When I was a troublemaker at Wiseacre High School, I almost never had time to write down homework assignments, but I always had time to fill out a prank form.

They'd circulate those blue mimeographs that smelled like a rusty barrel behind the Malignant Chemical Company, and I would fill out an "extra" for my favorite boy-genius pig on Green Acres, Arnold Ziffel.

Parents: Fred and Doris. Hobbies: Rooting for truffles. Address: 318 Pigpen, Barnyard, U.S.A. Career plans: Animal husbandry.

I'll bet the teachers got big yuks from that while they moved my college applications to the bottom of the stack.

Report yourself

Filling out stupid forms is one of the few things from high school that you actually use the rest of your life. Like the forms Cincinnati cops fill out so city council busybodies can make sure there is no horrifying "racial profiling" being perpetrated on the streets of Cincinnati.

Question: If a cop is harassing minorities, do you suppose he will report himself on a form?

Suuure.

The contact card starts by asking for date, time, location and "stop duration," but there's no room to write "too dang long because of this stupid form.''

There are 70 boxes to choose from for each driver and passenger, including three categories for sex: M, F and U (Undecided?).

Don't forget race: W, B, H, NA, A, O.

The ACLU would have seizures if the cops decided to keep files on race. But I guess it's OK as long as the records are used against the police.

The flipside of the form asks about clothing, gang name and gang affiliation ("Yes, officer, I'm vice president of Hell's Accountants. My gang name is Conan the Rotarian.") There's even a box for tattoos.

I filled the card out in four minutes. But I did not have any distractions, such as a bank robbery or drive-by shooting.

Just for the record, it takes about half as long to fill out a postage-paid complaint against an officer.

Knee-jerk frenzy

Hamilton County Commissioner Phil Heimlich says, "If council is serious about supporting the police, they should get rid of this requirement." He calls it "a liberal knee-jerk response to the profiling frenzy."

He found that 100,000 contact cards have been filed, wasting 16,666 hours of police time.

Councilman John Cranley, who came up with the idea, says the forms are a goldmine of data on criminals. But that may surprise the ACLU, which hoped they would gin up racial profiling lawsuits, not give police a tattoo inventory on drug thugs.

City Manager Valerie Lemmie's memo, signed by Police Chief Thomas Streicher, says time spent on contact cards "is not unreasonable."

But Heimlich says the raw data are totally meaningless because, "Nobody on council had any idea what they were going to do with the information" when they approved it.

That sounds like 90 percent of the forms my teachers handed out. They're probably still sitting in a file somewhere - under "Z" for Ziffel.

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.