There's a joke I make when I'm messing around with my dogs. I call them "dumber 'n dirt," even "dumber 'n dumb dirt."

I don't mean anything by it. They're good dogs. I say it affectionately, knowing they don't understand a word of it. It's our own private joke.

Well there are days when I see a news story and I don't blog it, because it's just, well, dumber than dirt. Instead I get lazy and wait for the other shoe to, inevitably, drop.

Like it did on Lycos Europe, a company whose mascot was once (back in the day, as they say) a dog.

The idea was, at first blush, a good one. Spammers steal bandwidth, spammers go after their critics with denial of service attacks. Why not launch a bandwidth-stealing denial-of-service attack against them?

And thus was born a "screensaver," as Lycos Europe described it -- actually it was a virus -- that was gleefully downloaded about 100,000 times, according to the company. Its purpose was to hit spammers with so many e-mails in that they couldn't get any e-mails out.

People with even an ounce of intelligence were able to see through this stupidity. My favorite comment came from anti-spam activist Rich Kulawiec, to Dave Farber's list. "I'll just confine myself to noting that trying to win a bandwidth contest with spammers -- who have an unlimited supply of it at zero cost -- reflects a stunning ignorance of reality," he wrote.

And so it was. Lycos Europe (not the same company these days as Lycos in the U.S., I should note) claims it's not back-pedaling. According to News.Com, "A Lycos Europe representative said that the screensaver has been temporarily pulled while the company deals with hosting and management issues." Yeah, right.

Bad dog. Dumber 'n dumb dirt.