Here’s the entry I tried not to write.

I was in the gym, trotting along on my treadmill and watching Captain Picard outwit a Romulan, when I glanced up at the larger television screens along the wall. It was another police procedural. The image was the top half of a prone, blank-eyed woman's body. The body was jerking up and down and the next shots wee of a man explaining to a cop (and the 14 year old boys in the audience eager to learn some gangsta slang) that “a ‘baby mama’ is owned by one particular guy, but a “sheep” is for communal use.

I returned to the world of Data and warp speed. The next day I looked up at the television screens and saw a police station interview room, a man saying, “Then I burned her and she screamed. I cut her and she screamed. I put my fist in her and she screamed louder. I controlled her completely.” The beautiful detective who had solicited this confession beamed. Ta DAAA! Full confession!

I’d been mugged.

I asked the front desk staff to change the station and when asked why, I quoted the dialogue. They were amazed. They said they’d never noticed anything like that. Keep in mind that the staff are positioned in front of five screens for several hours a day with at least two of those screens usually devoted to police shows. I thought of the New Yorker cartoon showing a little fish swimming along beside a big fish. “What’s water?” he asks.

That front desk guy saw what I saw only because I excised the worst of it, arranged it on a plate and set it before him on his check-in desk. “Oh,” he said. Oh, indeed. I don't think the word "desensitized" completely describes what's happening here.

It almost makes a girl long for the days of Petticoat Junction. At least then the proffered chocolate box of women tossing their underwear over the opening credits (one blonde, one brunette, one redhead—improbably offered up as sisters) didn’t stick in my head the way that blank-eyed, bouncing body did.

Things are different now.