Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bark louder, little dog.

This really is a full service blog.

Infrastructure week. at last.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

This fight is for everything.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

You are here: Home / TV & Movies / Television / Speaking of Stupid People

Speaking of Stupid People

by | 126 Comments

This post is in: 

One of my newest guilty pleasures is a show on A&E called The First 48. At any rate, what cracks me up is how stupid so many of the criminals are- wear gloves and leave no evidence whatsoever at a murder scene, and then get caught because you used the victim’s cell phone to call your mom for two weeks. Or kill three people in the middle of a crowd of a hundred people and get caught with the same damned gun a week later. Or walk in to the homicide interrogation room and talk for 8 hours before requesting a lawyer.

I suppose I should be happy most murderers are this stupid, but you would think they would know better.

Reader Interactions

126Comments

  1. 1.

    SIA aka ScreaminginAtlanta

    I had a job long ago working my way through school where I entered police reports by”key punch” (prolly no one here has ever heard of it). I was constantly amazed at how stupid the criminals were! Very entertaining.

    Hope everyone is having a lovely turkey day. No kitty sitter available, so Mr Screaming & I came over to the lake with 2 dogs and 2 cats. Juliette has to relieve herself of every possible bodily fluid or solidsduring the drive over. Fun times.

  2. 2.

    licensed to kill time

    I also love The First 48. Another thing that strikes me is how stupid and petty most murders are – it’s not at all like a murder mystery, just some dumb guy who got mad or disrespected or wanted the three bucks in somebody’s wallet. Talk about the banality of evil.

  3. 3.

    licensed to kill time

    Also, I don’t know if the show overemphasizes this, but it seems like a huge amount of cases are solved by “tips”. Lots and lots of tips. Never underestimate how quickly someone will drop a dime on yer ass. (Well, especially if you are going around bragging to all your friends about your stellar crime).

  4. 4.

    Punchy

    My addiction is Foresnic Files. I cannot stop watching them when they have those marathons. First 48 is okay, Cold Case Files is better, and so is FBI Files.

    I’ll only watch it if it’s non-fickshun.

  5. 5.

    Jay

    It amazes me that so many criminals cooperate with the police. If you have committed a crime, it’s the cops’ job to put you away. Why help them do it by giving them any information at all?

    The number of cases the police clear would plummet if criminals just had the good sense to:

    A. Refuse to go anywhere with the police unless you are taken into custody and then make the police say you are being taken into custody.

    B. As soon as you are taken into custody, demand a lawyer and then explicitly state that you refuse to say anything without a lawyer. Hell, just walk down the halls of the police station uttering “I want a laywer” over and over again in front of as many people as possible while they are taking you to the interrogation room.

  6. 6.

    monkeyboy

    I suppose I should be happy most murderers are this stupid, but you would think they would know better.

    How do you know “most” murderers are this stupid?

    You are basing your opinion on the truly stupid ones that do get easily caught. How many smart murderers get away with murder particularly when they make their act not look like murder?

  8. 8.

    Chet

    Here’s the problem. It’s called “The First 48”, as in, the “first 48 hours are crucial to solving the murder”. It’s not called “Unsolved Murders.” Which means that the murders they show are only the ones the police were able to solve.

    So consider what it says about cops, and their powers of investigation and deduction, if these are the only murders they’re able to solve.

  9. 9.

    licensed to kill time

    __

    Al and Dave refuse to debate not because they are stupid, but because they are smart.

    Alvin and Dave refuse to debate because they are Chipmunks , ummkay?

  13. 13.

    licensed to kill time

    @MikeJ: Well then I guess Dave, being a good agent, won’t allow Alvin to debate.

    Also, Newt’s Nook, a home for Pit Bulls, is now open:

    A North Texas shelter for pit bulls has opened this week, thanks to a Dallas topless club owner’s contribution after Newt Gingrich’s conservative group snubbed her donation.
    Rizos says she decided to “make something positive out of his bad manners.”
    She redirected the money to Animal Guardians of America’s sanctuary for rescued dogs in Celina, about 35 miles north of Dallas.
    Gingrich didn’t attend the opening of “Newt’s Nook — A Home for Pit Bulls.”

  14. 14.

    Brick Oven Bill

    People confuse stupidity with lack of education. Thomas Jefferson’s first act as President was to try to, in effect, abolish Legacy Scholarships, and have the State fund the higher education of those students with the highest test scores (intelligence). He failed in this regard. Jefferson was a lot like Chairman Mao when it came to Wealth and Birth, except that Jefferson was not a HBD Denier.

    Thomas Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence. It seems likely that he was influenced by Giordano Bruno, who burned less than two hundred years before the Declaration. The Catholic Church may have burned Bruno’s brain, but thought is mathematics, eternal, and can be known by all. Consider Jefferson:

    “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

    Then we come to the modern Left, the return of State Religion, and I would argue stupidity:

    “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t… Our observing system is inadequate”

    Al Gore refuses to debate. Al Gore is in business with David Blood (Goldman Sachs) and would become a billionaire if this legislation passes.

    Duuuuh. Hi Kenneth. Duh.

    As Big Media is interconnected with Big Wind and the power structure, we have to rely on the noted blogger ‘Yid with Lid’ and his blogspot account, to look more into Dr. Kenneth Trenberth, the Warmist Hoper.

    Perhaps Dr. Ken is not stupid, and is on the take. But in many ways this is worse than murder.

  19. 19.

    bago

    There is a sublime beauty in the ad ordering. Sarah sits atop “Speaking of stupid people”, and is immediately followed by an ad imploring you to “Stop Jerking”.

  20. 20.

    licensed to kill time

    Oh yeah, and those Einsteins who call the police to complain their dealer ripped them off and gave them fake crack.

  21. 21.

    Ahasuerus

    @Linkmeister: Now that’s a trip down memory lane; I used one of those for a Fortran course in 1975. But that was after my time on Kwajalein (66-68). Yokwe!

  22. 22.

    Raenelle

    My all-time favorite–Nixon conspiring to cover-up, pay hush money, elicit perjury, and generally obstruct justice–while taping the whole thing.

  23. 23.

    Kirk Spencer

    I used to be friends with a veteran detective who would tell us that the main reason people get caught is because other people know they did it. If you commit murder, don’t brag about it, don’t keep trophies, don’t go back to the scene to bask in the glory of how good (or lucky) you were.

    Same goes for burglaries, except you have to unload those goods somewhere, and pretty much every other crime.

  24. 24.

    Yutsano

    @Kirk Spencer: It’s amazing how there’s a whole psychology behind murder. People usually get caught because they can’t help but talk about what they did, either out of pride or shame. The end result is the perp usually gets caught because at the end of the day he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

    And on that note it’s time for me to go chow down. Happy Turkey Day y’all!

  25. 25.

    AngusTheGodOfMeat

    Big Media is interconnected with Big Wind

    Mwhuh? Big Wind?

    Bill, that’s the worst blow job you ever gave us.

    Please raise the level of your game. This is pathetic.

    Big Wind? Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahaha.

    I got your Big Wind right here, amigo.

  26. 26.

    Jason Bylinowski

    Yeah, John Cole, the myth of the stupid criminal is as American as apple pie, and just as fraudulent. The truth is that a whole bunch of criminal behavior is exactly as smart as you’d think it’d be (see FBI’s Most Wanted list and their extremely low capture rate), and for some reason people think this would be bad for TV. I say, on the contrary: I would TOTALLY tune into a show about criminal bad-asses. It would be a little like America’s Most Wanted, but more fawning. I’m not gonna lie, there’s a side of me that totally wants the bad guy to win every so often, and a show like that would appeal to that side of me.

    Note: this fancy of mine does not apply to most murders (excepting the occasional bad-ass vigilante justice story) , no rapery, and no crimes of any kind with children involved, just in case anyone was worried.

  27. 27.

    JBerardi

    Or kill three people in the middle of a crowd of a hundred people and get caught with the same damned gun a week later.

    “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

    Come on guys, this is basic stuff…

  28. 28.

