THE HO-RATIO

CSI My and Me, Me, Me, Me, Me – the HO-Ratio

I Googled: “I hate Horatio Cane” and got 34,800 results.
This didn’t surprise me, I have to admit.
God, Chuck Norris and Horatio Caine (Cane?) are all in the same league – only I don’t really hate God – I’ve never met Him yet – well not in a form that I can consciously recall. Besides, God is usually too busy supporting Blue Bulls rugby to waste His time with saps like me…
And believe me – I’ve given Horatio a full go. With the fantastic advent of PVR’s in this decade, I’ve taken to selectively recording the programmes that I really want to watch. And was CSI on that list? Yeah, I guess it kinda was for a while.
Grissom, y’see, had launched the CSI ship and his crew were an accessible and likeable bunch to my mind. I could even put up with Gary Sinise’s wooden style in the New York version of the show but when confronted with Horatio and his blonde sidekick with the Canadian accent (? – y’know words like home, road, boat etc. just don’t come out right) – I found myself cringing more than I had ever done through any single episode of The Office. Difference being, The Office styled itself on its cringe factor and made compelling watching - a testament to the genius of Ricky Gervais. But CSI Miami was taking itself seriously and the Ho-Ratio was something I’d never experienced before.
What’s up with that hands-on-the-hips-head-cocked-to-one-side-sunglassy-whisper he’s got going? I mean, Chuck Norris wishes he was Horatio Caine. Ho just assumes the position and delivers the whisper in his all-seeing, all-knowing, harbinger of criminal doom style that involves so much less exertion than a screech-accompanied roundhouse kick up the side of the head.
It’s a wonder the casting director didn’t spurn Morgan Freeman in the God role for Bruce Almighty. If he’d just watched one episode of CSI Miami, he’d have known right there and then the Almighty Incarnate was on the Florida set in the personage of one David Caruso and He fancied Himself as an actor.
The problem is, of course, that God can’t act worth toffee and should really stick to sorting out Universal catastrophes like GW Bush, global warming and Reality TV – stuff He’s qualified to deal with.
I mean He created all of that stuff (although I think GW and probably most politicians are the handiwork of Lucifer, who on second thought was God’s creation anyway so I guess He still has to assume responsibility for it all…)
It would probably explain why the whole planetary shooting match is going to hell if God/David spends so much time on the set of CSI Miami perfecting that terminally annoying fucking acting style(?)
I thought it might just be me until I did the Google thing and found verbose invectives in abundance on the Internet – collective souls who really couldn’t get through an episode of this crud without deleting it from the PVR or pacing up and down outside, contemplating taking up serial-killing (starting with the cast of CSI Miami) or at the very least starting to chain-smoke rather than facing Ho-Ratio's raisin-rumpled visage on the small screen.
I have a theory on David’s sullen, sombre thespian methodology: if he had to crack a smile, I reckon his face would get so lost in the wrinkled, desiccated skin created by this new expression that he’d never be able to revert back to the omnipotent husky sneer without radical surgery or something.
Horatio’s fizhog is the antithesis of Botox expressionlessness and it’s only his fear of moving too many facial muscles around that prevents any meaningful nuances from emerging. Hence his monotonous, monosyllabic delivery, dripping condescension and nauseating screen presence - a combination that makes you wanna just up and trash the tv to be rid of it...
The turtleneck in Ho’s case is no sweater, of course, it’s his actual wrinkly, freckly neck poking out from the oversized shirt collars, themselves encased in dubiously styled suits that look like Sonny Crockett rejects from the 80’s…
Being of the ginger type hair colour myself (but thankfully no actor), I ponder over the correlation between this pigmentation (Caruso, Norris et-al) and the abysmal acting abilities that accompany it. Is it mere coincidence or is it some cosmic law that ginger-haired men are always going to be fucking atrociously annoying actors?
I don’t know.
But you can rest assured that I will never tempt fate in this regard. I, for one, don’t suffer from a God complex.
Now go and do something useful while I practice my tap-dancing routine on the swimming pool…in readiness for my next audition…