I watched the local morning news to catch the weather forecast, then flipped the channel over to the lefty documentary channel, Current TV, which is usually good for some lulz, while I worked up the energy to get out of bed.

There, on the TV screen, big as life and twice as gross, was a dude lying amidst the ocotillo and the prickly pear looking a little mummified in his Adidas and blue jeans. Something had been at his face, most likely vultures. I couldn't help but blurt aloud "Yup, that's a bleepin' dead guy, alright." Hell of a thing to see before breakfast.

I had stumbled across a documentary that seemed to take umbrage at the vast attractive nuisance in America's lower left-hand corner, otherwise known as the Sonoran Desert, which is turning aspiring construction workers and fruit harvest technicians into human raisins at a pretty good clip, apparently. That is, when it doesn't get them shot for trying to tenderfoot their trespassing way through a desert that is jam-packed with raping, looting, beheading, drug-smuggling banditos locked in a turf war like something from Martin Scorsese on acid.

Now, normally, if the pool in your back yard was drowning neighborhood kids at a rate of a few hundred or more a year, you'd put a fence around it to keep the blighters out and hang a "trespassers will be eaten by piranha" sign on said fence and be done with it, but the guys doing the documentary did not strike me as being in the pro-fence camp. Further, since we've already put fence in most places that are easy to get to, that leaves the unfenced spots out in the middle of hell's back forty as the only lightly-monitored crossing places.

The film crew drove south and hooked up with a coyote in Altar to smuggle them back across the border somewhere in the middle of the Arizona desert, which I am pretty sure is not an authorized port of entry. I'm not, however, clear on the legalities involved, especially if you're breaking the law for the sake of Art and Truth as though you were working for Michael Bloomberg.

Anyhow, what I learned from all this is that hiking for days in the desert with just a couple gallon jugs of Gatorade between you and a really convincing Amenhotep IV impression is incredibly stupid and dangerous. You would think that this would be blindingly obvious, but apparently it's not.

Desperate to apply jumper cables to the nipples of our moribund economy, the media has been giving the annual retail orgy known as "Black Friday" an inordinate amount of hype.

With news cameras stationed at the front of local big box retail emporia, they were hopin' for a trampling and probably not above tripping a slower member of the herd to get one. (Note To Self: Next year run a pool on how many people get trampled for the sake of a cheap big screen on Black Friday morn in our fair land.)

At one point they interviewed one intrepid shopper whose naugahyde Members Only jacket differed in color but not in texture nor albedo from her broad swathe of exposed decolletage as she hyperventilated "We're here to fight! It's a war! For good prices!" into the camera, punctuated by the occasional "WHOOOOO!" from her daughter, vibrating and bouncing beside her in a cloud of dried mascara flecks.

I don't care if they are handing out dollar bills in the back of Best Buy in great big Ben Bernanke-sized sacks, you couldn't print enough of them to induce me to set foot into the middle of that seething mass of aberrant humanity. *shudder* I'm not driving within a mile of a mall between now and New Year's if I can help it. Santa Tam's doing all her Yuletide shopping at stores whose names end in ".com".