I hope I don't have to tell my readers
what the TV show CSI Las Vegas is. Twenty million people a week see
the show.
My only general comments about the show are that it is a detective story in the Sherlock Holmes genre. On CSI, crimes and non-crime homicides are solved with small clues and scientific logic.
The show gives a mis-impression about police work. There are no forensic labs in America that are half as capable as the CSI lab. Most crimes are solved, in the few cases where they are solved, by witnesses who secretly phone the police.
Misrepresentation of police crime solving is an old
thing. For thirty years TV and movies showed detectives collecting
fingerprints and using them effectively. This was nonsense before
1980 when the first statewide fingerprint data bases were developed
thanks to the computer. Before that hand sorting of fingerprints in
local files was the limit. San Francisco in 1979 had only 5,000
prints on file. Still too many to screen by eye.
The most recent CSI show startled me.
It turns out the dead male victim in the story, a rather meek man,
was suffocated after having sex with a
drunk woman weighing over three hundred pounds. She fell asleep on
top of him. She was more willing to go to prison for murder than to
admit that her weight killed him.
In my days of sexual experimentation I only had sex with one obese woman and she was not on top. I've never imagined this form of death.
What was your reaction?