"Da Kine. Da Fuck?"

1) I have a dreadful habit of watching episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter that I've already seen. 

Usually I'm two thirds of the way through an episode of Dog before I realise, "Oh I seen this one already I know what happens." By which point I think fug it I'll watch it again.

Because life is so long that we can afford to waste time like this can't we?

I was watching this one episode with a female perpetrator who in her mugshot had badly-drawn on eyebrows. It was as if they had been drawn on with a big black magic marker - via the tremulous hands of a blind man. And when I saw her mugshot and those magnificent brows, I thought, "Oh I've seen this episode." But I kept watching, rapt in my sublime forgetfulness, and Dog and Beth and family were nosing about this woman's home - which was really just a dirtshack complex on a remote backlot, but it was full of hidden rooms. Lots of ninja hidey-holes. 

I thought I was watching Shinobi No Mono for a minute!

Heh.

You didn't like that one, all right.

Anyway, the woman was a "meth-head" and (naturally) also a single mother of six, but she in addition stood accused of stealing somebody's dog. Like that episode when that "Bonnie and Clyde" team stole Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant. And so this time Beth goes, "What the fuck is this about you stealing a dog?"

"I didn't steal no dog."

Meanwhile Beth is, you can tell, trying to steal one of the woman's dogs herself. I know I've seen one episode where Beth actually did take the perpetrator's pet dog because she liked it and the perp was going to jail after all. So Beth is in the habit, let us say, of blithely taking other people's pets herself. And she was playing with this puppy on camera for ages. Lots of screen time for this one puppy. Eventually Beth had to reluctantly give the puppy back to the meth-head owner (who dully goes, "Drive safe now"), but you could tell that she had been hard at work angling to get the puppy for free. Like a child in a toyshop does - tries to get his or her parents to buy them something simply because they make such a public show of spontaneous fondness for it that the parents can't legally refuse.

Like my nephew in the Disneyland shop. He ran in there, sensing that the time was ripe to get gifts from the adults around, even when he didn't necessarily want anything. He wanted things in the abstract. He was picking up things willy-nilly and pulling a heart-tugging expression.

Beth was doing that very thing with this puppy, but it didn't work anyway.

And then she has the big brazen magnificent balls to accuse the perp of stealing a dog!

2) So then they have the perp on the backseat, and if you've read my earlier "posts" about the show in question you'll know that the backseat is a scene for a lot of soul-searching and hard questions. As the academics would say, it is a "site of radical cultural mediation and exchange." So as usual Dog and Beth are like Jay Leno, in that the first thing they ask the perp is if she's got any kids, and she goes "I had six, but one died."

And Dog, half-asleep and oblivious, goes, "And how old is she?"

"She WAS one-year-old -- WHEN SHE DIED in a car accident!"

So then, all tact and sensitivity, Dog goes, "Oh, da kine."

The fuck––?

"Da kine" is an old Hawaii word that doesn't have a set meaning and so can be said at virtually any times. Dog's company is even called "Da Kine Bail Bonds." And so when this woman tells him her daughter died aged one, all he can find in his human heart to say is, "Oh. Huh. Da kine."

One for the linguists, methinks!

"All My Sins Forgiven."

Dog.

Bounty Hunter.

What He Says.

Dog had a female mother-of-three "ice-head" on the backseat and was drilling her for her life story. He goes, "Talk story. Shoot."

For his troubles he got the usual crock-pot of gab and guff. Really a load of old rot. Baby Lissa was on the back seat with them rather than Beth, because - as Beth rightly says - Lissa has to learn what bounty hunters do if she's going to do this job. She has to participate in all parts of the job.

That was a really nice idea, Beth - a nice thought or emotion - but it didn't work at all because Lissa just sat on the back seat biting her bottom lip with her big Robin Gibb overbite. Her and her Dad together, they look like the Bee Gees sans Maurice (which is, after all, exactly what the Bee Gees are now). In fact Baby Lissa did on the back seat what baby Lissa does when she is in the bounty-hunting "field": that is to say, fuck all.

