Sunday, 27 January 2002 | The local news

According to an advertising supplement in today's paper, this year Target is selling novelty valentine gifts: a 0.5-oz. autographed heart filled with candy, a 0.75-oz. milk chocolate rose, a 7-oz. giant Hershey's Kiss, and a 2-oz. candy-filled SUV.

The top story on the local news tonight was about a goat in a distant county that got attacked by a wild dog, and about a llama who is able to protect this herd of goats against future attacks by acting as a scarecrow. After spending ten minutes tallying up the number of offspring the dead goat might've had, had she lived, and projecting how much money those goats might have been worth, the news went on to cover how a local psychic "got on the wrong side of the law" and how a custody battle in Florida is "almost like a soap opera!"

Tomorrow I'm going to try to avoid input that causes such emotional confusion that I don't know whether to laugh or become angry- frustrated-depressed. (Usually I end up doing all of the above.) Tomorrow I'm going to limit myself to news that is depressing in the most thorough sense, in substance rather than absence. It won't even occur to me to laugh.