Yours Till *&%^$

When I was a kid, back in the Stone Age, I had a small book of autograph verses called Yours Till Niagara Falls, which I note with amazement is still available from amazon.com. The sweet and silly declarations therein were a little too cutesy even back in the '70s when I was signing yearbooks, and I can't imagine kids today even having a clue what the point of those quaint little ditties could possibly be. But an article in this morning's paper makes me think that a copy of my old autograph companion should be issued with every new yearbook, and students should be made to memorize its contents: It seems that book-signers at a local high school used so many obscenities, suggestive come-ons and provocative statements in their yearbook messages that administrators had to seize the books and white-out inappropriate sentiments. There was a predictable amount of squawking about constitutional rights to self-expression and clucking over schools not allowing parents to do their jobs, but really -- if autographs now need to be censored, it's time to get back to "2 Good 2 Be 4 Gotten."