But, honestly, I don't think that anything on prime time is as gorey as what Discovery Health channel shows during the day.

I can't watch any of that stuff. I get completely squicked. I think it might a switch in my brain that knows: This gore is real vs. This gore is fake.

I saw one of those Discovery Channel ER shows recently, in which a college kid had burned himself severely (no idea how). So there were closeups of his burns and all, but what struck me was the person behind the diagnosis -- when they brought him in, he was trembling uncontrollably, talking and trying to get a handle on what had happened to him and trying to be responsive to all these hospital people, volunteering information. He didn't shut up till they put him on supplementary oxygen.

Later, they showed his new skin grafts on his thighs being washed and bandaged, as they are every day at first, and it's terribly painful. He would lie there, tears streaming down his face, apologizing for crying and trying to make lighthearted conversation with the nurses.

Closeups of 3rd degree burns? Whatever. I've grilled meat before. Those burns were meaningless to me. That the burns happened to a person, a real person, a person I got to know, a person I ended up liking a whole lot, that's what makes the burns matter.

The weird thing about severe burns is that it kills all the nerve cells, so the victims often feel no pain (after the initial burning). I read a book about the crash of a commuter plane - some of the survivors were all rational and pain-free, yet they knew that they were going to die as a result of their burns because their burns were too severe.

I think there was an ER episode about that at one point, where a firefighter had sustained burns bad enough that he was not going to survive them, but he was almost pain-free, and able to converse with the ER staff the whole time.

Also SLUT!

Just watched the episode (thank you, BitTorrent people). Lots of subtext. Like very much.

Jen, whose gore threshold is so low friends preview movies for her to see if they're J-rated, has no problems at all with Discovery Health-type shows and is well on her way to being a nurse. Gore squick is so subjective!

Had a totaly beamfaced, chuckle moment during the ep last night - I live on Moorpark!

I was strolling through TWoP and saw this: RE: the S&M vibe. Tim is either into it or really wants to be.

I laughed and laughed.

I thought to post: Tim's so rich if he really wanted to be into S&M, he'd buy you and beat you.

But then I'd get banned and Strega would never let me live it down.

This (below) was posted on TI.org's forums by "Bones", and I'm going to reproduce it here as it pretty much says what I want to say. Without requiring me to think.

. . . .

I think I'm beginning to get why some people don't get this show. If you're viewing it purely on it's surface qualities, you're just not going to get it. That's not what it's really about. It's about the stuff beneath the surface. The mysteries their trying to solve aren't so much the crime of the week as the larger mysteries of their own characters, and their place in the cosmic plan.

People who don't get that, never will get this show. I'm not dissing them for this. I don't get American Idol. The larger audience apparently does. I never will get American Idol. I don't watch it. My advice to people who don't get that there's more happening here than some repetitive crime show is, don't watch it. It's not for you. . . . .

The mysteries their trying to solve aren't so much the crime of the week as the larger mysteries of their own characters, and their place in the cosmic plan.

There's a cosmic plan?