When I looked at the photo of the giant cup of cappuccino with two grown men in it, I chuckled.

I mean, after all, one of them was the mayor of our city, the other was a city councilman. It was good-natured fun, or course. They were going for a record. A Guinness world record. The world's largest cup of cappuccino. They may even succeed.

It made me think about those Guinness shows on television and all the weird stuff people do these days for a little notoriety.

It's really bizarre.

Some of those people go way over the line. Piercing all manner of body parts and hanging weights from the pierced parts, walking on broken glass, squirting milk out of their tear ducts, lying in a box with 30 or 40 rattlesnakes, swallowing and regurgitating all manner of objects, lighting themselves on fire, hurling themselves over cliffs. The list goes on and on.

I see the promos for this stuff all the time. It does really well in the ratings, too.

And this is only one of those types of shows. There are lots of them. "World's Most Shocking Medical Videos," "When Pets Go Bad," "World's Most Shocking Videos" ... and we haven't even touched on the cop videos genre. You know, the ones with all the high-speed chases, car crashes and real live gunfire. Then there are the "Shocking Behavior Caught On Tape" and "Surviving the Moment Of Impact" series. And of course the "shocking confrontation" of "America's Most Wanted."

All of these shows command large audiences.

It seems as if we have undergone a bit of a metamorphosis in our definition of entertainment, but it only makes sense if you think about it. Movies and television shows have become increasingly violent over the years. Each year, producers and directors have to push the limits of good taste to command an audience.

Problem is, the limit keeps moving right along with them. The stuff we watch today would have been beyond the limit just a few years ago.

So what next? No more of this make-believe stuff for us. We want the real thing. And with with the advent and proliferation of home video cameras, we have arrived. We no longer have to watch make-believe violence. It's real.

So we put a little disclaimer on it and put it on the air: "This program contains images that may be disturbing to younger viewers. Parental discretion is advised." And, in large numbers, we watch. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for this stuff.

So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to see our mayor and our city councilman plopped down in a giant cup of cappuccino. It's just a sign of the times.

But there is an irony to it all. While lots of people these days seem to want to live on the edge and push limits, there also seems to be a simultaneous desire to deflect responsibility when things go wrong.

We see it all the time.

If you drink, drive and crash, sue the bartender. Sue the carmaker. Sue the alcohol manufacturer. If you get sick from smoking, sue the tobacco company. If you play with guns and shoot somebody, sue the gun manufacturer. (I am waiting for an overweight person who has bypass surgery at age 45 to sue a fast food restaurant chain.)

Seems lots of people are willing to engage in all kinds of risky behavior but are unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Most people do take responsibility for their actions. The lawsuits I refer to are rare. They are just well publicized. Nonetheless, I do believe there is a trend toward deflecting responsibility.

Maybe it's because newspaper people are skeptical by nature. If I drive by a house fire, I think it could have been an accident.

I bet if I went back and looked through newspapers 50 years ago, and 50 years before that, I could find a couple columns just like this one. There would be some pundit decrying the debauchery of the times.

And I would guess 50 years from now there will be another columnist writing the same thing. [[In-content Ad]]