Breaking Bad in real life?

It's either life mirroring art or art mirroring life.

I received a voice mail message from an unidentified man alerting me to his startling discovery: Jason West, the UC Merced graduate student deputies say was making meth, got his idea from a TV show.

The man, who I suspect may have been smoking some stimulants himself, couldn't remember the name of the show, except that it was about a high school teacher in New Mexico and on channel 63. He repeated those facts for about three minutes.

A Google search of "tv show cancer chemist new mexico" led me to "Breaking Bad," a show on AMC about a high school chemistry teacher who gets lung cancer and turns to making methamphetamine. It premiered in January 2008.

"It's amazing," the caller said. "I didn't know anyone would take it seriously."