My more macabre self was lurking today as I clicked on the "recent deaths" section of wikinews. It's wikideath. Cool.
I didn't recognize any of the names. These are people of international notoriety no doubt. To some. But to me they are people with strange names and noble births and/or worldly achievements.
What's especially cool about wikideath is that they list the cause of death alongside many of the deceased. So convenient. Don't you hate it when you hear or read that someone famous has died and they don't even tell you how? Something as mundane as "cause of death" (well, for most of us at least) lends a needed human element to a celebrity death.
The fact that I take pleasure in such dirty details exposes something about me. I just don't know what that is. I guess I'm one of those people that stares as she drives by an accident scene, involuntarily drawn to the possibility of seeing blood.
Of course it's true that curiosity can kill the cat and I often find that my interest becomes blanketed in disgust when I actually do get my grubby little paws on the sordid details. It must be voyeur's remorse, but only in a sense because a voyeur derives sexual pleasure from the object of her observation, and well, that would be disturbing, wouldn’t it? A cross between necrophilia and Schadenfreude. Yikes.
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