Hojack, Lojack®, and SVU

I was watching last night's "Law and Order: SVU" with the lovely yet talented Mrs 618. The episode featured the terminally unfunny Bob Saget as the murderer, the ever-luscious Katherine Bell as Saget's wife, and the incredibly-underrated Bernadette Peters as the defense attorney. The episode also marked the return of Mariska Hargitay, back from maternity leave.

At one point in the investigation, Stabler (Christopher Meloni) discovers Saget had implanted an RFID chip in his wife's shoulder (probably inspired by this story from earlier this year) to track her suspected infidelities.

Stabler comments, "He invented a Hojack."

We both fell out laughing.

For those who are fortunate enough not to have to know what a Lojack® is, it's a "stolen vehicle recovery system", in which a transmitter is concealed in a vehicle. If the vehicle is stolen, police can track the vehicle to its location, enabling much faster recovery. Lojack says, on its website, that 1.2 million vehicles were stolen last year, or about one every 25 seconds. Once the transmitter has been activated (remotely, of course), cops in specially-equipped cruisers can perform, in effect, radio-frequency tracking and locate the car. One can readily spot the equipped cruisers: those are the ones with the four 18" inch antennas in a square on the roof of the car.

I can tell you, the Lojack® system works every bit as well as the manufacturer says it does.