, a whopping 95% of those surveyed (some 400 drunken sots, apparently) admitted to drunk dialing or drunk texting following a drinking session. Nearly one-third of the phone calls went to an ex, and 19% went to a current partner.

And oh, the imagery: fifty-five percent said that on the morning after, the first thing that they did was reach for their cell phone to figure out who they had called the night before.

Remember the good old days, when the first thing you did was roll over to see who was next to you?

Uh, allegedly.

P.S. 10 hippy points to the first person who identifies the Essenian cleanser to which the "Delete! Delete!" alludes.

The innocent victims of Internet child abuse cannot speak for themselves.

But you can.

With your help, we can eradicate this evil trade.

We do not need your money.

We need you to light a candle of support < http://www.lightamillioncandles.com>.

We're aiming to light at least One Million Candles by December 31, 2006.

This petition will be used to encourage governments, politicians, financial institutions, payment organisations, Internet service providers, technology companies and law enforcement agencies to eradicate the commercial viability of online child abuse.

They have the power to work together. You have the power to get them to take action.

Please light your candle at lightamillioncandles.com < http://www.lightamillioncandles.com> or send an email of support to light@lightamillioncandles.com .

Together, we can destroy the commercial viability of Internet child abuse sites that are destroying the lives of innocent children.

Kindly forward this email to your friends, relatives and work colleagues so that they can light a candle too.