The other week, I was walking past the living room when I heard my wife and daughters screaming. I ran in to the room to see what was going on, glanced at the TV, and realized it was time for their weekly dose of "Untold Stories of the ER." I tried to leave, but my wife grabbed me by the arm.

"That woman," she said, "has worms living under her scalp!"

Unfortunately, it was true. On the screen, an ER doctor was staring at the patient's scalp where, sure enough, worms were poking their creepy heads (or rear ends, you never know with worms) out of a little hole in her head. Each time the image came back on the screen, the three women in my life grabbed each other and shrieked the way a person might when they see something so disgusting that they want to poke their own eyes out.

"Why on Earth would you watch this?" I asked.

My wife took her hands off her eyes. "How can you not watch?" she said.

I didn't stick around long enough to see the doctor pull the worms out of her head. The show, I've learned from hard experience, features all kinds of stories that make you wish you didn't have cable: A man who repeatedly cuts off his fingers in power tools, another guy with an ax stuck in the back of his skull, and a guy who had his ear bitten off by a brother-in-law.

I take the position that in an average lifetime, especially as you get older, you're going to see way too many disgusting and disturbing things without looking very far, and I'm not going to spend any extra moments looking at other people's gross stuff. At a certain age, each of us is going to be a walking gross-out, with enough medical issues to fill a nursing journal.

But I think I'm the only one. Everywhere I look, I see news stories that don't really have any news value in them at all. They're just excuses for us to look at revolting things. A Florida teen gets attacked by a cougar and has to have her head stapled back together. We get to see the staples. The other week, a boy was on a picnic with his family at a park. He was carrying a deer antler he'd found, and when he fell down, it - wait for it - pierced his eye. The story, with all the gory details, was on the national news, complete with an X-ray. There's very little chance I'm going to be attacked by cougars, and I don't think the general public needs to be warned about the dangers of walking with deer antlers while on picnics. The news anchors pretend they're showing the stories because they're uplifting, but the anchors ought to just introduce them by saying, "Coming up next, something so revolting you'd better not have your mouth full!"

There's a TV show my wife watches about a doctor in Beverly Hills who performs plastic surgery. Half the time, we're right there in the operating room, watching him suck fat out of somebody with a straw. I see plenty of people in real life who ought to get plastic surgery, and plenty more who clearly have gotten it, and regretted it. I don't need to be in the room while it's happening.

One recent morning, I came into the kitchen where my wife was watching the morning news. They were showing a report about a little kid who was screwing around with his brothers, fell down, and, (why not?) got a car key stuck in his eyeball. All the way in.

As I glanced up at the TV, they were showing his X-ray. It was one of those really big keys with the black plastic knob at the top, the kind where you can press the buttons to open the door locks from 40 feet away. All of it except the black plastic knob was in his eye. I gagged on my coffee and walked out.

"Come back here!" my wife yelled. "You have to see this!"

"No I don't!" I responded. "Actually, I don't have to see anything I don't want to see!"

At some point, though, I'll have had enough, and will take drastic measures.

But then I can tell my wife and daughters to watch for me on their favorite show. The episode would be titled, "Pittsburgh man pokes own eyes out with stick!"