Thirty years later.

When Alan was working in an office, I would get dinner ready to fire, then wait around for whenever he got home. Often I’d watch one TV show as I waited; it’s how I got through “The Americans” and a rewatch of two of “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos.”

Lately it’s “NYPD Blue,” only I watch it as Alan cleans up the kitchen after dinner. Because it was on a commercial network, it’s only about 43 minutes, so Alan can join me for the second, third and fourth act, and rarely misses anything. (Something I learned on my journalism fellowship: One-hour TV dramas have four acts, movies three.)

We watched “NYPD Blue” together when it dropped, in the early ’90s. Everybody who was paying attention to American TV probably remembers it was a pioneer in showing material previously forbidden on prime time (butts, side boob), and using spicier language. Some affiliates refused to run it, and I’m pretty sure everybody ran it at 10 p.m.

Anyway, “NYPD Blue” was a cop show, a collaboration between Steven Bochco and David Milch, and probably the only reason it got on the air was Bochco’s status as a cop-show hit machine. It’s interesting mainly as an artifact of Hollywood entertainment, as well as society’s attitudes about police.

The Hollywood stuff first: The casting precedes the era of wokeness. A transgender woman — treated by the retrograde Detective Sipowicz the way the monkeys in “2001” treated the monolith — is played by a biological one. An adult described as “retarded” is clearly an actor who is not disabled in any way. As the seasons pile up, it’s like “Law & Order” reruns, where you can always tell who the bad guy is, no matter how fleeting his or her introduction, because if it’s an actor you’ve come to recognize, yep, that’s the guy. Also, it was so obviously shot in Los Angeles. (The sunshine gives it away.)

As for the police, well. I’ve lost track of how many times one of the detectives threatens to beat the shit out of a suspect. And then gets the confession! In fact, the willingness of a “skell” to take the beating is seen as evidence he’s telling the truth. And it’s always a he, although female skells swing through the 15th Squad station house often. They don’t get beaten (although they’re often killed by the third act) and sometimes someone will peel off a few $20 bills and tell them to go straight to the Port Authority and buy a bus ticket to their sister’s place in Florida. Where is all this petty cash coming from? We don’t know.

Of the NYC apartments we will say nothing, as we all know how those are.

This is how Hollywood did Gritty Realism, once upon a time. And we wonder why cop worship is so widespread.

“We Own This City” — now there’s a realistic police show. (David Simon and George Pelecanos, HBO.) The Baltimore police beat people, steal like kleptomaniacs, abuse every regulation in the book and basically act like an occupying force. In other words, like cops we all know.

Memorial Day weekend, and when people say, “Let’s remember all those who gave their lives for freedom,” all I could think about were the kids in Uvalde. But I kept my mouth shut. Bike ride, stop at a friend’s swimming pool, then ribs on the grill. A quiet day. Hope yours was good.

Posted at 8:14 pm in Television |
 

56 responses to “Thirty years later.”

  1. Jeff Borden said on May 30, 2022 at 8:30 pm

    You left out the ready availability of parking for American-made four-door sedan behemoths driven by the plainclothes cops. I’d laugh out loud every time Sipowicz and the others pulled in right at the front door with their Caprice Classics. Or Ford LTDs. All else is true. The first TV pilot I ever saw –at 28– was “Hill Street Blues.” It seemed so mature to my naive eyes. I watched the pilot last year and was dismayed at how corny it was.

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  2. LAMary said on May 30, 2022 at 8:52 pm

    That’s known as Doris Day parking, Jeff. Watch a movie like Pillow Talk and see Doris pull into a parking space in front of her Manhattan office building. Driving a convertible, yet. Doris Day parking is the central tenet of my spiritual life. Leave a parking space better than you found it and you will be rewarded the next time you park by finding a space near the entrance to Costco or your dentist’s office.
    And yes, I keep thinking of those kids in Uvalde this Memorial Day too. Kids shouldn’t die especially in the horrible way those kids did.

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  3. nancy said on May 30, 2022 at 8:59 pm

    I call those Hollywood spaces, and occasionally get one here (but probably no other city in the world). “Hollywood rain” is that weird only-in-the-movies rain where it’s clear the sun is out and shining, but oddly, it’s also raining! You get one or two of those a year here, during spring or fall when clouds are passing quickly. I always comment on it — “let’s go out in the Hollywood rain!”

