"Entropy."

I am not saying that Dog the Bounty Hunter was ever actually a good television show, but I used to extract a scintilla of amusement, if not actual pleasure, from mindlessly tuning in & dropping out in front of it. Now even that feeble activity is a "diminishing return".

I watched the latest episode, from Norwalk in Los Angeles County, California, and Beth looked old and grumpy and wasted. She looked like a sack of potatoes. She was used-up. She looked like W.H. Auden's ballsack. Her old man, it hardly needs saying, looked like scar tissue on an over-done rump steak. These people been around too long.

"Been on the bum too long."

They will outlive us all.

Firstly, Beth has a lousy attitude. It's unchristian, it's uncharitable, it's plum wrongful.

Must do better.
Doesn't play well with others. 

She's rude, spoiled and unsophisticated. She's not a gal's gal-pal. She sees other women enter the room, and she instantly wants to humiliate them in front of the "male gaze". She is most "women beware women".  In Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet is discussed by Mr. Bingley's sisters, they are unfair to that honorable female. They would however be entirely correct if they were talking about Beth Chapman:

"Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, "is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex, by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But , in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art."

She is one of those people who they cover up their social awkwardness with a vocal show of authority –– which is to say, she is personally brimming with abrasive obnoxiousness. With her lousy attitude she should ideally work in a comic-book store. If she did that, I predict she'd go far.

Leland, meanwhile, is week-to-week (not to say bumper-to-bumper) being reduced to a glorified door-to-door salesman. He turns up in a cheap suit smelling of bad cologne and inquiring as he opens his suitcase up whether you would like to buy this body armour or that taser or failing these twain perhaps you'd like a gold-leaf-embedded King James Bible or a few stray volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica even?

"Would yeou like to buy a razor strop?"

The first twenty minutes was taken up with dull inventory, Beth inspecting the arsenal of this week's bailbondsmen and pedantically finding fault, then snapping, "Leland, fetch the samples." Leland wakes from his stupor to go out to the big black coach to get the suitcase. He looks like he hates the show.

In another scene Leland was coaching the bailbondsman CHRIS (who "looks like a doofus from Michigan" –– Beth) in how to talk to prostitutes on the phone. He said he was too "shy" and "inexperienced" to do it himself. There followed a tract of innuendo and joshing about who was more  plausible as a "john" to the Korean hooker they were chasing. Sonny was suggested, that useless fat pillock. He was rejected because he would have probably forgotten the plan and tried to fuck the hooker. So they decided on fat CHRIS, who worked at the Norwalk bail bonds shop. He looked like he might pass for a user of whores. A really nice thing to have said about you.

They were doing run-through conversations, role-playing. Leland kept doing the phone sound, quite straight-faced: "Ring ring ring ring ring. You say 'hello'."

FAT CHRIS: "Hello?"
LELAND: "Hello."
FAT CHRIS: "Hello, I'm around right now and I wondered if you and me we could hook up––"
LELAND: "Don't say 'hook up' to a hooker bro!"
FAT CHRIS: "Oh yeah! Uh, ... I was wondering if we could get together joo and me...'"
LELAND: "Okay that's better..."
FAT CHRIS: "What if she asks what I want to do?"
LELAND: "Bro I guarantee she won't bro."
But she did. Chris didn't get flustered, he shot back instantly: "Water sports!"

CLICK. She hung up.

Leland was baffled. "Why'd you say 'Water sports' bro?"
"It was the first thing I thought of––!"
"Funny that!"
"Hey you do it if you're such a nat'ral-born pro at talking to prostitutes!"
"Ah fuggew!"

They ended up tracking the lady-of-the-night to an apartment where she was hiding under some laundry. They pulled her out of the pile of towels and pants and took the flannels and socks off her head and frogrmarched her out into the streets.

Dog's soliloquy to the Korean hooker was a strange one. He said, "Get out. Run to the hills. Bad time a-comin'. Animals migrate [sic] when the water runs out. Your water's dry here. Why don't you make like a leaf and blow away. You won't see twenty-five the way you're going. Specially given the freaks in this State."
That's Michigan and California they've managed to offend in this one episode.

