What I’ve Learned from Law & Order:

In New York City, eccentric senior citizens watch the street.

When a suspect discovers that the jig is up, the appropriate accompaniment is a single note sustained over several measures, followed by a second sustained note, a minor third below.

Proper Courtroom witness examination--

Incorrect: “Mr. Fishbein, you’re just a pus-filled bottom feeder who snacks on the entrails of women he’s raped and murdered.”

Correct: "You’re just a pus-filled bottom feeder who snacks on the entrails of women he’s raped and murdered. Isn’t that right, Mr. Fishbein?"

When you first interview the family of a victim, none of them can imagine why anyone would do such a thing to their spouse/child/uncle/Shetland pony.

The carpet fibers in your floor match the carpet fibers in over four million cars in the tri-state area.

If you’re planning a crime, never smoke cigars, drink alcohol, wear a fragrance, or use a wallpaper, that is only carried in one store.

The mob is vicious, but mobsters do not use foul language.

If you give a cop a muffin, he will talk about his digestive system.

Building supers have had enough already.

Psychologists think everyone’s innocent.

Some law enforcement officials enjoy the occasional aperitif.

Never screw with a rich Jewish grandmother.

If you are the cousin of a neighbor of the chiropractor of the parents of a suspect, and you don’t cooperate with the police, you can be charged with manslaughter, and spend ten years in jail, even if it means your eight year old asthmatic daughter will grow up without a mother.

Wise up. If you’re willing to tell an unsavory character where another person will be at a certain time, don’t be makin’ with the excuses later on.

If you ever get in trouble, you may safely assume that you are the most memorable character your waiter has ever met.

If a single, lone lunatic police officer lures, guns down, stabs, fellates and sets aflame an entire neighborhood of innocent New Yorkers, every other NYPD officer will need to be restrained from punching out the two detectives assigned to investigate the guy.

Try to avoid humorous meals, in case you are ever autopsied.

There’s no guarantee that you’ll get that job in the D.A.’s office, but a modeling career will help your resumé.

If a judge is acting like a horse’s hind side, find out who paid for his/her summer house.

Nobody every buys pesticide just to kill bugs anymore.

People who casually drop French words into conversation are guilty. Bien sur, but how guilty?

Easiest way to get killed? Hop onto the Internet.

Everyone knows you’re wearing a wire.

Painters, orchestra conductors, research professors, novelists, and professional athletes do these jobs as a way of channeling their constant desire to murder everyone they see.

Surgeons would think they were God, if they could live with the demotion.

Liberals are suckers. Rights activists are blowhards, and feminists live for revenge.

New Yorkers are remarkably versatile. It’s not unusual for the same person to be a Broadway usher witness one week, pop up two weeks later as an insurance executive with a file the detectives need, only to re-emerge as Bayside’s #1 pawnbroker who’d better turn over evidence or the whole store will be closed for a month, in the season finale.