Lindsay Lohan is in big trouble.  She’s been in big trouble for the better part of three years, mostly because for a period of about 18 months, the thing she did more than just about anything else was smash her car into various other cars, and shrubberies, and houses, usually when she was drunk, or carrying cocaine, and once when she was allegedly attempting to run down her maid. 

I have only seen one of her movies and will admit that it was “pretty good” for a movie about teenage girls.  Since then, the only work I’ve seen of hers has been text messages and or Twitter pronouncements about various social issues and deaths of celebrities that among other things, confirm that Ms. Lohan did not attend college, and that she is as inherently stupid as she is situationally stupid.

She’s in trouble this time because she failed to attend many weekly alcohol treatment meetings that were ordered by the court.   In fairness to Lindsay, her excuses for not coming were reasonable, such as that she was at the Cannes Film Festival and had her passport stolen, and on a different occasion, that she was in Morocco “working with children” which she reminded the judge was “not a joke”. 

Just because her excuses for missed classes mostly related to her life as a busy starlet, she identified herself as the everyman when at yesterday’s hearing she requested that she be able to speak in her own defense; a strategy attempted by roughly 100% of criminal defendants with a success rate of 0%.  In this case, however, it was marginally less effective because it was filmed, and included a part where she said she thought she’d been “in compliant”. 

So what was she so confused about?  By her own words, Lohan told the judge she was never looking for special treatment and even teared up at the notion that she had put less into the program than the other participants who had normal lives and job.  She merely wanted to be able to decide when she was going to attend the meetings so that she could still work when she wanted and have the free time to fly around the world going to parties and hanging out with Paris Hilton and being involved in confusing car accidents.

Another big portion of her plea to the judge rested on the fact that she mostly skipped classes to work and that she can’t be punished for trying to “provide for herself”.  Lohan apparently failed to see how this line of thinking was deemed disrespectful of the program’s other participants, who had to take time away from jobs that didn’t involve making $12 million dollars for being in a movie about a Volkswagen beetle with a mind of its own.

Before she was sentenced, Lohan played her final card, which was a reminder to the judge about how hard she’d worked her “whole life” to get to where she is.  Since the judge has had cases of shin splints longer than Lohan’s pre-career life, she was surprisingly unsympathetic, and slapped Lohan with a significant jail sentence.

I often sympathize with defendants, and hate when someone is given jail time for a ticky-tack probation violation, but in this case I’m squarely with the judge.  At age 23 it’s time for Lindsay Lohan to grow up, to follow the rules that everyone else follows, and to gain financially from her experience in prison just like every other idiot celebrity who has five too many drinks and smashes their pink car into someone’s lawn.

I was going to write this week about Michael Vick, who proved stupider than everyone thought, even though everyone already thought he was basically one step above not being able to put one foot in front of the other, when he threw himself a 30^th birthday party at a nightclub that hit its zenith when someone was shot, specifically the someone named Quanis Philips, one of the two someones in the entire universe that Vick is ordered to avoid as a term of his release following his conviction for dog fighting charges.

When Vick was making his own futile plea to the judges in his case he mentioned that he was starting over, and that he was going to purge himself of the street mentality and the various gun-toting lackeys who have followed him around since he got rich.   The judge in that case didn’t buy it, and gave Michael two years and negative a bazillion dollars to remind him of how badly he needed to disassociate with his former entourage who do things like shoot people at your birthday party.

Perhaps Lindsay and Michael should get together.  It would take both away from the things that get them in trouble, provide for some riveting conversation and result in an epic Scrabble rivalry.