Later, in the SUV together, Dog and Beth found time for some of that patented schoolyard courtship ritual that is their "playful chiding exchanges":

B: Women have more stamina than men.
D: More stamina than––? Where are we talking about here?
B: Everywhere. You know exactly where.
D: Are we talking about––?
B: We are.
D: You think you have more stamina––?
B: I know it.
D: We'll see tonight.

Hideous imagery this exchange unavoidably conjures in our heads. A knock-down drag-out slugfest in their hotel room. Lots of wheezing and panting as these heaving, groaning octogenarians grapple and dully pummel each other around the bedroom. Ostensibly it is a love-match, but all affection, and all pleasure, left the venture in the first half a minute. They've been here five hours since. An exercise in willpower and endurance and sheer gnarled contrariness. A refusal to stay down. A refusal to die.

Much like this show and everybody watching it.

THOMAS RUGGLES PYNCHON.

"Have You Got Good Religion?"

Dog was looking for some no-account scofflaw and as usual he arrived too late to deal with anybody but the usual: some bumbling, halfwit, crooked uncle or father or stepfather or "gramps" (or "a sort of family friend"). The uncle (father) (gramps), naturally, swore that he didn't know where his nephew (or son) (or grandson) was. Dog respectfully called him a liar to his face and blustered deeper into the building. He hollered imperiously those immortal words, "Leland–– check the crawlspaces and under the bed."

By the way, these meth addicts always keep such messy places. You'd think they had no gumption! They should do a show about it. "Flip This Crack Den."

So Nuncy Grampy was playing his apportioned role (i.e., "too stupid to dissemble") ("too stupid even to fool Dog"), and he said, "I swear I don't know where he is. We don't even talk. Bring me a Bible and I'll swear on it."
Dog turned quickly and retorted tartly, "A meaningless remark! Who here can vouch for your good ties with your diocese? Who here can speak for your personal commitment to the Shavvat? Who shall attest to thy Christianly reception of Election and Grace? Who among ye can tell me if ye bathed in the blood of the Lamb? Have you got good religion?"
He then began to croon "Dem Golden Slippers."

No, none of that happened. The man made the remark about the Bible but Dog didn't even bother to respond.

They found the nephew/grandson/son in due course. I'd like to say they did so by canny sleuthmanship and excellent deduction but would you even believe me if I did?

Perp he had a fat estranged wife (of course) and while she sat blubbing to Dog and Beth hubbins was in the building next door frolicking and doing heroin with some nubile young drug addict a quarter his age. Strange how people live. He had his wife in the palm of his hand! He had his cake and he ate it too! I looked at this drug addict in his crack den with naked envy. As Joe Fagin sagely says, "That's Living Alright!"

When Dog burst into his secret crack-den love-nest, the guy was swooning on his feet. Half-dead on his feet he was withal full of junkie bravado. He rolled his eyes and bragged to Dog, "If you hadn't of surprised me like that I was gonna commit suicide by cop!"

Dog gave that all the credibility it deserved. He said, "I'd been knocking on your door for half an hour you nincompoop."

No –– he didn't. But she should of.

He should of said, "Suicide by cop? Brah, you ain't suicidal and I sure ain't no cop!"

I really ought to write some scripts out for this show. It'd be much better if I did.

Just a suggestion to the good people at Country Music Television.

At the end they had the usual Asterix-like banquet scene where they all dress up with the local bounty-hunter dynasties and they go to  Denny's or a Red Lobster or an Olive Garden and they prate platitudes at each other. Cacofonix in a corner tied up. This time somebody remarked plaintively, "What are our grandchildren's future?"

Never mind the essence and substance of the question, I stared at the TV for a few minutes trying to parse the sentence, see if it could conceivably have made sense.

Never mind I missed the answer to the riddle: that our grandchildrens' future "are" bounty-hunting.

