Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

It turns out that SDB is a one-time fan of the show Emergency!, that terrific 70s drama about the adventures of a pair of paramedics and their fire department, as well as the tribulations of some of the doctors at Rampart General. That was a great show, and I distinctly remember hustling home each day the year I was in second grade to catch the 4:00 re-run of the show on TV. (Which was followed at 5:00 by Star Trek.) Being that age, I had no idea that the show was partly mainstreaming the idea of paramedics. Who says TV is useless?

One of my favorite bits of Emergency! lore comes in the film Wayne's World, which many people assume to be just a dumb teen-type comedy -- but it's full of jokes that only people of a certain age could possibly get, such as when the perpetually-drunk background character is about to "spew", and Wayne yells, "We've got to get him to Rampart!" When I saw that movie in the theater, at that moment everyone over the age of twenty laughed, and the kids just kind of tittered along, the way they do when they're in the presence of something funny but they don't get it.

For some reason, the episode of Emergency! that always sticks out in my brain is one where the guys respond to a call where a person who has eaten something like nineteen hamburgers for a contest has passed out. One of the guys says, "Well, I guess he won", whereupon another guy standing nearby says, "Nah, I did. I ate twenty." The paramedic asks, "OK, how do you feel?" and the guy kind of shrugs and says, "Kind of full."