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  4. Joe Kobiela said on May 30, 2022 at 9:24 pm

    Cop shows Dragnet, Adam12, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blues, and my favorite Homicide, each one seemed to push the envelope a little farther.
    Just got back from a 3 night stay in Denver drove up to Vail on Saturday a nice drive still snow in the mountains, didn’t realize there were bike trails along side and in the medians of Interstate 70 Had a nice lunch in Vail, and window shopped some properties a little to rich for my blood. Watched the race on Sunday. Made it home in a little over 3.5 hr at 25,000ft in the Cheyenne. Hot tub time now with the missus.
    Here’s to summer
    Pilot Joe

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  5. Brandon said on May 30, 2022 at 9:27 pm

    No fans of Blue Bloods, then?

    Hollywood rain, also known as sunshowers.

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  6. David C said on May 30, 2022 at 9:42 pm

    I heard out west bike lanes on interstates are common. I’m not sure why anyone would want to suck down all the exhaust fumes but for easier grades it seems like a good ideal

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  7. Julie Robinson said on May 30, 2022 at 9:53 pm

    Hollywood sun, AKA sunshowers, is quite a common phenomenon here in central Florida. We had some only yesterday.

    I too have not been able to get the Uvalde families off my mind. When we watched the PBS Memorial Day concert I was undone, comparing how they will be missing their children the same in the same ways. So, so unnecessary.

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  8. Sherri said on May 30, 2022 at 10:57 pm

    Our city is considering a Public Safety Levy, and part of the public process of deciding what it will look like and whether to put it on the ballot involves, among other things, briefing the Planning Commission. Which means this non-cop-worshipping ACLU board president got to weigh in, and ask the police chief some questions, like why we should keep doing more of the same. The two most common calls the Redmond police respond to are car prowls and traffic collisions, and I asked him why armed commissioned officers were necessary to respond to these situations. His response? Car prowlers have guns, and the Washington state code requires a commissioned officer to respond to traffic collisions.

    I have no idea if the second is true, and it wasn’t the time for me to ask for data about the first one, like how often officers respond to situations where the car prowler is still on the scene, as opposed to being called because a car window has been smashed. Our Black police chief is also adamant that there is no way his police department exhibits any bias in arrests and stops.

    Redmond is not a bad police department, but it is also not immune from the problems endemic to the system of policing in this country.

    Two years ago there were protests even in Redmond about policing, and now it’s like it never happened.

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  9. Dexter Friend said on May 31, 2022 at 2:53 am

    I worked 2nd shift and taped “NYPD Blue” and saw every episode. Sipowicz was played by Dennis Franz who was a combat veteran of the American-Vietnam war. I remember all the long list of actors , some stand out, like “John Irvin” (Bill Brochtrup) who was what may have been the first “really out” gay man on a primetime show, and although his private life is sheltered, I believe Bill had a husband along the line at one time. I think the trans person was the character “Peaches” (Jazzmun).
    I was not a fan of all cop shows at all, but I did love NYPD Blue. Headlines were made when “Andy” showed his hairy ass in a scene.

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  10. alex said on May 31, 2022 at 6:48 am

    In my circles, we call it “rock star” parking. And when I lived in Chicago, it was known as “good parking karma.”

    I wasn’t much of a TV watcher when NYPD Blue came out, so never really saw any of it, although I remember the novelty of butts and boobs on network TV and all the speculation about where it would lead. You’d think 30 years hence we’d be seeing dicks and pussies, but now we don’t even see butts and boobs.

    Wasn’t there some cop show in that era where they’d break into song and dance?

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  11. ROGirl said on May 31, 2022 at 7:36 am

    There’s always a parking spot right out front, the elevator door always opens as soon as they walk up, the apartments are enormous, they always eat Chinese food with chopsticks directly out of the cartons, they always leave a restaurant before or just after they start eating.