This conclusion was almost as chilling as that episode of Parking Wars where the guy who tows illegally parked cars away in his truck went to his infant son's kindergarten and weirdly talked to his pre-school son through the wire fence. At the end of it he turned with a gruesome leer and said to the cameraman, "When he grows up he's gonna be like his old Dad –– a tow-truck car-remover!"

The child visibly blanched.

"The New Dog (and Pony) Show." Or, "Dogz is Not a Put-On."

Beth and Dog have a new show on the Country Music channel, called Dog and Beth On The Hunt. That's inspired. I only wonder why they didn't call it Dog and Beth Are Bounty Hunters Who Are Married to Each Other and This Is Their Programme in Which They Chase Petty Criminals.

It is sandwiched between episodes of a show called Guntucky. 

I used to say to my wife, "If you ever come in the apartment and I am sitting watching an episode of Psychic Kids, you are hereby granted absolute license to kill me roughly." Seasons passed and I updated this joke to include Sand Masters when that fine show blew onto our screens like a scirocco through the Gobi.

I now say, "If you ever come into the apartment and I am watching Guntucky, please kill me with violent prejudice."

In the "wake of Newtown," I wonder if the Country Music channel will come up with a spin-off called Gunnecticut. It seems like about as good an idea frankly.

Idea for a reality show on the Country Music channel: Kill Your Teacher (Praise Your Preacher) (Sing the Family Hymnal). 

The new Dog show, to return happily to my familiar subject, is rendered conspicuous by the absences of Duane Lee and Baby Lisa, both of whom strayed far from the reservation at the end of the old A&E season. Also Bobby Brown "peeled off" and went wildly AWOL and sued Dog and Beth and A&E. This was off-camera. There's a confusing testimony by him on Youtube though if you're at all interested by this. They should do a reality show about that reality show so we can find out what's actually going on. The Chapman clan do love their Bible-family circle-jerks, their praise-Chrast ring-a-round-a-Rosies, but these people clearly despise each other "off-camera."

That said, I was quite surprised that the spat with Duane Lee was genuine. I had been convinced it was a put-on, a narrative "arc" inserted artificially to drum up some viewership, to try and get some Ryan Seacrest Kardashian points. Apparently it wasn't.

Leland is still on the show, but it's like he's been lobotomized.
(In the voice of GARRY SHANDLING:) Yes, I know what you're saying: "Could you ever even tell if Leland Chapman had been lobotomized?"

This incarnation of the Dog and Beth traveling circus and farmer's museum has the vapid illusion of serving some didactic, pedagogic purpose. They are ostensibly going from state to state advising ailing bailbondsmen on how to pep up their lifestyles and also redeem themselves in the blood of the Lamb. They offer sagacious nuggets of brilliance, like: "You need pepper spray cause what you gonna do if your mace and your tazer fail you?"

Leland said that. He also advised the wearing of gloves because, "You don't want somebody's tooth embedded in your knuckle when you go to punch them in the face."
They went out on a shooting range and Leland basically told them to point their guns at the targets and pull the trigger. "That's correct. Very good."

The sadness and loss felt by Leland was palpable. He told the two trainee bounty-hunter troglodytes, "You go round the back."

The back, the going round of it, that was Duane Lee's old spot, his old routine, and you could see in Leland's sad, wounded eyes the personal pain of losing his brother. He chose the Yankee dollar over loyalty to his brotherman.

He tediously explained the philosophy of sending the man round the back of the house thusly: "We wanna surround the house. So: this is the house..." [Here he traced with his finger a square shape. Then, pointing to the sides of the square...] "We go there, there, there."   

Beth was teaching the new generation of dumb fucking working stiffs too. She said to the stereotypical white-trash/trailer-park glam-rock/cyber-gonk secretary, "You got the bounty-hunter spread-sheet?"
"Nope."
"Gotta get it sistah. Gotta get that spreadsheet brah."

Another time to protractedly demonstrate their resourcefulness they had an interface with a fat bearded guy in spectacles over their computer and he looked up a name and address from his computer database. The trainee bounty-hunters looked on in awe, like the first cavemen to behold a fist hatchet, and Beth simpered smugly and said, "You too can be an ace sleuth like us if you sign up to this guy's list."