    Napoleon

    My brother was on a grand jury once and nearly every indictment that they heard were involving criminals equally stupid as the ones you see on TV, which makes you think they do not need to work too hard to come up with their shows.

  32. 32.

    mvr

    It’s not like killing people is a good long-term strategy for solving problems. So it should not be too surprising that people who do it tend to make mistakes in long term strategizing. Also, consider the sample — these are the folks who got caught. There is probably a very small number of people who get away with this sort of stuff for a long time, and they probably tend not to make such mistakes.

  33. 33.

    Vincent

    @Jason Bylinowski:

    You’re not alone in this. That’s why movies like Ocean 11 and tv shows like Dexter and such are popular. There’s something intriguing about criminal masterminds. But notice that audiences will normally only cheer on clever burglars, hackers, and hitmen who kill other bad guys. There appears to be a point at which when a criminal in real life or fiction goes beyond, the audience will stop rooting for you no matter how smart or clever he or she is. People like criminal genius but not so much criminal savagery unless they’re horror fans or something.

  34. 34.

    OriGuy

    I got interested in computers around 1972. At the time, my high school had a teletype that would dial into the CDC 6600 at Indiana University. A few of us would punch BASIC programs onto paper tape offline and feed them in once we were connected (at 110 bps). The closest my school had to a programming class was Introduction to Data Processing. It was mostly about key punching for future data entry clerks. I did learn how to use the program drum, which let you specify certain columns to skip, duplicate, etc.

    When I went to college at Illinois, they were still using punch cards for a lot of things. My second programming class used a PDP-11 with a card reader for input. You could stay all night at the computer lab, but they locked the keypunch room at midnight. People got good with an exacto knife and kept a supply of cards with things like semicolons, or “i := i+1;” on them. One time we liberated a keypunch just before midnight and they called the campus cops on us.

    When I started at CDC in 1978, they were still using punch cards. We had to share the few terminals and code patches were often mailed to customers on card decks. A few holdouts were still using them three or four years later.

    Ah, memories.

  36. 36.

    Max

    Speaking of A&E, Steven Segal: Lawman starts next week and Howard Stern was saying he saw the first two episodes and it is NOT to be missed.

    Guilty pleasure.

  38. 38.

    Notorious P.A.T.

    @Brick Oven Bill:

    Bill, you complain that people won’t debate you, then unload a word salad like that. What are you trying to say? “Big wind”? Al Gore is a murderer for money? Maybe it’s the tryptophan in me, but huh?

  40. 40.

    pcbedamned

    @OriGuy:

    The closest my school had to a programming class was Introduction to Data Processing.

    I absolutely HATED that class!!! How I passed, I don’t know, because I can’t remember anything about it except that I skipped it a lot. We had one computer in the ‘typing’ room that we had to partner up on for our 1 week course on word processing (in Grade 12). Now they get computers in Junior Kindergarten.

  53. 53.

    Corner Stone

    @General Winfield Stuck: Well at least bring something proper then. You’re one lame motherfucker, as TZ has previously dropped on ya.
    Are you and eemom married? Or maybe brother/sister? Cause you remind me of each other.
    Unable to argue through to a logical conclusion, and clearly not enough firepower to mouth off to anyone.

  54. 54.