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  12. Jeff Gill said on May 31, 2022 at 7:37 am

    Had to Google around out of curiosity:

    Dragnet, 1951–1959 & 1967–1970
    Car 54, Where Are You?, 1961–1963
    Adam-12, 1968-1975
    Hill Street Blues, 1981–1987
    Law & Order, 1990-2010 (and now 2022-)
    NYPD Blue, 1993–2005
    Homicide: Life on the Street, 1993–1999
    Law & Order: SVU, 1999-dear Lord, no…
    The Wire, 2002–2008

    As that sequence was ending, this one began:

    JAG, 1995-2005
    CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2000–2015
    CSI: Miami, 2002-2012
    NCIS, 2003-my oh my…
    CSI: NY, 2004-2013
    NCIS: Los Angeles, 2009-
    NCIS: New Orleans, 2014-2021
    NCIS: Hawaiʻi, 2021-
    NCIS: Sydney, 2022-
    CSI: Vegas, 2021-

    I don’t have the mental energy this am to make anything of these sequences, just that they tell a story of sorts.

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  13. Jim said on May 31, 2022 at 8:11 am

    I live in the UK – if I see an interesting series on the tv, I go onto Amazon to see if there is a dvd of the series . I watched 10 minutes of *The Closer*, and bought the series . Watch the dvds as there are no adverts .

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  14. Deborah said on May 31, 2022 at 8:40 am

    I remember watching Dragnet when it was mostly reruns. Car 54 was a favorite but didn’t have many seasons. I remember Adam 12 but never watched it. Hill Street Blues seemed pretty good to me, I wonder if I would say so now. Then my TV watching days mostly ended because I worked late and VCRs happened and you could watch movies from Blockbuster any time you wanted as long as you got them back in time.

    I watched all eps of Severance and am now watching it all over again, realizing I missed a lot the first time.

    LAMary, you mentioned the term Doris Day parking once a while back and it stuck with me ever since. I usually avoid those parking spaces because they’re the hardest to back out of, because of people pushing shopping carts walking behind you etc. I always look for the pull throughs, which are usually way out at the ends of parking lots. That way I get more steps in and no backing out, just head out forward.

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  15. kv450 said on May 31, 2022 at 8:44 am

    Brilliant observations, ROGirl.

    UK Jim – if you liked “The Closer”, check out its successor/spin-off “Major Crimes”.

    Or even grittier, “Bosch”, on Amazon.

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  16. Suzanne said on May 31, 2022 at 8:57 am

    I was a loyal Hill Street Blues watcher. We were living in the Chicago suburbs at the time so I related to life in the big city. I admit to being a Law & Order addict. Our son took some criminology classes in college and said one prof told them that L&O is the tv show that probably the closest to reality. CSI, the prof said, is almost laughable because no police force has modern labs like that and nothing gets done that quickly.

    My very conservative, gun loving brother loves Blue Bloods because that family has dinner together every Sunday and work through their problems as a family. Yes, that’s nice but it’s also not a real family and sadly, real life isn’t scripted.

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  17. Suzanne said on May 31, 2022 at 9:11 am

    Re: the discussion recently about Christians’ embrace of guns.

    https://twitter.com/johnson__joey/status/1530500001402609665?s=21&t=AxPHJKHGwk7-lqEdLCgG5Q

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  18. Jeff Gill said on May 31, 2022 at 9:47 am

    I didn’t include:

    Blue Bloods, 2010-
    or
    Chicago P.D., 2014-

    because the first is a show about Sunday family dinners with some cop subplots thrown in, and the second oddly enough I have never seen, nor the two Chicago cousins (Med & Fire, I think?), just because time & circumstance. But my impression is they’re about as police related as “Days of Our Lives” is about the Salem P.D. (which would be an interesting reframing, come to think of it).

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  19. Mark P said on May 31, 2022 at 9:50 am

    I read somewhere someone was saying we should have a day memorializing all the children who have died to protect our right to own military-style semiautomatic rifles.

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  20. FDChief said on May 31, 2022 at 9:57 am

    Monday I drove the little Prius down to the Deep Southeast – stopping on the way to pick up a single beer from the already-grimy-looking-new-Plaid-Pantry off Columbia Boulevard – to spend an hour among the dead men.