The idea is like "Chef Ramsay" coming to a restaurant and pillaging the staff, finding gunk in the freezer and acting like it's still shocking to his superior sensibility. Then the coming up with fatuous solutions.

It's good to see then that the old repartee is still there:

BETH: I'm gonna slap yer.
DOG: Whatever.
BETH: Duane I like. Dog me no likey.

All the old hits, they're back, lovingly revisited for a new "new country" audience.

Incidentally, is the Country Music channel known to be a shit-kicker glue-sniffer redneck ultra-rightist channel? I'm only asking because the tone of this first episode was not in the past tradition of eggshell-walking and fence-building, like when Dog would daub on face-paints to protest the many sufferings of the gay/lesbian/bi/curious/transvestite/transexual community, or when he gingerly went among the African-Americans and blunderingly, urgently attempted to make social reparations for his past gaffes.

In this episode they went fiercely and unrelentingly after the Native Americans with some considerable savagery. I didn't know if I was watching Dog or Hell On Wheels. Is it okay to go after the red man? You naturally wonder if their old A&E editors silently, and wisely, edited out all the awkward and costly Prince Philip-style political blunders the Chapmans made, while the new editors are such corn-pone neo-Nazis they don't bother about it.

Dog's mind seems to be drifting. Never mind that his skin is bright red and his hair bright yellow. I shall say nothing of that except he looks like a traffic light without the green lamp. His mind is almost visibly dwindling, almost as deleteriously as his golden ("bright yellow") locks of hair. Several times he'd be knocking on the door of the perp, gun in hand, banging and hollering and then he'd turn and say, "What's his name again?"
("Who am I? Where am I?")

He was at the door, rocket launcher in hand (I should note that this gigantic Rob Liefeld-esque bazooka only pumps out hot air as far as I'm aware– that or wiffle balls) and a four-year-old child answered the door. Dog bellowed at the child, "Where's MAURICE, you black-skinned crook?"

The perp's actual name was "Marquise Cooper," but Dog would insist on calling him Maurice. "Come out bruddah. Come on Cooper. Come on Maurice."

Later there was a trainee working stiff called LUMUMBA (he actually solved the crime single-handed despite the Chapmans' "help") and Dog insisted on calling him "LUBUMBA" which became "La Bamba."

They were sent to another address and then doubled back to where they were and Dog got confused and hare-brained ("hair-brained") again. "Can you see the house we were just at, Leland?"
("Where am I? Who am I?")

They caught "Maurice" and he wept on Dog's breast and Dog cradled his head and kissed him tenderly above his ear.
"What did  I do, sir?"
"You failed to appear in court."
"NO! IT CAN'T BE TRUE!"
Not having been on television before, Maurice was hellbent on chewing up the scenery with a "bravura debut." His seemed to be a hysterical over-reaction to the bald fact and Dog, always professional, coolly parried it:
"Don't get crazy son. You just missed your court date."

Soon the perp was on the back seat, becalmed and kittenish and on the phone to his fat trash ex-girlfriend. Still chewing scenery but focussed now. When she picked up the phone the camera was there,  and she wanted to be seen on-camera to be taking the initiative and so she shot in first, "I'm done with y'all." Because "Maurice" was on the backseat of Dog and Beth's SUV, he of course was more interested in peaceable solutions and so he crooned some blues about loving her and Chrast and family and flag and the great state of Guntucky too.

They went after another perp on the same show. Quite honestly at any moment I wasn't sure who they were after or why. But they were talking about the aunt of a perp and Dog said, "She's straight, the Auntie?"
His trainee stuffed-shirt goes, "Straightish."
Nice definition of the people on this show.

For this new perp, Dog got all sneaky. He noted, "He's very fast, he's smart, very paranoid so to get close enough to capture him without him noticing us first is going to be the difficult."
So what they did was they all piled into Dog's gigantic black tourbus with his name and a blow-up of his badge on the front, and they "snuck up" on him in that.

