Blogdog:
There are days when I can take almost any news. Other days I’m ultrasensitive to it. Sometimes all I can handle is comedy or music–or silence. I find pets to be pretty wonderful, in their ability to make me smile when other things get me down. Maybe it’s because they don’t worry about the news.

(Me? Most days I can just about get through the comics without feeling the misery.)

Reagarding depressing news: I watched Oprah the other day – catch her as often as possible – and was traumatized with an hour devoted to ‘baby rape,’ child slavery, and child prostitution clips that included father’s pimping their sons. I understand this is necessary ‘education’ that Americans especially need – that we are clueless to the nightmarish global treatment of youth – as well as slavery issues right here in the US of A. It was some of the darkest, most depressing coverage I have ever watched – it was a rough lesson in enlightenment.

I confess for most of my life I haven’t followed the news very well. In 1978 my grandmother asked me if I’d heard the pope died. A few weeks later she told me again that the pope died. I thought she was repeating herself and reminded her she’d already told me that. She laughed and said, “No, this is a different pope. You need to check the news more often.”

Once when we lived in San Diego, we turned on the TV news on a stormy morning. The weather person said it would be a beautiful day. That second the TV station blacked out because of lightning. It gave me the best laugh I’ve ever gotten from the news.

I follow the big events, and last year I got sucked into the political coverage, but that’s unusual for me. The classified ads are useful when I’m looking for something in particular, and newspaper is great for disposing of cat litter (though not the local paper printed on smaller newsprint), but daily news tends to upset me and wear me down, so I avoid it more and more. We even recently unsubscribed from the satellite news channels we used to watch, because their coverage became so lopsided. Now when I want to check the news I go looking for it on the Internet.

Only news I read is what I cherry pick on the Internet from several newspapers – run the gamut from liberal to conservative publications.

Forgiveness for the toes I might be crunching in these neck-of-the-woods, but the NC Times is a worthless use of paper – I dash to the section called ‘Weird News’ for laugh therapy. And our local rag is even worse – the main headliner is someone called Virginia Funk – kind says it all.

The paradox to avoiding all the violence and depressing news is that I will watch anything that starts with CSI.