La Danse Macabre
Last week was busy. I was hired by an agency in L.A. to do a sketch. The client was really picky but we made it through. I also have a multi-media project going. The deadline is looming so I needed to make good progress on it.

I relaxed with the TV last night. I watched most of the Fox cartoons (except King of the Hill -- can't handle that one anymore). Then it was Crossing Jordan, and after that I sort of watched Stargate and then half of the space-opera that follows, then switched over to CSI. The last one is a CBS show, but is on ABC at midnight for whatever reason. There is an awful lot of shows about forensics on the tube, isn't there? We apparently have a fascination with the subject. It is indeed interesting, and they can go into intricate detail about how they figure out who killed who, which makes for pretty watchable stuff.

When I'm watching one of these shows, I always suspect that they are really designed around the corpses. I guess that's an obvious statement, but what I mean is the explicit viewing of body parts. When I was a kid, there was an infamous movie that could be seen periodically at the 49 cent Broadway Theater. It was the horror classic called Night of the Living Dead. It was a thrill-ride of zombies and gore, as we all know. It even had a particularly disturbing scene, where a couple of the normal people attempt to escape, the car crashes, and the zombies do their thing. One of them pulls out the intestines of somebody. That really seemed to cross a line, even for a horror flick.

Those quaint days are long gone. Now show after show features a dead body that we get to watch them cut up and pull apart with as much realism as they can manage. It strikes me as some form of porn, but who am I to judge?