Dog refers to the senior bailbondsman, the scatterbrained honcho they're there to assist, as "The Old Man," 'cause he's all red in the face and can't remember shit by now.

These bumbling amateur bounty-hunters they are assisting have to provide on-camera testimonials about how Dog, Beth and Leland are all helping them in finding crime-solving solutions to knotty problems. It's exposition, it's propaganda, it's boring viewing.

I query the point of this episode. So these stiffs had to call in Dog and Beth for this "knotty konundrum"? All they did was ask the perp's "Auntie" and then his fat ex-girlfriend and they sang like canaries and gave him up trussed up like a Christmas goose. Come to that, the guy was driving up and down the one strip in town in a bright red truck with a pair of silver bollocks affixed to the back bumper! Hardly a case for Holmes!

Then again, "The Old Man" (one HANK BAYLESS -- Hank CLUELESS I said) was about as useless as tits on a warthog. He'd say about every stiff, "This guy is a pain in the ass and I have haemorrhoids bunched up like grapes in my asshole." He whined, "He don't wanna get caught." Well who does, bounty man?

Boba Fett you ain't.

Hank Bayless is retiring though. Depressing thought. I paused the DVR and looked at the old defeated codger and thought, "What are you going to do with the rest of your life I wonder, you man?"
Death is depressing. it clearly casts a dreary pall even over life.

Leland broke into the house and said, "We're comin' right for ya now ese brah."
Dog said that the fugitive was "hanging on his coattails."

Dog on the informant: "We don't know his name?"
The trainee-stiff replied, "No, I can't remember his name."
There was a pause and Dog coughed awkwardly and went, "Mmmmm. Okay. Look, next time write his name okay?"

[...]

Then he goes,  "Who we after again?"

I answered the TV at this point, thusly: "I have no idea."

"Book 'Em, Leland, Murder One."

Dog was on Hawaii 5-0. 

It was purely a sinecure, like most things on TV, but Duane still blundered wherever he feasibly could.

Pure puppy puffery. There being no show left to promote, he was promoting the nebulous brand of Duane Chapman. Life exists henceforth in stolen chances at advertisements. The prologue, never hereafter the denouement.

Now you should know this: the two lead actors in Hawaii 5-0 are almost identical -- one is just a foot shorter than the other one. One of them is the son of James Caan. I saw him once in Joan's on 3rd Street. Both are lantern-jawed sandy-headed dependable, stand-up meathead heartland homeland good-old-boy shitkickers. This must be confusing for viewers I would think. Still, it seems American viewers have voted with their feet and it has been decided that the people must have plenty of sandy-haired, square-jawed, two-fisted cannon-fodder types. File alongside the ubiquitous feisty hispanic female, the corrupt Irish-American uniform cop, and the dogged African-American law official. 

In his scene, it was highly unrealistic because Dog wrestled the poor perp (nearly wrote "poor poop") to the bonnet of a car. When, in the history of the world, has Dog ever directly attacked a perp? He always has Leland do it, while he stands about paring his nails before donning a delightful pair of lace gloves. Remember when Leland punched the shit out of that guy on a motel forecourt?

"We beat you to it for once! Ah-ha!" Dog beamed at the cops, trying to pretend he was breathing easy inside his whalebone girdle. Coughing away a coronary. As his "chestal thorax" goes into "arrest" and he goes through the "seven stages of denial." He made a peevish little allusion to that tried, trite old routine whereby the cops always ruined a perfectly decent episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter by arresting the quarry before Dog's ingenious, intricate plan reached fruition.

I fast-forwarded over this supremely dull programme looking in vain to see where Dog popped up again, but he didn't. It veered next into a storyline about roller-derby MILFS -- and so on. After this, bedlam. The show seemed to be roving all over the place, in fact, in its frantic search for a plot or a way to stop the viewer walking away in boredom. This must explain the very apogee of desperation: having Dog appear on an episode.

This week the guest is Jimmy Buffet.

"Yelp."

This was from a Yelp review of Da Kine Bail Bonds Company. I don't know whether it is authentic but it sounds it. 

