Images from Hell and Tequila

I have been thinking about a quote I read somewhere recently about how everything today is about commodifying sex and horror. I love a little bit of the thrill of the hunt for the gritty, so I do my share of clicking around the images of war and death. My voyeurism around news coverage of the tsunami wreckage has until now yielded rather chaste images of high aerial shots or home videos of the white line of the advancing wave on the horizon. 160,000 dead in a few minutes just doesn't make sense to me yet, so I keep clicking, but I just keep getting those extreme close-ups of faces of survivors or the geography-lesson images. I therefore wasn't hesitant to click on a coworker's attached images of "local photoes of tsunami's impact." He is a Chinese environmentalist working in China- China didn't have that direct an impact. I assumed it would be more nice aerial shots of beaches created where once there were none. The first and last image I opened was of a sunny scene of a dumpster filled with stiff, misshapen, brown bodies. Faces weren't visible. Legs were.

I immediately felt sick, and then did what my good friend La sometimes does-- inundates herself with images of cuteness. I went to Google image search and typed in "cute." THIS turned up among polar bear cubs and frogs and kittens. I am now officially traumatized.

I will now spend some time clicking around the more wholesome www.sashy.com/etc/cute in the hopes of purging these images.

This cat in a lime helmet helps.