What, no hermaphrodite deer?

Here at the Southern outpost of our open thread it has been a slow moving Saturday. Other than a nap, a newspaper, some cold pizza, and a procrastinated science fair project, I'm already drawing a blank on what became of my day. I don't much mind the squandered time, given that it's a three day weekend, but I do wonder what I missed. Checking the hard news bonanza that is CNN.com, I find today is Biological Freakshow Day: the top stories of the day are Bush's moles (the dermatological, not informational, kind), Anna Nicole's embalming, Britney's shaved head, and an honest-to-goodness four-legged duck. I swear, if the last, decadent days of the Roman Empire had had a website it would have had to have been the Latin version of that.

Playing a hunch, I fire up one of my favorite toys, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and check out past versions of the CNN homepage. I'm a little disappointed that the oldest page is only from 2000, but I click it anyway and find links for tropical storm Beryl and the Democratic National Convention. The what-might-have-beens from that pre-stolen-election time are enough to turn my stomach, but at least there are no mutants--animals or celebrities-- to make me queasy. The next news I rediscover, from my birthday in 2001, was especially virtuous, with a call for world peace from the pope and heart surgery for a South Pole doc. That was pre-9/11, though, and I'm sure the headlines from the last quarter of the year would be different. Finally, looking to appease my sense of symmetry (read: compulsive nature) I scan the database for February 17s and find only one. The stories from 2/17/2004 are a slightly different style of sensational-- the Peterson case and a South African "thrown to the lions"--but perhaps they posed as real news more easily than Britney and Anna Nicole ever could.

It's a meaningless sample, I know, but I bet it suggests a little bit of truth: that the worse reality seems to be, the more we seek to avoid it.