    As always Willamette National Cemetery was tidy and pleasant; impossibly green grass alive with the tiny flags it flies every Memorial Day (how the hell do the Coasties sneak in and plant their service flag on every USCG marker? Is there a buoy tender crew that gets detailed off the week before..?) and crowded with families visiting their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.

    It took me a while to find another Army brother of my generation – it’s only in the graveyard that you’re really confronted with the massive wave of military service that encompassed the WW2 generation – but it was not unpleasant to wander in the pretty garden on a sun-dappled day.

    I shared my drink with SFC Groome, and hoped his own family had come to remind him how they missed him. I hoped his Iraq tour had been an easy one, that he’d been able to have a laugh or two, and came home sound. That here was to us, who was like us? Damn few, and they’re all dead.

    And this year, like so many of the past years, I felt adrift, disconnected from the nation who paid me and clothed me all those years, struggling to recognize the nation of my youth with a nation that seems at war not with foreign enemies but with itself. Where the most dangerous place to be is not in some foreign field but in a classroom, or a store, or a church, or an office.

    And I left the dead to the grass, and the sun-showery sky, and drove home.

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    • nancy said on May 31, 2022 at 10:05 am

      Beautifully said.

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  21. Jason T. said on May 31, 2022 at 1:35 pm

    Alex @ 10:

    Wasn’t there some cop show in that era where they’d break into song and dance?

    “Cop Rock,” a massive flop for the Stephen Bochco TV factory of the ’90s.

    I’m a big fan of the “Omnibus” pop-culture podcast done by Ken Jennings and John Roderick, and (tries to look humble) a while ago I suggested they do an episode on “Dragnet.”

    They took the suggestion: Episode 289, Dragnet

    One of things they pointed out was that, before “Dragnet,” cops were often portrayed either as corrupt or ineffectual.

    Think about the police officers in all of the 1930s and ’40s (and earlier) detective stories, like The Thin Man or Nero Wolfe or Sherlock Holmes — at best, they were incompetent and needed private detectives to help them solve crimes. At worst, they were crooked.

    After “Dragnet,” it was no longer fashionable to portray police officers as bumblers falling down manholes and stealing apples from fruit carts.

    Not for nothing was “Dragnet” referred to as “the fuzz industrial,” meaning an “industrial film” — in other words, paid propaganda.

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  22. Peter said on May 31, 2022 at 3:20 pm

    FDChief, that was a very nice entry.

    I’m stunned at how many WWII vets are still alive – my Dad was only 19 when the war ended and he died recently at 95, so you’d think there’s only a handful after that….

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  23. Brandon said on May 31, 2022 at 3:38 pm

    Cop Rock, “Let’s Be Careful Out There.”

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  24. Brandon said on May 31, 2022 at 3:59 pm

    @Jeff: You left out Hawaii 5-O (1968-1980) and its reboot Hawaii 5-0 (2010-2020).

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  25. Deborah said on May 31, 2022 at 4:35 pm

    I’ve mentioned this here before, when we went to Thiepvol cemetery in France, for British WW1 soldiers.

    According to Wikipedia it’s Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, Thiepval has been described as “the greatest executed British work of monumental architecture of the twentieth century”. So that’s why we went, but the amazing thing that happened while there was we met the oldest living British veteran from the UK who was being interviewed by the BBC. They were having a hard time getting him to talk until my husband started talking to him as a vet who was in Viet Nam. They talked about how horrendous war is and the old guy just opened up. Of course we were all crying, including the BBC folks. They appreciated that the guy was then responding to their questions and telling stories. This would have been 1999 so for sure he’s long gone now. It was an extremely memorable experience. My husband’s mother and younger sister were with us on that trip in France and Germany.

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  26. Julie Robinson said on May 31, 2022 at 5:23 pm

    Thank you, FDChief, you honored your friend.

    Biden said some good things over the weekend–“Memorial Day is always a day where pain and pride are mixed together”, and of the anniversary of his son’s death, telling families he knew remembrances can “reopen the black hole of pain.” He really is the Consoler-in-Chief.

    And then he said the Second Amendment was never absolute. How many AR-15’s did that sentence sell? Criminy, Joe, we’ll never get any sensible gun control if the crazies think you’re coming for their guns.

