First we watched the PBS Nova program on bioterrorism which made me much less worried about smallpox, more worried about the plague, and even more worried about the Russian research facilities with all kinds of diseases stored in vials stuffed in coffee cans in unlocked refrigerators.
Then, on the History Channel, there was a program from last winter about the World Trade Center. How it was built, and so on. Included in the program was an eerie, sad portion of an interview (recorded in January) with Frank DiMartini, construction manager of the WTC, who spoke quite confidently of the ability of the Towers to withstand the force of an airplane crashing into it - and even more than one. DiMartini was in his office in the WTC on September 11, and was not one of the survivors.
Moving on to CBS, there was protracted, painful weirdness in the person of Michael Jackson who has got to be one disturbed fellow. He can't sing at all anymore and looks like an alien, especially when placed alongside his perfectly normal looking brothers. And who were all those people cheering hysterically? Do you know anyone who even cares about Michael Jackson? I don't.
Finally, there was a NBC Dateline "special" on exorcism. Not the Catholic kind, but the evangelical kind. The program centered on a South Carolina gent who thought he had demons inside him (didn't see the beginning of the program, so I don't know how he reached this conclusion). We saw excerpts from the exorcism session, in which he was prayed over for five hours by a team of exorcists from his Baptist church. It was pretty strange, and although I'm sorry the man had been depressed and glad (he reports) that he feels delivered from whatever was binding him, I can't commit to defining the situation as demon possession with the consequences of real evil piled up lower Manhattan.