Nothing shocks me anymore. I see people do the most outrageous, bizarre things every day, and I guess I'm just used to it. I wonder if Jerry Springer planned it this way.

It's like the stupid questions I get at work. They cease to surprise me, or even register. In fact, I am surprised when I don't get asked stupid questions. I still think they're stupid, of course, and I hope to God I never get so used to them that they start to seem reasonable and well thought-out. I still write down the exceptionally stupid ones, but when I get just a generally stupid one, I think I've started to file them away in my brain somewhere and not even think about them anymore. It's just normal now.

Click here to see my Stupid Questions Page!

I think you just get used to stuff that you're around all the time. Even stuff like the Backstreet Boys. But more than that, I think you can actually learn stuff, even when you don't intend to learn, just by being around it.

Like forensics. I grew up watching Quincy and then with M.E. Rogers on "Law & Order" and now "C.S.I." I think I have absorbed enough information to become a forensic pathologist with very minimal formal training. Or at least, I could become a TV forensic pathologist. One whose job was a lot more along the lines of confronting criminals and interrogating suspects, and a lot less like crawling around on the ground and picking up crap with tweezers and then looking at it under a dorky microscope. At least, I could do all this and totally rule as long as no one required me to actually know what the word "pathology" means. I guess I could look it up. Sometime. Like when I'm not watching "Sheena: Nekkid Jungle Woman", or maybe when the dictionary isn't all the way over there on the other side of the room.

Maybe it doesn't always work. I was in traffic court this week and I didn't feel like Jack McCoy.

It would be cool if it did work that way, though. I would be a doctor, lawyer, cop, and superhero. Married to Teri Hatcher, playing in a rock band, fighting terrorists single-handedly, and driving a '38 Auburn Super-Sport.

Maybe the point is that I know how to do all these things just from watching TV. Well, except for the "getting Teri Hatcher to marry me" part, which I probably never could have managed. I like to think that all television is educational, if not in a technical sense then at least in a personal one. I mean, that you can always learn about life and how to get along with people.

10) Never offer immunity for someone's testimony. When they're on the stand, they're going to confess to a crime and then you can't touch him for it.

9) Judges are sarcastic, especially when they're setting bail.

8) Rich people can get away with anything.

7) If you're interrogating a suspect and someone interrupts you with a folder in their hands, read it. This is one piece of evidence that you need to convict.

6) If you have to consult with another officer on a case, good cops will be on the street, and bad cops will be at their desks.

5) Brow-beat every witness. Even your own.

4) You can't prosecute based on the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice. But you can try.

3) If you offer someone a really good plea bargain, and they still insist on taking their chances with a jury even though they totally look guilty, then they're innocent. Start looking for new suspects.

2) Never lie to the police. They know.

1) Never, ever cut a deal.

One thing that seems to happen over and over, in books and movies and TV especially, and that is when people meet total strangers who look exactly like them. I'm not talking about cousins, like on "Patty Duke", or sisters like on "I Dream of Jeannie"; I'm talking about the new kid in school who looked just like Robbie on "My Three Sons" or the one who looked like Peter on "The Brady Bunch" or the three times it happened on "Gilligan's Island". It just happens. There's never any explanation for it (except the one offered on "My Three Sons", when the guys said "Scientists call it a 'Non-Genetic Duplication'," which is just another, stupider way of saying, we look alike, but we ain't kin to one another).

It just strikes me as an extraordinarily bad idea in the circumstance to play a trick on someone and switch places. First of all, because you don't know whose life it is you're stepping into, but most of all because you don't know what kind of bastard this guy's going to turn out to be and screw up your entire life. And yet these wacky sitcom characters never seem to learn.

Like "The Prince & The Pauper", you know, that old story by Mark Twain. It would be cool if you were the pauper, I guess, although I never really understood what the prince got out of the deal. But then, I've never been rich or famous or ruler of a country, nor have I ever wanted to be.

Going to bed.