    MR Bill

    I have a sort of stupid police/stupid criminal story…
    My daughter’s first car (she helped buy it) was a late ’80s Crown Vic, that she and some of her buddies (she was 17) painted in all the colors of leftover spray paint (in my studio) they could find. I believe this was an attempt to make it undriveable by her mom and I, one that would fail. It was a mess, peace signs and the words ‘skankmobile” and “Buddha”hidden in the random paint. I told her she ought to call it ‘the cop magnet’, but she was only stopped once, on her way to the nearby college she attended.
    Two days before New Year’s 2003 I got home from work, and had just closed the bathroom door when my wife yelled “Why are the police in the driveway?”
    I went out to find a very short and somewhat spherical sheriff’s deputy on his radio saying “The suspect’s car is here!”
    When I asked if I could help him he asked “Is this your car?” I gulped and said, no, it’s my daughter’s car. “Was she in Copperhill ” (TN, just across the stateline) “today?” “Uhh, why sir?” “A car matching this description was used in the robbery of the Ducktown Bank today.”
    Now, Sarah had take her boyfriend Josh, who’s car was in the shop, to a job interview and gone to a drugstore in Copperhill (or at least she said she had), dumped Josh at his mom’s, and taken her mom’s car (much more fun to drive) back to a friend’s house. I didn’t think it possible she and Josh could have robbed a bank (much less stuck around; Josh and her were A students, on the quiz bowl team; armed robbery was not Josh’s style, although he might just try to hack their computers..). I told them what i knew, where Josh lived.I was freaked out a bit but sure this was a silly mistake.
    More cop cars have arrived, and some neighbors are beginning to onlook, they tell me Josh has been taken to the Polk Co. Jail in Benton TN, and the FBI will be there soon. Just then Sarah drove up in her mom’s car.
    The short deputy furrowed his brow, stared and said (in a highpitched mountain voice) “Well, if she ‘ud just robbed a bank, I don’t think she’d drive right up hyar liik tha-ut!” ( We talk like that.) I thanked him for his perception, and felt that it would be OK. Sarah answered their questions, a bit freaked but self possessed. We went to the county jail (in Blue Ridge GA) and had just sat down in the interrogation room (a friend/lawyer was supposed to be on the way) when we got word that it was a mistake, Josh was not the robber, and the actual vehicle on the tape was a gray pickup. Josh got to meet the FBI guy (“Man, he was really rude, and mad when the teller said “no, that’s not the young man.”) and I had to go to Benton to pick him up..
    The stupid criminal part is that the actual robber, who looked a bit like Josh was caught the next day, one county over, with +$5000 of the $8000 in a paper sack on the pickup’s seat.
    True story…

  55. 55.

    General Winfield Stuck

    @Corner Stone:

    Are you and eemom married? Or maybe brother/sister?

    And taking shots again at people who are not on a thread. Someday, the stoopids will completely take over your happy Texas ass, if they haven’t already.

  59. 59.

    Corner Stone

    @Mike E: I appreciate the offer, but tearing Stuck down to his essential quivering shell won’t take but a minute. He’s only got one gear. Lame.

  60. 60.

    Bobby Yamaha

    @Jason Bylinowski:

    I would TOTALLY tune into a show about criminal bad-asses… I’m not gonna lie, there’s a side of me that totally wants the bad guy to win every so often, and a show like that would appeal to that side of me.

    There’s an episode of Cops where they sit this undercover cop in a lawn chair outside an apartment building “selling” dime bags of pot.

    When the customers come up and try to make the purchase the wanna-be SWAT team comes running out and fucking TACKLES them! Over pot! And then they impound their cars.

    Only a bunch of pathetic, impotent assholes would have to resort to something like that and then be clueless enough to want it to be seen nationwide.

    A spin-off called Crooks in which the cops take an ass whippin’ – and we all know the footage is out there but they won’t show it – would make millions.

    But I guess Criminal Masterminds will have to do.

  62. 62.

    Corner Stone

    @General Winfield Stuck:

    And taking shots again at people who are not on a thread. Someday, the stoopids will completely take over your happy Texas ass, if they haven’t already.

    It just struck me that you are both really, really fucking bad at calling people out. You try it, you both get your ass spanked, then you resort to the “whatever” school of defense.
    Seemed like a natural pairing to me. What other kind of individual could stomach your lame attempts at relevance?

  64. 64.

    Corner Stone

    @General Winfield Stuck: And you see? This is perfect as an example.
    You get taken to the shed, got absolutely nothing, dimly (oh so fucking dimly) realize it, and decide to go to the failsafe – “You likey the demon alcohol!”
    Yes. I’m over 21. And you’re one lame motherfucker as has been amply displayed time and again.

  65. 65.

    stinkwrinkle

    @SIA aka ScreaminginAtlanta: You bring back memories of COBOL on punched cards. I am not entirely grateful :)

    BTW, you know how our fellow commenters whine about the lack of an Edit button? Imagine them without a delete key, and you had to throw the page away if you typed even one character incorrectly!

