On the local NBC affiliate, I believe the first ten minutes involved the following stories:

- The 5 year old who was handcuffed by cops

- A guy whose self-righteous neighbor put up flyers accusing him of being a sex offender, even though the flyers show a different person. Turns out the neighbor may be arrested for doing it.

- A flasher who committed suicide after people in his neighborhood put up his "sex crimes" description, with "CHILD RAPIST" added to the sheet in huge black letters.

- And the Florida Legislature passed the Jessica Lunsford Act, which does some additional thing about sex offenders. Minimum sentences, I think. (Checking…) yeah, 25 years to life for certain offences, and then when they get out they have to be monitored by GPS tracking systems. GPS tracking!

- Finally, they finished up the child abuse and sex offender show with a story about a child rapist who followed his victim from Florida to Kansas.

I’m sure they must have done a story about the Michael Jackson trial, but I gave up on TV for the night after that. The Fox affiliate replaced the Simpsons at 11 with A Current Affair, so I’ve been trying the local news. Hideous. Chicago news is pretty good. Sure, it chases murder and mayhem -- “if it bleeds, it leads” -- but they seem just a little less unrelenting about it. In the 80s, I used to read a ton of splatterpunk stories involving cannibalism and zombies and awful awful things, but 10 solid minutes of child abuse and falsely accused sex offender is more than my poor brain can take.

I did flip channels first, and got to see a "shark attack" story, about the school of sharks that has slowly been working its way up from Palm Beach to the Space Coast. But then I flipped again, and got to see the story about the Mom who rented a Disney tape that had been recorded over with " The Voyeur #5". (No relation to Mambo #5.)

I should have just watched the Appliance Direct guy.