    In and around all our activities this weekend I was arguing with gun nuts, trying to be the voice of reason and kindness. We need better mental health care, one said. Yes we do, unfortunately Governor Abbott just cut that. Another proclaimed it’s only criminals who get guns illegally. I presented him with a chart from the NYT showing the huge number of mass shootings where the weapons were purchased legally. We need to harden our schools–yes, Uvalde had already done that.

    Finally I said, can we all agree that shooting 10 years olds is bad? Well, yes, but…and off to yet another tired old meme. They simply cannot make the connection between our gun culture and the shootings. Facts do not penetrate their brains.

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  27. Colleen said on May 31, 2022 at 5:37 pm

    We call it Doris Day or Sinatra parking. If it’s near the front, but not not a primo spot, it’s Joey Bishop parking….

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  28. Suzanne said on May 31, 2022 at 5:38 pm

    Apparently it’s been verified that the back door of the school in Uvalde was not propped open and was not the way the shooter got in. So, the cops lied about that, too.

    You are so correct, Julie, that gun nuts cannot connect gun culture with the shootings. It’s like their brains have one lane which does have off ramps, but they don’t see them.
    This podcast touches on that idea in the context of religion, but gun culture is kind of a religion, isn’t it?

    https://armchairexpertpod.com/pods/fb-religion

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  29. FDChief said on May 31, 2022 at 6:16 pm

    Thanks, Nance. Thanks, Peter.

    Thing is, Julie, I have no idea who Sergeant Groome is or was. I mean, other than his dates, and that he went to the Gulf War in ’91 and Iraq.

    But that’s kind of the point; I go not for someone in particular, but for all of us who carried the ruck (or the memo pad or the case of C-rats or MREs). We’re just soldiers and that’s our bond, and I hope that someday some other GI will do the same for me.

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  30. Dorothy said on May 31, 2022 at 6:39 pm

    My latest binge watching is via YouTubeTV – I see ER reruns from 9 AM to 3 PM. I watched it from the start when it debuted but I must’ve stopped watching about half way through its 15 year run. I’m re-watching it from the beginning and I’m up to season 11. Retirement allows one these kind of indulgences, and I’ve made one quilt and worked on two or three others while I listen/watch the show.

    There are so many guest stars from other tv shows and movies that do some great work. Here’s a short list: Rosemary Clooney (in the first season when her nephew was a rising star on ER), Bruce Weitz (from Hill Street Blues), Bob Newhart, Ewan McGregor, Red Buttons, Ed Asner, Jessica Chastain, Kirsten Dunst, Piper Laurie, Frances Sternhagen – and a few hours ago the episode that featured Ray Liotta (he won an Emmy for this episode) was on the POP channel. It was intense and very well done.

    It’s hard to listen to even a few stories about Ukraine or Buffalo or Uvalde – imagine if your job was to cover them or edit the stories. They can’t look the other way or decide to pay no attention to them. It’s causing a great deal of stress to journalists and my heart is hurting for them too. It’s beyond my ability to imagine how hard it is for the families of those dead victims.

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  31. Sherri said on May 31, 2022 at 6:55 pm

    Not only are most of the guns sold legally, gun manufacturers are now offering financing on their guns. The manufacturer of the gun in the Uvalde shooting, Daniel Defense, a self-described Christian gun manufacturer, makes guns that cost $2000-$3000. The killer didn’t have that kind of bank, but no worries, you can buy and kill now with a low down payment and easy finance terms!

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  32. LAMary said on May 31, 2022 at 8:43 pm

    Cop Rock it was. That was a really stupid show.
    I, like many women over 55, am a Law and Order fan. Not the new one, not the rapey one, not the organized crime one. The original. It’s a thing for postmenopausal women. I like Jerry Orbach and Paul Sorvino.

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  33. Jeff Gill said on May 31, 2022 at 9:05 pm

    On the Florida Man front:

    https://www.wesh.com/article/volusia-county-explosion-bonfire-death/40151917

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  34. Deborah said on May 31, 2022 at 10:21 pm

    While we were visiting my husband’s granddaughter in Orange county CA, this past January, there was a TV show playing on a TV set in the corner, no one was really watching, which drives me crazy, either watch the TV or turn it off because I find it distracting. Every once in a while I’d be drawn to the tv screen to see some idiot doing the most outrageously stupid stunt that always ended up with some horrific injuries. I have no idea what that show is called but it was causing me to have PTSD seeing what these people put themselves through and how people thought watching that was entertaining. The Florida man link brought it all back to me.