  67. 67.

    eemom

    jeez — I drop in after dinner to find I’m being insulted in absentia.

    I’m not gonna bother to retort to the Corner gentleman, as I think it’s pretty obvious he’s in a DSM-IV category all his own.

    I am however, honored to be related to the good General. : )

  69. 69.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    I told you fuckers he’s a spaz. You will start listening to Fuckhead eventually but by then it will prolly be too late.

  70. 70.

    Corner Stone

    @General Winfield Stuck: Everyone saw you get your ass spanked repeatedly the other day. Lurkers were calling for Angus to stop beating you down. Same lame defence today as then.
    But hey, it’s what’s always worked for you, eh?

  71. 71.

    Corner Stone

    @Just Some Fuckhead: Well, we could also listen to you discuss how often you masturbate. That’s always a ripe topic for discussion.
    Course, there was the time you called another poster a c*&t, that was a fantastically thoughtful display.

  75. 75.

    Corner Stone

    @eemom: You tried to pin some weak bullshit on me. Some things I never said, nor implied.
    I didn’t care for it. Sorry to harsh your buzz or anything.

  76. 76.

    Vincent

    Ah, it’s just not Thanksgiving without one’s crazy aunts and uncles calling each other fuckers.

  77. 77.

    SIA aka ScreaminginAtlanta

    @stinkwrinkle: ha! I remember starting my business with a fancy-schmancy IBM Selectric typewriter! Self-correcting! I was some kind of cool.

  79. 79.

    Corner Stone

    @General Winfield Stuck: God.
    Get some juice man, or just give it up. That’s some damn weaksauce.
    Not that we expect anything different from you. You’re one lame motherfucker, as you continue to prove day in and out.

  80. 80.

    Shell

    Steven Segal:

    Steven Seagal? Steven Seagal? Lord, help us. The talking tree has a tv show?

    As soon as you are taken into custody, demand a lawyer and then explicitly state tha

    How many episodes of Law and Order have we seen where the perp asks for a lawyer (somewhat hesitantly) and the detectives say “If you’ve done nothing wrong, what do you need a lawyer for? It only makes you look guilty.”

  84. 84.

    eemom

    @SIA aka ScreaminginAtlanta:

    I’ll see your IBM Selectrix, and raise you a Smith-Corona with the correction ribbon you had to take in and out.

    Better YET — a manual with that white powdery paper thingie you put in front of the ink ribbon.

    I am Methuselah.

  87. 87.

    SIA aka ScreaminginAtlanta

    @eemom: Before the Selectric, there was the paper you held in place it erased the error. And the White-Out!!

    I honestly thought when computers started being used that I didn’t really need one. Je suis un idiot.

  88. 88.

    Corner Stone

    @Just Some Fuckhead: Oh noes!! The horror! JSF has taken some kind of ire to me!
    That little dicked motherfucker has taken time from having his priest fondle him to focus his mighty intellect on little ole me! And called me a spaz! Circa 1980!
    Whatevers shall I do?

  91. 91.

    Ahasuerus

    @Linkmeister: My dad was employed by Bell Labs, and was working on constructing the domes for the missile tracking radars. My mom taught English on Ebeye. I was but a wee wanderer, still in grade school, so I think you have a few years on me. Still, it’s nice to meet a fellow Kwajer; we’re few and far between.

  93. 93.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Corner Stone:

    Whatevers shall I do?

    You might try getting a prescription for prozac or lithium or something like that. Maybe give up the intertoobz until you can teach yerself some self-control. Find some grown-up friends that can mentor you on how to act like an adult.

    I could prolly come up with more suggestions but I doubt you’re serious.

  97. 97.

    kay

    They call the police a lot.

    That’s what I can’t figure out . They’re all on probation or have something outstanding, or their situation is incriminating when they make the call , and they regularly call 911 for a police officer to resolve some stupid family or friend dispute. Then half the family or social gathering get hauled in, for or another thing, and everyone’s upset.

    I ask, “who made the call?” (although I know who made the call: they did) and they say “I did, but it wasn’t about me“.

    I say: “why do you keep calling the police? You always get arrested”.