After all wouldn't you shoot some dude in the face if he stole your purple drank... brah...? 

I did not have a good bail bonds exp. with this company. I am not sure if they are only worried about their tv show, and not their customers but this seemed to be the case.
I had to bail my mother out of jail because she shot some dude in the face for stealing her purple drank.
Worst interest rates eva
How bout that one, brah?

"Living It Up At The Cock Fights."

"He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos."

JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses.

I was watching a Dog the Bounty Hunter episode which I knew I'd already seen, which is - as I said yesterday - not far different from giving up altogether and freely, deliberately, frittering away your God-given life. It is not far different, I say, from cocking a pistol into your lower jaw and spinning the barrel playfully then pulling the trigger just to see what might come of it.

Anyway, that happened and this episode involved the team chasing a slippery character who goes by the colourful name of CHESTER CHRISOSTOMOS ("gold-mouthed," I thought, a good and dutiful scholarly "spalpeen" and remembranceful reader of James Joyce), who had retreated to the deepest darkest wilds of Hawaii. He had, in the idiom of his confreres, "dug in."

This man CHESTER GOLD-MOUTHED withdrew from society not - like Thoreau - to be closer to his thoughts and God-in-Nature, but to partake in low gambling and cock-fighting. He found a certain rural transcendental calm in bloodletting and mayhem.

The team busted in on one of his associates out way out in the wilds and the guy had dead chickens all over his yard and was actually wearing a baseball cap that said "COCK FIGHTING". The man goes, "I am not involved in cock-fighting."

They didn't find Chester. He had a way of disappearing into the night.

So on day three or four, Dog announced to the camera his revised methodology: "The plan is the boys are riding the motorcycles down in there, Baby Lisa's parked out at his mother's house and Beth and I are going to be up on the ridge." Then, without a trace of irony, he said: "We learned this tactic from Custer."

Their enterprise was about as successful as Custer's. Baby Lisa abandoned her post to use the toilet and the thing fell apart from there. "We're kind of stuck here," Dog admitted, "so we've got to try to make a possibility out of the impossible."

This seemingly involved them browbeating Chester's girl CARLA to no avail, then blundering aimlessly through the brush. At one point Dog picked up a breeze-block and hurled it into a bush. I thought, "What if Chester Chrisostomos had of been in there? He'd of been killed." The methodology further involved Duane Lee and Leland building plank bridges and falling into quicksand. The A&E website amazingly has the transcript of this episode, which includes this wonderful exchange, which since we have the apparatus I simply must quote liberally from:

00:54:16	Right now we found this freakin' pig farm, we can't find a way to get around it.
00:54:20	There's a big, huge moat.
00:54:22	We got Leland going to go get a plank, and then we're gonna drop it like the military and freakin' attack.
00:54:31	Go, just bounce like a rabbit.
00:54:33	I'm right behind you.
00:54:36	( laughing ) Are you going ?
00:54:44	No way, bro.
00:54:48	Okay, you guys, it's getting dark.
00:54:50	We gotta put this on hold until tomorrow.

As you can plainly see from the transcript, they conclude their "methodology" - as usual - by going home as soon as it gets dark. It's really a pity that they stop at sundown, so they can put the kids to bed. Because as I have established in a previous essay, most criminal enterprise tends to take place after sundown. Maybe this is another tactic cribbed from that master strategist CUSTER.

In the interests of brutal honesty they really ought to show the scenes at home after a day of bounty-hunting, after the Chapmans have "clocked off," and everybody is sitting in the TV room watching TV. Like that scene a few weeks ago where they showed Duane Lee dolefully watching Storage Wars. Gary Boy stuffing his face with too much pasta. They could have ingeniously juxtaposed these scenes of domestic calm with orgiastic, bacchanalian scenes of Chester living it up at the cockfights. Chester with a chicken's head in his mouth, blood around his jaws as he heaves on an ice pipe.

[...]

