News Bullets

• WJZ Baltimore has posted a new video interview with Hill Harper (Dr. Sheldown Hawkes), who recently was in Baltimore to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Hitachi has issued a press release trumpeting the appearance of its latest variable pressure scanning electron microscope in last Thursday's CSI episode, "Werewolves."

• It's not yet appeared on CSI, but I4U has an article on a Canadian startup company called HumanCore that has developed a revolutionary new human anatomy software program. It's being dubbed "CSI in a box" and will allow forensic investigators to digitally reconstruct a face from a skull in only 30 minutes.

• The Ventura County Star recently visited the real-life CSI department of Ventura County. "You don't submit something and within 15 minutes you have a DNA match," local police chief John Crombach told the paper, explaining the differences between television and reality. "I wish it were like that."

• Kevin Williamson at the Calgary Sun last week reviewed Four Kings, the new sitcom NBC has started airing opposite CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Calling the show a "misfire," Williamson was disappointed NBC wasn't able to follow up on My Name Is Earl and The Office with a third successful comedy.

• Radio Iowa notes that the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation is looking for a new director for its state crime lab. The department is hopeful that the popularity of CSI will make it easier to find a suitable candidate.

• Meanwhile, in Denver the police department has set up a volunteer CSI department. "It's gonna be a challenge but I like challenges," Brooke McCarty, one of two volunteers currently training with the DPD, told CBS 4 Denver.

• The New York Times this weekend published a retrospective look at Miami Vice, complaining that CSI: Miami "is a buzz-kill version of" the classic cop show starring Don Johnson.

• CSI has once again drawn the ire of the Parents Television Council. Founder and president L. Brent Bozell III of the organisation last week wrote about the inclusion of CSI's Thanksgiving episode in the E! Online list of "most icky moments" of 2005 television. "Some shows made the list because of the timing. CSI is a gross-out show most weeks, but on Thanksgiving night, they just had to air a plot where a man gorged himself to death, a scene watched by millions of Americans who had just over-eaten. Watching the technicians sort the unsavory contents of the dead man's digestive tract, making jokes about the "buffet" and commenting on the putrid smell of the partially digested hot dogs was too much for the turkey-burping critics."

• Asian TV site TelevisionPoint.com has posted a preview of last year's season finale for CSI: Miami, which is due to air on local station AXN soon.

• The Miami Herald recently described a CSI: Shark Fin program that's been set up as the result of cooperation between scientists at Nova Southeastern University and federal fisheries to bust a black market in fins using DNA testing.

• The Canadian Globe and Mail also recently visited a group of real-life CSI agents, who commented that the TV show "made them laugh."

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