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  35. LAMary said on May 31, 2022 at 11:40 pm

    That show was probably Jackass, Deborah. It was very stupid.

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  36. Dexter Friend said on June 1, 2022 at 1:24 am

    Well by gawd, I loved Cop Rock, never missed it. It was so weird…it was like a template for all LA cop shows, then out of nowhere, the whole cast performed a highly choreographed fast number. It was wild… and of course, it lasted maybe half a season and was shit-canned.

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  37. Nelson said on June 1, 2022 at 7:30 am

    The PR work TV has done for cops is wild. SVU would have you believe there's a dedicated team of professionals committed to investigating every rape and not just two dudes with punisher tattoos being like "sounds like a misunderstanding"— Robby Slowik (@RobbySlowik) May 28, 2022

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  38. Mark P said on June 1, 2022 at 9:23 am

    The solution for mass shootings: Ban and buy back. Passed next week and done in the next month. And if the Supreme Court Taliban overturns it, ignore them.

    It’s the answer, but the Republicans will look high and low and somehow never see it.

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  39. Deborah said on June 1, 2022 at 10:33 am

    I’m hoping that the outrage over assault weapons and anti-abortion stays until at least the election so it will encourage more Dems to vote and encourage young people to register to vote so that we can get something done in Congress to stop this gun madness and to do something positive for the lives of women.

    There’s an article in the NYT about the fires in NM https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/01/climate/new-mexico-wildfires.html

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  40. Sherri said on June 1, 2022 at 11:16 am

    Solutions to the gun problem are numerous, but getting any enacted is the barrier. I mean, getting rid of the second amendment would also solve th problem, makes total sense because the conditions that prompted the second amendment no longer exist, and could never happen.

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  41. Jeff Borden said on June 1, 2022 at 11:51 am

    U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger once said, “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

    And yet the Federalist Society mooks on SCOTUS are very likely to kill a long-standing state law in New York limiting who can conceal carry a deadly weapon within the next few weeks. These bastards –who pretend to know the minds of 19th century men and interpret modern laws through those blinkered viewpoints– will be no help in solving the problems of this nation. No. It will be a hindrance. . .not only in addressing the slaughter caused by guns. . .but in fighting climate change, addressing income inequality, voting access and, of course, reproductive rights.

    The machinery of our republic is creaking with age. It is no longer capable of addressing the swiftly growing array of issues and obstacles confronting our battered, disillusioned and blood-soaked nation. We’re as close to becoming an authoritarian state as we’ve ever been and one of the two major political parties is fully onboard with that prospect.

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  42. Mark P said on June 1, 2022 at 12:22 pm

    The “originalists” on the Supreme Court are our original hypocrites. They declare a law unconstitutional when the Constitution doesn’t give them that power. It is a power the court assumed with no justification based on an originalist reading of the Constitution.

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  43. brian stouder said on June 1, 2022 at 3:31 pm

    I am extremely disappointed/crestfallen/frustrated and upset about Johnny Depp’s Rich White Male Infallibility verdict

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  44. Jim said on June 1, 2022 at 5:12 pm

    On mass shooting response in other countries:https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/01/opinions/australia-uk-new-zealand-mass-shootings-gun-laws-alpers/index.html

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  45. Dave said on June 1, 2022 at 5:13 pm

    I never really watched NYPD Blue but I was a loyal fan of Hill Street Blues. I wonder if it would entertain me today like it did back when. I did finally watch the first season of NYPD Blue when I had a whole lot of downtime while staying with my ailing father throughout 2012 into 2013.

    I remember watching Cop Rock, one episode was enough for me. Dexter, glad you liked it.

    I, too, fear for our democracy, when the likes of the Orange Buffoon can go around yelping that the Georgia primary was fixed. Any election that you don’t like the results, say it was fixed and a certain number of backers will surely agree with you. It’s just godawful.