As I mentioned, I had seen this episode before, but happily I couldn't seem to remember the ending. How they caught the bad guy and such. Usually I remember some sweet peculiarity from the arrest and the corollary Backseat Redemption Scene. This time I couldn't remember any such thing. It became clear why not in the last minute or so, when it turned out that one night, while the Chapmans were innocently dozing watching TV at home, the police burst in on Chester's rural compound and arrested him. It was one of those episodes, where they lost out to the FILTH. The police, it seems, don't play fair. They have an annoying habit of going after criminals even after the sun has gone down.

[...]

I wonder how much they pay per hour for somebody to transcribe the dialogue from an episode. It'd be a lot of fun I expect and you'd certainly improve your written English as you worked.

"The House Always Wins."

Sometimes in your day, in your life, in your soul's reeling arc betwixt the vault and the precipice, you have to simply listen to some good old kkkountry gold on the stereo of your shitkicker flatbed truck. And when you stop, as stop ye must, you have to stroll over to your foeman's front porch, where your foeman lounges in a hammock, and you got to spit a plug of tobacco in your foeman's face and smile as the juice drips down your foeman's chin.

Other times you have to watch an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter that you know that you have seen before, even with the knowing that thy term of natural life on this firmament is perishing by the second.

Why because it's good and it's righteous and it's right and it's goodly and it's kindly and it's not ungood.

This lunchtime I watched an episode where Dog was going after an inveterate gambler, one Kristine Lau, and this provided the premise and the impetus for round after round of gambling metaphors from Dog.

"She's a gambler. So are we. We're gamblers. It's gonna be like chasing ourselves. Because bounty-hunters are gamblers. Every time we take on a bond we make a gamble. Right?"

The camera then shows Leland with his lips parted. You can almost read his mind:

"...? Whaddid he just say? We're gamblers now?"

Nothing daunted, Dog kept the thematic zingers coming. "We're The House. She's the gambler. She's bet she can outrun me. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."

Now Dog had narrowed his focus. He wasn't going to keep making broad gambling metaphors. He was going to refer to himself and the team henceforth as "The House".

This is not to say he didn't experiment with other, equally confusing figures of speech. At one point, to punctuate a lull in the narrative, he growled "We're here. We're live. This isn't Memorex."

Bad metaphor for the digital age, Duane. You're making yourself look old - obsolete.

Then he resorted to that classic trope of American folk rhetoric, willful exaggeration. Speaking of his quarry's dwindling options, he asked facetiously, "Where they gonna go, the ocean? They gonna rent a submarine to get away from us?"

He was on rare form in this episode. It was, I should note, from maybe six or seven years ago, when the world looked young and hopeful and a bard was inspired to heights inconceivable today.

Dog's methodology had been typically bewildering. In pursuit of Kristine Lau they had decided to be as blatant and cumbersome as possible, effected by blundering raucously into all the illegal gambling dens and asking the staff bluntly "Ya seen her?" while brandishing her mugshot. Amazingly, when this didn't turn up any results, Dog seemed genuinely surprised. He was at a loss as to how it could've not've worked.

As time ran out the bounty-hunting team would go to the car parks of these strip malls where the gambling dens were and saunter around like Union Square protesters, ostensibly scaring off custom. I think the quaint idea was to embarrass her into submission. This didn't seem to be working either, especially because come about ten o'clock at night, when most gamblers are still eating breakfast, the Chapmans got tired and went home.

They were knocking on a gambling den door one evening when they received a call from their own office that Kristine Lau was there and had given herself up. Not one to underplay the moment, Dog still got right flustered and acted like they were in a race against death itself to get back to the office before Kristine Lau changed her mind. He was all animated in the SUV, bouncing up and down on the back seat, one second chiding Beth for her driving then chuckling with glee "The House is gonna win!"

As usual when they got to the office the arrest was totally mundane and everybody calmed down immediately.

Nevertheless, Dog had room for one more gambling metaphor in his summing-up segment: "In a gambling perspective you win, lose or draw. This was a draw."

Here he paused, and I thought he had finally laid his flirtation with the device of The House to rest. No such thing. He grinned his pure kkkountry gold smile and resumed:

"A draw in favour of The House."