On Fri, 7 May 2010 21:25:55 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

So I'm watching CSI:NY the other night. The CSI's determine that there
is a body buried in a concrete slab at a construction site.

One of the characters is Dr. Sheldon Hawkes. Here's his character bio:
"Hawkes is a Medical Examiner with the NYC Office of the Chief Medical
Examiner (OCME). He was a child prodigy who graduated from college at
eighteen, and by 24 he was a fully board-licensed surgeon."

Guess what? Hawkes is also pretty good with one of these:

http://www.arpielleequipment.com/pro...ges/cc6500.jpg

To extract the body and take it back to the lab, Hawkes gets behind
one of those bad boys and cuts a perfect rectangle around the body.
These CSI guys can do anything!

They take the huge slab back to the lab and Hawkes begins to extract
the body with - ready for this? - a Dremel tool!

I was laughing my arse off.

CSI is something else again. That's certainly the best use of a
prodigy, a medical exxaminer. Not.

I've been to the NY Medical Examiner's office btw. It's a whole
building, 5 stories or more plus a couple levels of basement, and
pretty wide on First Avenue around 24th St. I guess they do the exams
for all five boroughs, the whole city, although I'm not sure of that.
I went there to watch an autopsy, but when I saw the guy, and he was
about my age, early 20's, I didn't like the idea so much. Years
earlier I'd seen an hour or two of an autopsy of a an old woman, who
died pretty much from natural causes, and I decided one autopsy was
enough. So I left and came back two hours later for my roommate.
(The earlier autopsy of the old woman, wasn't so bad, because she was
old. One interesting thing is that she smoked, and her lungs were two
colors, sort of pink in the center near the bronchial tubes, and the
outer circle, half the radius, much more than half of the volume, was
dark brown or black, without blood circulation, maybe even dead (I
don't know) but not rotting because it was inside her, because of all
her smoking.

I also had a law course taught by the Acting Chief Medical Examiner of
NYC. In forensic medicine or forensic law or whatever it was called.
How medical things related to the law. It was a pretty good course,
and really interesting, except for three class sessions. At them, he
showed slides of traffic accidents for almost 3 solid hours. About 30
minutes into the first class, I decided that I had already known
traffic accidents were bad and I wasn't learning any more than that
and I left. The next class I left after a minute or so of slides,
and I thought people would follow me, but none did. The third class,
I left after a minute or so, and again no one followed me, and if he
finished the slides and went back to course work, I don't know. I
think I got a decent grade in the class but the whole story would be a
lot better if I had actually graduated law school. I don't know if
the other students were more callous than I was/am, but they seemed to
me to be ready to pay any price to graduate with good grades, and were
afraid to walk out.

Though I still think they were bad for me, for my mental health, to
look at even the first half hour, I actually forgot most of the
pictures pretty quickly. But there is one I stilll remember 40 years
later and though it doesn't make me a safer driver, it still makes me
sick to think of. And while I thought the ACME was a very good guy in
a couple ways, and nothing wrong with him in all the other ways, and I
can see showing a half hour's worth to make us safer drivers, I still
wonder what would drive him to show 3 hours' worth. I think he taught
the same course for one semester every year.