In my new neighborhood today, someone in an old Ford threw something wrapped in blue plastic onto my porch at like 4:30 in the morning. Terrorist? Turns out it was a rolled-up paper item with words and images somehow pasted all over it. Gotta be the most elaborate welcome-to-the-neighborhood prank ever.

How is the CBS “Kid Nation” contract even legal? Here’s how the paper-thing on my stoop put it:

“As is standard in such agreements, the parents and the children agreed not to hold the producers and CBS responsible if their children died or were injured, if they received inadequate medical care, or if their housing was unsafe and caused injury.

“But while such agreements might be standard for adult participants in a reality show, it also takes on a different tone when the minor and the parent are being held solely responsible for any “emotional distress, illness, sexually transmitted diseases, H.I.V. and pregnancy” that might occur if the child “chooses to enter into an intimate relationship of any nature with another participant or any other person.”

WTF? Lawyers are actually allowed to write this kind of thing and parents allowed to sign it? Is that the ironical Hollywood subtext of the title “Kid Nation”? The show features forty kids, eight-to-fifteen years old, living on their own, Lord of the Flies-style, in the New Mexico desert. HIV? “Sexual relationship of any nature with… any other person”?

Of course I wanted to read the whole “Kid Nation” contract, to get to the part where no one was going to be held responsible for the kids killing and eating each other or, in lieu of that, for boring viewers to death, but the paper-news-thing had no way to link to the original document… what a drag. Turns out some websites are run like that too, as if they were part of some hyper-primitive reality TV experiment.