Bassett here. Been down the past few days with a weird fluish-coldish sort of combination; so have found myself a little listless and more inclined to watch TV than normal.

Last night, found myself watching a documentary about the Titanic on the History Channel (and remarking again that it's a channel I should watch more often.) They were talking about the evacuation and how badly it was carried out, with hundreds of seats on the lifeboats going unfilled. On one side of the boat, they enforced the rule of "women and children first." On the other side of the boat, while they announced it as "women and children first," if there were no women and children in sight at that moment, they'd let men on.

One of the comments made, I find equal parts telling, disturbing and grossly comical. It went something like this:

"The morals of the time were such that a man might take a seat that should have gone to a woman or a child, but he would feel very bad about having done it."

Well, doesn't that make everything better?