    It’s as if they think the police officer will be focusing like a laser beam on only the incident or person they object to, regardless of their own vulnerability on these matters.

  99. 99.

    bernini

    Cornholio Stoned clever. Bring special douchieness to thread. Out of no where bat shit you appear and save thread.

  100. 100.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    Think of it as watching a snake swallow it’s own tail. No retort is really necessary for that.

    Fairly apropos as Corner Stone Brick Head has had their head up their ass so long that the oxygen deprivation wiped out the little intelligence that once existed.

  103. 103.

    Guest

    It’s not surprising that people who commit crimes do self-destructive things that end up getting them caught, when you realize that for the most part, people who take other people’s things, and who kill each other, are desperate, disadvantaged, and drunken people acting either in the heat of the moment or under circumstances that drastically skew their perception of reality.

    Sure, there are a few intelligent but evil or vengeful people who plan and carefully carry out criminal designs – but really, that’s mostly just in books and on tv. If some made-up criminal mastermind commits a blunder that allows Peter Falk to undo his foul plot, then it makes sense to poke fun at his stupidity.

    Most people in the real world who commit crimes do so without thinking, or because *getting in trouble* seems like a natural thing to do – being punished is part of the unconscious plan from the beginning – “aggressive passive-aggression” if you will.

    Crime’s really about the forcible construction of subordinate classes of humanity, really. Middle- and upper-class people generally don’t walk around feeling like they’re about to get in trouble at any moment. A lot of poor people do.

    Discuss.

  105. 105.

    Corner Stone

    @DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): Hey!
    It’s the Perfect Duncitude Trifecta(tm)!
    JSF has been stealing insults from ’84 and Revenge of the Nerds.
    The White House has been wondering where the knee pads they lent you are.
    And Stuck…well, nobody really gives a shit about anything he says.

  107. 107.

    Chuck Butcher

    As somebody else mentioned, as a problem solving method murder pretty much sucks and is indicative to the mental processes of those engaging in it. The “I won’t get caught” piece of criminal thinking is held in the face of utter stupidity, it seems to be denial taken to the n/th.

    That starts to break down when there isn’t connection between the actor and the victim, say for profit or political ends/terror. If a person were to coldly decide that certain figures needed to be offed in order to strike fear into a viewpoint without personal consequences it could get difficult to solve. The question is whether coming to that decision is a rational act…

    It is probably fortunate for us that sniping is almost entirely the province of movies or warfare because the reality of it isn’t that complicated. A modest hunting rifle with modest optics can be tuned to 600 yds w/o real difficulty and the direction of a gun shot is very difficult to determine under the best circumstances. That makes the actor the really big question.

  109. 109.

    Notorious P.A.T.

    Mental note: if someone rats me out and I decide to kill them, I don’t do it as soon as I get out of jail. That’s a little suspicious.

  110. 110.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    Hey Corner Stone Brick Head Prick Head, you think give a shit about what some deranged mental midget like you has to say about me on the internet? Fat chance sucker. You have been a non-stop fuckwit ever since you stumbled in here and you are destined to be a fuckwit for as long as you proudly walk around with your head up your ass, recycling your endless stream of shit that you think passes for wit and intelligence.

    Please lamely flail away at what I said to you since I expect nothing less than your usual top notch delivery of epic flail. You’ll see just how much I give a shit about what you have to say by my lack of response to it.

    Afterward, be sure to pat yourself on the back for winning the fight, you’ve earned it!

  111. 111.

    bedtimeforbonzo

    @Max: Saw a funny promo for that show today. Segall is handcuffing a criminal, who suddenly realizes he is getting handcuffed by Steven Segall and says: “I want your autograph.”

  113. 113.

    Comrade Kevin

    @Chet:

    Here’s the problem. It’s called “The First 48”, as in, the “first 48 hours are crucial to solving the murder”. It’s not called “Unsolved Murders.” Which means that the murders they show are only the ones the police were able to solve.

    How many episodes have you watched? They routinely show cases that haven’t been solved.

  115. 115.

