Y’all know I hate those stupid Facebook applications. Every single last one of them, including the “Arrested Development” one, and I’m pretty sure that’s the best TV show I’ve ever seen. But if there’s one way to revitalize rapidly shrinking newspaper circulation, it’s to write about Facebook and its wild and crazy apps. Some mom did just that. I’m still overwhelmed with excitement.

It’s like this. Some mom, possibly a desperate housewife, is Facebook friends with her daughters. (Coolsville!) When she found that her daughters were trading virtual “naughty” things like thongs and copies of Candide, she wanted to know what possessed her daughter, so virtuous and true, to do such a thing.

Exciting, right? Then the mom—let’s call her Ms. Boring—consulted online experts: why are my kids trading these items online? Answers ranged from “they’re dumb kids, that’s what they do” to “leave me alone, you dullard.”

Tucked away somewhere in the piece is the fact that, out of the more than 7,000 applications on Facebook, 84 of them account for 87 percent of application use.

Then the mom, you know, asked her kids what was up, after sending some naughty gifts of her own. (Oh, the irony!) The kids told her that she was “creepy” and that they’d never take care of her when she went senile.

The end.

These Naughty Gifts Don’t Clutter a Closet [New York Times]