Thoughtless for the Day

The following are six of my favorite episodes of Dragnet. If you ever find yourself channel surfing and you come across these bizarre little gems, remember that viewing them is mandator and they will be included in your final exam. I've paired 'em up and categorized 'em before ironing by boxer shorts.

Klepto Kids:

Junior Achievement - Joe and Bill (played by the always terrific Harry Morgan who portrayed the judge in Inherit the Wind, wasted several years of his live on Dragnet, and eventually found meaningful employment as Colonel Potter on MASH) investigate a string of burglaries that turn out to have been committed by a group of eight-year-olds working under the tutelage of a pre-pubescent super criminal/pathetic dipshit.

War on Christmas - It's Christmas Eve and Joe’s on duty because God hates his fuckin' guts. Anyway, the baby Jeebuz has gone missing from a church’s crèche. Instead of proclaiming a miracle, the priest calls in the heat. It turns out that the figurine was "borrowed" by some Mexican kid who promised JC that if he got a wagon for Christmas, he'd give The Son of Man(son) a ride in it. Whatever happened to opening your presents on Christmas Day and not Christmas Eve? WHYY, here in Philly, shows this episode every year on December 24th.

Baby (not Jesus) Goes Bye-Bye

Fat Donna - A woman finds a (live) newborn in a garbage can. The careless mother turns out to be Fat Donna. Much, much funnier than it sounds: honest!

Worst Tub Toy EVER - Joe meets a pair of young, clean-cut, middle-class. They live in a nice house, have a baby daughter... and they enjoy smoking pot. No, the baby doesn't smoke pot: just the parents. Joe gives the cannabis loving couple his standard talking to, and they just laugh him off. But who's laughing when the parents get so stoned at the kind of pot party where no Tupperware is exchanged that they forget to check on their daughter's progress in the tub. Now that's stoned! This is why I don't smoke pot. There obviously hasn't been any good baby neglecting shit around since 1968.

Sammy Davis Only Had One Eye, But He Gave Acid to the Children

You think you can pick him out of a lineup? - Someone is selling Acid on the streets of LA. That someone is Blue Boy. And why is he called Blue Boy? Because he paints half of his face blue. Duh. The highlight of this Dada masterpiece involves Friday showing people a picture of Blue Boy (with his trademark half-blue look) and asking them if they've seen him. One-by-one, the helpful citizens study the photo and say shit like "I dunno; looks kinda familiar" and "I think I may have seen him around, but I can’t be sure." Fuck me upside the head with a bazooka. I know this is LA in the goddamn late ‘60s, but were there that many people were running around with half their face painted blue that the locals couldn't tell them apart?

Tune in; turn on; and drop a load in your pants - Joe Friday spends an entire gawddamn episode debating a "thinly disguised" Timothy Leary character (Subtlety was never one of Dragnet’s strong points: the actor might as well be waring a name tag reading "Hi, my name is Timothy Leary"). When the guy postulates that he’s taken LSD over four hundred times and yet is just as sane as Friday, the audience is forced to agree, as we have all seem homeless people covered in their own feces who are every bit as sane as Joe Friday. Former captain of the Bumfuck Debate Team, Friday, counters that the faux-Leary has taken so much LSD that he wouldn't know it if he were insane. Touche! If you're crazy, you definitely think you're sane. And if you're sane, you might think you're crazy (which would make you kind of crazy, I guess), but you might also think that you are, indeed, sane. In Joe Friday's world, sanity can only be verified by a qualified third-party. And the only one qualified is, of course, Joe Friday.

Well, that (in roughly one thousand words) is why when I hear the word "Acid", I think of Dragnet. This is definitely not the case when it comes to my nephew and nieces.

To my twenty-one-year-old nephew, raised on a wonderfully inappropriate and exceptionally entertaining diet of violet video games and movies, acid is a corrosive material to be thrown in the faces of camp councilors in order to transform them, years later, into burley machete-wielding maniacs. Ah, the innocence of youth.

When my young nieces hear the word acid, they think of the Deoxyribonucleic kind (this must confuse them when watching documentaries about the Sixties). Before you say "Oh, that's so cute" you should probably know that my nieces are using their knowledge of DNA to build a mutant army with the sole purpose of enslaving you. If it weren’t for Bush’s War on Science, my nieces' school would’ve had enough money in its budget to fund their twisted experiments. Think about that the next time you call him "President Dumbass".

While we’re on the subject of DNA, we might as well talk about mine. A few of you might remember that I sent my DNA off for analysis a few weeks ago (although the majority of you are Chinese citizen who are only reading this site because it somehow managed to slip past your government’s internet filters). So what has my DNA been up to since then?

According to the Genographic website, my samples traveled to the Houston, Texas office of Family Tree DNA, where they were assigned to a batch and shipped to the Arizona Research Labs at the University of Arizona (I wonder if the people of those states are aware of the gawdless Evil-looshun work being done in their backyards). There, my samples were sorted by computer and allocated to a specific location in one of sample grids. In other words, my DNA was placed alongside the DNA of total strangers. All of our genetic paths had diverged over 200,000 years ago, but here we all were: together again.

Next, the cells in my sample were broken open by incubation with a protein-cutting enzyme. Oh, like I couldn’t have done that at home. Then a robot used silica-coated iron beads to extract my DNA. Fuck yeah! I've lived long enough to write that sentence! From now on, no matter where I go, what I do, or how shitty my life may become, I can always say "At least I’ve had my genetic material harvested by a robot."

After that my DNA was transferred into PCR (polymerase chain reaction ) amplification plate for testing using – get this, fuckers – another robot. Then a human (perhaps a cyborg) staff member used a computer program to assign a score to my sample. The computer generated score was reviewed by two additional cyborg laboratory staff members.

And the results?

Well, I should have those in a few days. In the meantime, you could always amuse yourselves by betting on my ethnicity. The smart money is riding on "run-of-the-mill Honky", but I wouldn’t rule out "Slav" "Mongolian" or even "Red Sea pedestrian". Let the wild speculation begin!