The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street

3. Some Coffee in Your BUD

When that Friday drunkenness Anheuser-BuschBUD and Miller Brewing encourage so often hits its preferred level at around 9 o'clock every Friday evening, who doesn't think to themselves: Boy, I'd like a caffeine jolt.

That is why Anheuser-Busch and Miller took it on the chin this week for a product innovation dumb enough to be tagged with a diagnosis for schizophrenia: beer and caffeine. That's right, folks, the nation whose mark of greatness had been combining peanut butter and chocolate to create a marketing juggernaut has now in its long march toward irrelevancy been reduced to this: mixing what dials you down with what dials you up.

Beer, which blessedly makes you fall at your own feet, infused with caffeine, which makes you hop through life scratching at your own skin. I am not impressed by this conflict in a bottle. How can red-blooded Americans drown their recessionary sorrows in peace?

Fortunately, authorities, apparently sensing that this concoction can send our impressionable youth to hell in a basket (actually, beer barrel) were roused to action. This week we learned that the worthy attorneys general of several states have asked -- nay, demanded! -- documents from the beer companies about how these drinks are marketed. They are worried about the caffeine element enticing kids, but from my blurry vantage point on the couch, I'm just worried about the many adults who, with an unneeded jolt, will be forced to find another escape hatch to life.

Dumb-o-meter score: 82. This raises a deep philosophical question. If I wanted to be animate, wiggy and full with antic fervor for life -- well, why would I drink in the first place?