    The founding fathers, all those rich white slaveowners and whatnot, could not imagine the world we live in and yet we’re to adhere to that document that I’ve heard some call ageless. That just isn’t true, in my view. I remember reading about a case involving video games and Scalia kept asking questions. One of the other justices finally spoke up and said Scalia was just trying to learn what the founding fathers thought about video games. That’s pretty much the problem.

    Mark P, may you get healthy.

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  46. Deborah said on June 1, 2022 at 6:40 pm

    Many people are writing about assault weapons and gun control etc, I thought this one written in 2019 was a good explanation of what the framers were dealing with in the 1790s https://medium.com/technology-taxes-education-columns-by-david-grace/guns-america-in-1791-were-worlds-away-from-guns-america-today-e1f502674d4a

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  47. Jeff Borden said on June 1, 2022 at 7:49 pm

    Another mass casualty event at a Tulsa hospital. Four dead including the killer. This fucking country. . .

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  48. Sherri said on June 1, 2022 at 9:43 pm

    I’m halfway through “We Own This City”. Definitely not an entry in the cop-worship genre.

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  49. Mark P said on June 1, 2022 at 10:15 pm

    Thanks, Dave. I saw my primary care doctor Tuesday. He said I was lucky. I could have died. He also said since I’m on an anticoagulant that I have a very small risk of more clots. I am recovering quite nicely. I could barely carry on a conversation without gasping while I was in the hospital, but Wednesday I took our dogs for a short walk with no problems. The only remaining issue is a nodule they found by x-ray in one lung. They think it’s benign — most are — and they are going to follow up. It’s a smallish dark cloud in an otherwise clear sky. I won’t be completely as ease till I know for sure.

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  50. Dexter Friend said on June 2, 2022 at 2:13 am

    Holland , Michigan now. This will never stop…we are not safe anywhere in this nation.
    https://www.wilx.com/2022/06/02/hope-college-goes-into-lockdown-due-nearby-shooting/

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  51. Dexter Friend said on June 2, 2022 at 2:16 am

    Who could ever forget the sponge-heads of “Alien Nation”?

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  52. David C said on June 2, 2022 at 6:00 am

    My incidental imaging finding was a renal artery aneurysm. I went through (paying for them was the worse part) four CAT scans until the doctor was concerned about too much radiation so the next test was an ultrasound. On the ultrasound they found there was no circulation in the aneurysm. I had blocked itself off. So I was told it was almost impossible for it to burst and don’t worry. I wonder if the first test had been a cheap old ultrasound would I have needed the expensive CAT scans. I guess in the end it ended up well for both me and the hospital. I got to not worry and they got money.

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  53. Mark P said on June 2, 2022 at 8:45 am

    Ultrasounds can see things x-rays can’t, like blood circulation. They are probably at least an order of magnitudes cheaper than a CT scanner, and the electrical power usage is also probably an order of magnitude lower. Plus they emit no radiation. I had both in my recent hospital stay, but I’m on Medicare with a supplement, so I don’t have to pay.

    When it comes to testing, I have heard doctors say they are like a man with a hammer — everything looks like a nail. So, if you have a CT scanner, you use it.

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  54. Julie Robinson said on June 2, 2022 at 10:10 am

    A German friend tells me they start with breast ultrasounds there instead of mammograms. Now that she lives here she’s frustrated about having mammograms. Having had both, I would prefer to start with the ultrasound too.

    I had a little lady parts procedure yesterday and now I have to wait two weeks for results. I was all nervous and jangly about it so she gave me a couple of Xanax. Turned out to take five minutes with no pain, but the Xanax knocked me out for the rest of the day. I will say it’s wonderful to have a woman ob-gyn again.

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  55. Suzanne said on June 2, 2022 at 11:31 am

    The only CT scan I have ever had was to determine that I blood clots in my lungs but the doctor didn’t want me to have another to make sure the clots had dissolved because of all the radiation. I have had several ultrasounds since then to check blood flow, heart function, and I am not sure what else and I don’t mind them at all. I nearly fell asleep during one!

    So, I wonder, too, why they aren’t more widely used instead of mammograms.

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