If she was a stray niece or a stepdaughter Dog would have kicked her off the team as quicky as he kicked off that weird drug ingester Justin, his wigger nephew; but since she is a flesh-of -his-flesh daughter he keeps her around and lets her slide along while Dog tells himself outrageous untruths about his daughter's mettle and efficacy.

Anyway they're all on the back seat and the ice-head stay-at-home-mom goes, "I was straight for fifteen years." Already at this point this had the awful ring of exhausted familiarity to me. "What started you off again," Dog mutters - scarcely interested himself.

"My father died," she said, and I thought then: "Haven't I heard this ballad before?"

Every time the perpetrators tell Dog how they "fell" there is always some sad story that mitigates the sin. It's like the American Idol auditions on the backseat there. (Did you see, incidentally, the recent round of American Idol auditions? People were seriously trying to wreak pathos from the fact that they had asthma. One girl who was in her late twenties complained to the panel that her parents had got divorced last year. She was a grown adult who lived away from home! Isn't it a statistical probability, by now, that the average American is the child of a "broken home"?) But this dead ur-vater motif... even Dog felt it was hooey, he goes gruffly, "Well, she admitted that she wasn't even close to her old man so it's just so much deflection of existential responsibility."

Then they arrested some worthless hoodlum gangbanger who was hiding in his mother's attic. The mother swore blind that Sonny wasn't there but she and all her swearing could not defeat the paranormal nose of "Youngblood" who says sotto voce to Dog, "I smell a female rat, cap'n, permission to go in?" Dog nodded in assent and sure enough they dragged the son out of the attic and the mother stood there coolly chawing tobacco as they did it. Like she was thinking, "Waal you got to try and beat the rap well innit." I laughed savagely - she had been shown to be a loathsome liar on television but it seems she didn't give a pfennig for the "television audience at home" or what they might think. She answered only to her personal genius of the hearth.

This seems the sign of the age - more people are appearing on television every day and they care less and less what the viewing audience at home thinks. This is not, as the anthropologists would say, a shame culture. Like: there are shows about overweight people where the contestants go through all manner of degradation violation and exposure and you wonder, "Do these people not have work-colleagues or schoolmates who will tease them to the point of suicide for this?" Maybe I grew up in a crueller time and place but we got teased for the smallest flaws in Sonning Common in the 1980s, I'll tell you. The averge schoolchild was both a sadist and a pedant, which is a critical hybrid indeed. And in that day there was no panel, with Randy, Simon and Posh Spice, there to sympathise because you had asthma or a weight problem.

You were simply given "grundies" and henceforth dispatched promptly with "bundles down the dip."

Anyway, I saw that and I thought, "My mum would have shopped me to the bountyhunter in a heartbeat and I am a better man for it." Mothers, don't commit perjury on television!

So they arrested the son, and there he was on the backseat and Dog is lecturing him against his anti-social affectation of carrying a loaded gun everywhere he would go. Then with that boring drivel out of the way Dog leans over and says, "What do your tattoos say?"

(I have seen this line used on the L train out of Bedford Avenue, only it was delivered on that occasion by a salivating old man leaning over a female hipster. Amazingly the girl was all too willing to describe at tedious length what her tattoos meant. I think this eventually, by dint of sheer boringness, fairly killed the lecherous old man's ardour and he abruptly returned to his introspective activity of "pocket billiards.")

Meanwhile the crook says to Dog that his biggest tattoo says, "All My Sins Will Be Forgiven" and he next tells Dog that he used to be "a dancer at church." Dog is suitably impressed by this. You could tell this by the way his eyebrows shot up. I was only thinking, "Since when do they have dancers at church?"

The mind boggles. What would the Reverend Cotton Mather say to hear this to-day?

And meanwhile Dog was all shocked, after all these years, still shocked that somebody who goes to church could at the same time be a gun-toting criminal.

This in America yet!