How You Know God Hates You

Truth is Stranger Than Fiction… Even in the World of CSI

I am a big fan of the CSI shows. I am a far bigger fan of the three shows than they actually deserve. That said, while recently watching Season 8 of the original CSI, even I had to admit that producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s show was beginning to show some ugly signs of aging.

The plot lines were the same, but the trivial nature of some of the crimes and gratuitously unusual aspects of the suspects’ personalities were beginning to take the shine away from the evidence. And CSI is, as I have noted before, one of the only shows in the history of television that gets substantially worse as more information is revealed about it’s regulars.

This thinning of material is understandable and to be expect after X amount of years. I mean, in the first season, Gil Grisson and fellow lab techs could entertain America by solving some more mundane murders involving hit-and-run accidents and cyanide. But there are only so many shows that you can make involving hit-and-runs before the audience begins to tune out. By Season 8, CSI had already trotted out serial killers, super serial killers,* suspects with multiple personalities and a panoply of other unusual murder scenarios that the Las Vegas crime lab investigated and solved.

QUOTE:

“She’s a great human being and a whore. She’s got a wonderful, great, big heart and a little bit of a crack problem. God vomited and there was Jackie.”

-Carlos Alazraqui has a unique way of talking people up in Reno 911

* These are the serial killers who spend the six months prior to their murders creating a precise scale model of the impending crime scene and delivering it to the crime lab in advance of the killing.

In Season 8 of CSI, there was an episode called “Drops Out”. In the beginning of “Drops Out”, Detective Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle) goes to a nearby prison to talk to a convicted criminal there named, of all things, Drops. As Brass arrives at the Las Vegas Detention Center, he spies Drops engaged in a heated battle… in a game of chess. This isn’t that unusual; certainly not peculiar enough to merit me writing about it. However, what took this situation above-and-beyond even the normally curious boundaries of the CSI television series’ was that Drops was participating in a chess tournament against Cornell University’s chess team. Someone even made up a ten foot wide sign marking the occasion.

I simply couldn’t believe it. It was such an amazingly bizarre and unbelievable scenario that I grabbed my camera and took several pictures of the scene so that I could send them around to my friends (one of whom actually attended Cornell).

I mean, I simply couldn’t believe it. An Ivy League university was engaging in a chess tournament with convicted felons? Where was the upside in this situation? If the chess team came back with all their limbs, I’d qualify that as a marked success. If one of the team members lost to a prisoner, what would that do to their psyche? More to the point, how the hell did the writers come up with this one? And how did they pitch it? The only plausible explanation that I could fathom was, as I wrote to my friends, that someone had to have lost a bet to a Cornell alum. There was just no other explanation for it. 1,000 monkeys typing on 1,000 typewriters for 1,000 years couldn’t have come up with this one.

I’m in the midst of writing a very long piece on the CSIs. I wrote at length about the Cornell University vs. Las Vegas Detention Center Chess Tournament and how this marked a changing of the guard for the show and was, along with Wallace Langham’s name in the opening titles, a clear sign that the show was starting its inevitable downturn.

Several days later, after this waxing poetic on the slumping CSI, I was reading an article on the Chicago Sun-Times webpage about the Bears when I took notice of one of the most recent stories to have been posted. The headline read “Inmates vs. Princeton students: Prison chess”

My jaw dropped open.

I clicked on the link and learned that several members of the Princeton University Chess Club were going to maximum-security prisons and playing chess with the inmates.

What the hell is going on in this world?

The Uplifting Headline of the Week

Iraq and Iran resume swaps of 1980s war dead

According to the AP:

The bodies of 41 Iranians and 200 Iraqis, most of them unidentified, were handed over at the border crossing point of Shalamcha in southern Iraq, while Iraqi and Iranian military bands played martial music and national anthems.

Um, yeay?

Me Senses Some Future Confusion

The winner of the Best Debut Director at the British Independent Film Awards was none other than Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen, the director. Steve McQueen, who was born in 1969. In short, not that Steve McQueen.

In other news, Lionel Barrymore won the Best Screenplay award*. Down the road, I’m feeling a middle name or initial entering the picture for McQueen (much as it did with Morgan J. Freeman) or a full on name change. Something. On the other hand, I suppose this is one way to get noticed… It’s also part of the reason I’m investigating the possibility of changing my name to George Clooney.**

* This is absolutely not true.

** This is also absolutely not true. I’m actually thinking of Denzel Neumer.

The Five Things I Learned This Week

1. The first 30 results of a Google search for “Just Add Water” brought up one result associated with the movie of the same name. That’s not good.
2. Mexico not only has a Navy, but after a second fatal shark attack in Mexican waters, the Navy took out after the sharks to presumably deal out some justice Chief Brody style.
3. Botanists consider anything with seeds that grows on a plant or a tree a fruit… including cucumbers, squash, eggplants and tomatoes.
4. Angelina Jolie is my own age, 32. It only feels like she’s much younger.
5. When oil was first discovered in the United States in the early 1860’s, the part of the country known as the “Oil Region” was northwestern Pennsylvania.