    J. Michael Neal

    I don’t go back as far as you guys, but I did have to explain to a couple of classmates that, when I first came to the University of Minnesota, if you were assigned a research paper, you actually had to go to the library and check out books on your topic. If someone else in the class beat you there and checked out a book you needed, you were just screwed. You could ask the nice librarian if she would call around to the libraries at other Big 10 schools and see if they had a copy of the book that wasn’t checked out. If they did, they’d mail it to Minneapolis, and you could have it in about a week. Hope you didn’t wait until the last minute to get started.

  116. 116.

    bedtimeforbonzo

    The USA Network is putting out some good stuff these days, so I don’t know if this counts as a guilty pleasure, but “White Collar” is as entertaining as any crime show on TV. Fridays, 10 p.m. EST.

    I don’t get into all of the CSI/NCIS/Criminal Minds hocus-pocus. “White Collar” is of the con man/mystery/suspense genre, moves at a sprightly pace and features wonderful chemistry between the ex-con and FBI agent leads.

    It also features a grown-up and shimmering Tiffany Amber-Theissen, who was always good to look at while my little sister made me sit through many a lame “90210” (her favorite show back then).

  119. 119.

    Scruffy McSnufflepuss

    Murder’s just like anything else. There are the murderers who are amateurs, and there are the murderers who are serious about it. The amateurs are often caught; the professionals are very rarely caught.

    If you read about the lives of Mafia hitmen, it becomes clear that very few of them were caught. Or, if they were, it was for something unrelated, or it was at the end of a career in which they’d killed 20 or 30 (or sometimes, many more) people.

  120. 120.

    Ivan Ivanovich Renko

    @Linkmeister: We had two of ’em in our computer room at my alma mater back in 1978… and they were central to the computer science classes at the time. Oh, the good old days(not!)

    PS and off topic– having started computing back in those days, it sends a shiver up my back when I see ads for TERA-FUCKING-BYTE drives for LESS THAN A HUNDRED BUCKS?!?!

    ain’t Moore’s Law a mutha-fo-ya?

  122. 122.

    Ahasuerus

    @Linkmeister: Thanks for the link. I used to have a subscription to Kwaj Connection, but let it drop after the last move. Nice to see all that stuff on line; kind of a trip to recognize some of the names after all this time.

    Oh, and “Emo Kabatat!”

  123. 123.

    Linkmeister

    @Ivan Ivanovich Renko: Yeah. I remember having to lobby for a year to spend $5,000 for a 10mb hard drive the size of a pizza for an IBM S/34. Later I spent $400 for a used 40mb external hard drive for a Mac Plus. The current PC cost me $375 and included 500Gb of hard drive.

  124. 124.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @J. Michael Neal

    I don’t go back as far as you guys, but I did have to explain to a couple of classmates that, when I first came to the University of Minnesota, if you were assigned a research paper, you actually had to go to the library and check out books on your topic. If someone else in the class beat you there and checked out a book you needed, you were just screwed. You could ask the nice librarian if she would call around to the libraries at other Big 10 schools and see if they had a copy of the book that wasn’t checked out. If they did, they’d mail it to Minneapolis, and you could have it in about a week. Hope you didn’t wait until the last minute to get started.

    One of the best classes I took in high school was debate (I actually ended up as captain of the team my senior year). Our teacher in debate, a wonderful lady named Dorene Wright, taught us how to use a card catalog and the Reader’s Guide to Periodicals to do research for our cases. So when I went to college and had to do research I had a leg up on a lot of other people who didn’t know how to use the card catalog, didn’t understand the Dewey Decimal system much less the Library of Congress system and didn’t know about the RGP.

    Of course nowadays it’s all teh intartoobz. In a way I find this liberating, in another depressing because even though research is orders of magnitude easier than it was 25 years ago fewer people bother to do it.

  125. 125.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Bobby Yamaha

    A spin-off called Crooks in which the cops take an ass whippin’ – and we all know the footage is out there but they won’t show it – would make millions.

    Oh yeah, I’d watch that on Pay-Per-View. One can only hope that one of these days the producers of Cops will realize that this footage represents a potential goldmine and will release it.

Comments are closed.