Documentaries

Lately, I seem to be getting sucked into documentaries at a disturbing rate. The problem isn't that they are documentaries, but that I can justify it as "not really television" because it's "educational." Here's what I've learned...

• Adolescent girls are being kidnapped into prostitution rings in suburbia. I've known, this because Oprah did a show on this a couple of years ago.* This was more of an NBC investigation, but still very disturbing. If I am remembering correctly, Oprah's show was about pimps luring girls into prostitution. The more disturbing thing about this show was that all of the girls were lured by fellow adolescents.
• Drinking the Koolaid is creepier than I'd realized. NBC also did a 2 hour documentary about Jonestown and infamous leader Jim Jones. The clips from the website are really just as informative as the documentary, but I learned a lot about the background of this situation that I hadn't known. My major complaint, however, is that I kept watching for the entire two hours because I wanted to know how the "survivors" escaped the koolaide fate and the documentary never explained. I ended up googling this later.
  
• The Mafia has very strict politeness rules. Okay, this is something that I kinda figured, but this was actually kinda fascinating. Discovery Channel has a two part series on the 10 Commandments of the Mafia. In addition to the explaination about how much lying was expected and how much was too much, I also learned that the linguistically the Mafia is very tightly bound by it's own set of politeness rules (such as introductions) and violations of those rules might get you killed.
  

I am currently trying to convince myself that I need to grade tonight rather than see a modern CSI team recreate the Kennedy assasination, but we'll see what happens.


*Yes, I know this is only one step up from citing Wikipedia.