News Bullets

• Sara at the Adam Rodriguez Yahoo! Group recently posted some new information about Keeper of the Past, the American Film Institute student film the Eric Delko actor is starring in. In the film, Rodriguez plays Stanley, an image manipulation expert who is up against a fierce adversary in a media battle that will decide the outcome of a political campaign. "I believe we were lucky to get someone of [Rodriguez'] talent and experience to contribute to Keeper of the Past," director Alonso F. Mayo told the mailing list. "Adam was a trooper since I'm sure the conditions of a low budget short film are quite different from that of a network TVseries. [...] He put in a lot of himself in the project and brought the character of Stanley to life." Thanks go out to Elyse's for this!

• And Adam Rodriguez is calling on people to support an auction benefiting the Tsunami Relief fund. "Open up your pocket book, make a bid from the heart," he was quoted in a press release from the auction organisers.

• William Petersen (Gil Grissom) narrowly beat Jeremy Piven in the Chicago Tribune's Ultimate Chicagoan poll. Next, Petersen will probably have to take on comedian Bernie Mac.

• CBS has updated the official web site of the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, ditching the pure Flash-based format still in use on the Miami site, and instead adopting New York's hybrid style. The site contains the forensic tools & procedures handbook also available on the New York site, full summaries of all CSI episodes, and brief actor and character biographies.

• Jonathan Storm, television critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, looks at the amazing proliferation of drama shows, noting that scripted dramas take up 42% of the broadcast schedule. And even better, most of them are good, including the CSIs, which Storm noted "provide compelling variations on a sameness," and often provide "grins with the occasional body-part joke."

• The USA Network is scheduled to launch a remake of the classic crime show Kojak this Friday with a two-hour television movie, starring Ving Rhames. While Denver Post critic Joanne Ostrow liked the show, she wrote in her review that "the crime-scene gore feels too CSI-familiar."

• The Sun-Sentinel takes a brief look at the CSI board game.

• Australian television reviewer Ruth Richie recently had some rather harsh things to say about the CSI franchise. "Jerry Bruckheimer TV is consistently as bad as any Jerry Bruckheimer movie," she wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald. "The characters all speak in reprehensible sound bites. No wonder they hire good actors. Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes should be paid danger money, not for working in near darkness for the entire series, but for spilling such laughable dialogue with straight and strangely smug faces." Thanks again to Elyse's!

• And finally, two more stories were recently posted about students trying to emulate CSI by joiing forensic science classes. Susan Abrams at the Los Angeles Daily News wrote about students in the Regional Occupational Program offered through the William S. Hart Union High School District, while John Briggs at the Australian Mercury News wrote about 500 Australian students visiting the Rokeby Police Academy, ahead of the Tasmanian Police Expo. "Everyone who visited here seemed very interested in checking out the processes," Senior Constable Kim Jensen told the paper, after explaining several high school students how to take finger prints.

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