blood on the trajectory
One of the things that I enjoy about the “CSI” family of prime-time dramas is its reliance on technology and expert knowledge to explain how the cops solve crimes. I imagine most critical viewers realize that police computers use such stylish interfaces or the software is that sophisticated. I’m hardly an expert in anything, let alone police procedures, but it is funny when I catch them using putative jargon that’s just plain wrong. On “CSI: New York” tonight there was a close-up of the rear end of an arrow spattered with blood. Gary Sinise’s character declared, “There’s blood on the trajectory feathers.”
“Trajectory feathers?” I thought to myself, “aren’t they called fletching?” Of course, “trajectory feathers” sounds more like technical terminology, providing the appearance of expert knowledge on the part of the cops. I haven’t seen any reception studies of cops, but I wonder if they cringe at the inaccuracies of cop shows or they enjoy watching their profession portrayed on TV. I suppose that because police dramas have long been a staple of TV programming, there’s no excitement over seeing yourself on TV.
[…] I love the inevitable technobabble on many television dramas, and tonight’s “24″ served up a few doozies. The CTU agent Chloë O’Brien had escaped from holding and was helping Jack Bauer by accessing the systems from a remote location. A Homeland Security operative assured the station chief he could find her saying, “I can trace her physical location by examining the binary.” I thought this was laugh-out-loud funny, since even my puny English-major brain knows nearly any binary code would be practically useless. Chloë is certainly accessing the system through some kind of VPN system (or as she called it “a subnet”) which would encrypt the data. Looking at the binary would hardly be a workaround for encrypted transmissions. […]