Cut me open and crawl inside me - that way one of us gets to live

The weekend is here and there's no point fighting it - it's a great feeling even when you're unemployed.

Watching: CSI: Miami as part of my other New Year's Resolution to watch every single episode of the CSI franchise in chronological order, though unlike my actual Resolutions which are aimed at self-improvement, this one is more out of spite so I can continue to deride, ridicule, and sneer down my nose at those who watch CSI with a straight face, except now I can do so armed with a wodge of knowledge about it. If you haven't watched CSI - I assume because you don't hate yourself or humanity enough to do so - it's a monster television franchise about forensic scientists who use cutting-edge (and in the case of CSI: New York science fiction) technology to sidestep actual detection. It is competent and unremarkable television elevated by high production values to appear to be a little more ambitious than it actually is, though occasionally its awfulness is entertaining in and of itself, as are the occasional moments where it does actually approach greatness only to snatch the very concept away from the viewer.
The best example of this is near the end of season two of the original CSI (Las Vegas) when the slightly aloof, verse-quoting and standoffish Gil Grissom is revealed to be the way he is because unknown to the viewer and those he works with he is deaf as a post. It's a stonking bit of rug-pulling considering the show in which it appears and I'll admit that it is actually a brilliant slight of hand that explains so much about what at first seems a very cliched character: he's distant in conversations because he can only contribute if he can read lips, he doesn't listen to music, he doesn't watch tv or movies and prefers to read, shows a disposition towards tactile hobbies and pleasures - I will admit the retrospective light it casts upon the character and scenes in which he appears is a fantastic conceit. And then two minutes later the show does an about-face and turns it into a degenerative disease that has only reared its head now - which is less 'impressive' and more ' typical soap opera bullshit'. So near, CSI. So near...
Anyhoo, I've caught some of the more current CSI: Miami episodes where the whole thing is constructed around the gravel-voiced Mary Sue that is David Caruso's Horatio Cain, a pallid ginger man in his mid-50s who lives in an American skin cancer capital. That's just bonkers in itself before you get to what is essentially a long-running audition for the role of Judge Dredd, but the whole show does sort of hold together if you view his team as less police officers and more a bunch of Baker Street Irregulars to Cain's Holmes, there to feed him tidbits and set up scenarios for him to dole out beatings to spousal abusers, torture suspects, and on at least one occasion to execute an alligator with a double-tap to the brainpan, AS ONE DOES.

Watching it from the first season, David Caruso does actually seem to be trying to act, as he indulges in smalltalk with other people rather than just making hateful and inappropriate remarks over corpses, bless his little cotton socks, though I suppose it made sense to differentiate itself from the other iterations by turning the main character into a bit of an icon, the unfortunate end result of this being Sela Ward's portrayal of CSI: New York's Jo Danville, who I shall probably mention at a later date when I post something edited down to a mere few thousand words explaining why the character is quite possibly the most hateful, sanctimonious, self-righteous and misanthropic cunt I've ever seen on television. Seriously, there is a point in one episode where she overhears someone remark of a man who risked his life to save others that he was "a hero" and she just turns to the camera while the brow of her soft-focus face that looks like someone has melted a plastic bottle over a fully made-up member of the cast of CATS visibly furrows in disgust at the notion of altruism.
And yet why am I surprised? CSI: New York is a show that starts an episode about rapists with a woman working out in a gym where all the other female patrons are exercising by dancing on stripper poles - and this has literally nothing to do with anything that follows.

I am also currently watching Pearl Harbor as I watch this and I don't know why everyone is so down on it - it is really funny. I know that sounds like derision on my part, but it is so ham-fisted that when the officer shows up at the nurse's place to tell her that the pilot guy is dead, I laughed. The nurses' letter to the pilot serving in Britain?
Hysterics.

Because it is Friday: