Creative works with factual errors that so easily could have been checked and corrected

Reminds me of one I’ve mentioned in a similar thread and always drives me mad - Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing #46 “Revelations” in which Moore describes Sister Ann-Marie boarding a train at Leicester Square and going north through Camden Town station and then to Mornington Crescent. Camden Town is the station after Mornington Crescent! I will happily accept all the rest of the nuttiness in that story which includes stations and trains full of people somehow not noticing an evil warrior whose head faces the wrong way, Exocrcist style, but this won’t stand.
Drives me nuts especially because Moore claims to be so hot on the research for the Louisiana locale of his Swamp Thing stories yet here he presumably couldn’t be bothered to look in the back of a diary to look at a copy of the London tube map.

And m-w.com lists both pronunciations.

Back in the '80s, or maybe even in the '70s, the band Sparks had a song called “Upstairs” that dealt humorously with the functions of the brain.

When you want the art to start
You cue the left side and the art will
Start to flow and flow and flow
And leave a stain on all your carpets
When you want the intellect
You cue the right side and you can
Collect the Nobel Prize in person
Or have someone mail it to you

Apparently the rhyming parts of their brains weren’t working, and neither were the research centers.

I watched the film Black Dynamite a month or so ago (and thanks to whomever it was on the SDMB who turned me on to that). Aside from a few anachronistic phrases in the dialogue, it was very easy to suspend my disbelief and imagine I was watching a forgotten 1970’s film.

That is, until the exposition of a plot point depended on the area code of Topeka, KS being 785. Back in the 70’s Topeka was still in the 913 area code. It didn’t get assigned 785 until twenty years later.

They got so much right in that film, I was disappointed they got something so simple so wrong.

Not sure if it’s considered a “creative work”, but Who Wants To Be A Millionaire had a question asking “Which U.S. body of water was formerly known as the Sea of Cortez?” The correct answer is the Gulf of California, except that it’s completely in Mexico. The guy got it wrong, probably by eliminating the correct answer due to it not being in the U.S., and left without a word of protest.

A page runner in one of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers states “The jugular vein is actually an artery”. Uh, no, it’s a vein. The carotid artery, which runs more or less parallel to it, is an artery.

I was gonna say Dan Brown’s account of the origins, history & general purpose of the Illuminati in ANGELS AND DEMONS.

I don’t know why this one has always bothered me, because the show is beneath criticizing, but on The Facts of Life there was an episode where Charlotte Rae decided to take a class on Shakespeare.

One of the students, asked to role-play Juliet as a way to understand the character, says, “Well, I take poison!”

How could nobody in the whole production of the sit-com - writers, actors, directors, editors - not know that Juliet doesn’t take poison in Romeo and Juliet?

Whenever I hear QUIN-cee, Massachusetts, I cringe. There is no such place. It is, and always has bee, zwin-ZEE.

Bingo! I can overlook factual inaccuracies that are intentionally included for the sake of the story, but this was just sloppy ignorance and so it pissed me off and ruined the book.

Well, but there should be a special exception clause for placenames in Massachusetts. I mean none of them are pronounced how any sane person would pronounce them upon just seeing them written down.

In the end-of-the-world movie Deep Impact, a body (comet, I think?) is coming to land in the Atlantic, and the Eastern Seaboard of the US is “evacuated” to higher ground.

This is what I-66 was built for – originally it was intended to be a straight evacuation route from DC to the mountains. But it’s a commuter road now.

In the movie, one zillion cars are packed bumper-to-bumper, waiting to die (in other words, it looks like a normal rush hour with no comet). The protagonists can’t wait – so they pull over onto the shoulder and drive off down the shoulder to safety.

If for some unimaginable reason everyone else was being polite and not already crammed on the shoulder, there would be chaos as everyone deliberately pulled onto the shoulder to block our heroine (Tea Leoni) from getting ahead of them.

More to the point, due to conflict over previous agreements not to widen the highway, parts of 66 have no shoulder because the shoulder has been turned into a commuter lane during rush hour – which would certainly apply during mass evacuation as well.

I don’t expect filmmakers to understand every city’s HOV rules and peculiarities, although any local consultant would have laughed at this scene. But it’s just plain counter to human nature to posit everyone sitting nicely in traffic waiting to die so that one selfish rulebreaking car can run ahead.

I was once watching this movie about a giant prehistoric snake that was terrorizing a maximum-security prison in Antarctica.

They made a big deal out of the fact that the protagonist was super smart and well-respected, with a Ph.D. in Advanced Sciences.

Not only that, but our professor of Advanced Sciences had years ago written his dissertation about this prehistoric snake, even though by his own admission there was no evidence supporting his theory.

It was a beautiful film.

As long as they literally said his Ph.D. was in Advanced Sciences, that makes everything else OK.

At the end of Tommy Boy (I know), Chris Farley’s character calls his girlfriend in Cleveland and tells her that he’s at the Sandusky airport and will be home (in Cleveland) in a couple of hours. OR maybe it’s the other way around (he’s in Cleveland but headed to Sandusky). It doesn’t matter because:

A. There is no airport in Sandusky.
B. Sandusky is approximately 1.5 hours from Cleveland, only an hour from the western suburbs. He could have driven there faster than he could have flown, even if there was an airport.

It took me approximately 3 second to verify that there is still no airport in Sandusky. Not even a little landing strip.

The vaporization device in “Batman Begins” was an eye-rolller for me. You mean you’re going to use the giant microwave to flash-vaporize water throughout an entire city… without simultaneously cooking all the inhabitants? :smack:

An infamous one.

U2’s "Pride (In the Name of Love)

“Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky…”

Oops. MLK was assassinated at 6:00 p.m., of course. I’ve heard that Bono sings altered lyrics in concert.

IIRC, she drives onto the shoulder and turns around, heading back to the coast and her eventual demise. She doesn’t go around anyone.

I’m being yelled at to get off the computer, but I really wanted to reply to this one. Search “Young and the Restless” and “Ottawa” on google. The writers at CBS couldn’t be bothered to figure out that there’s no such thing as the WATERFRONT DISTRICT in Ottawa, and that getting to Quebec by boat is pretty much the most conspicuous way to travel.

The Alastair Reynolds novel Century Rain has a character from, for all intents and purposes, the future, who is visiting an alternate version of 1950s Earth. As part of his cover story he claims that he is from a state called “Dakota.” At first, I thought this was a deliberate plot point, and that some other character would call him on his ignorance and out him as some kind of spy. But, the other American characters in the novel never did, so I started to wonder if for some bizarre reason the Dakotas had merged in this alternate history version of Earth, and I spent much of the book speculating about what that might mean.

It turns out that Reynolds, who is Welsh, just didn’t realize that North and South Dakota were two different states.

In a detective novel I read a few years back, the protagonist talks about the another character erasing the information from a computer. She talks in great detail about how he dabs acid here and there on the circuit boards and how they sizzle and peel apart.

Except that’s not how you do it. It’s much simpler and takes a screwdriver. You remove the hard drive. Could they not afford a fact checker? They don’t have some geeky 14 year old nephew or neighbor?

John Sandford, Winter Prey. A plot point hangs on looking at a newspaper photograph (in other words, a halftone) under magnification to pull out a crucial detail. Know what you see when you magnify a halftone? DOTS.

Come on! Has Sandford never looked at a newspaper? I won’t read any more of his books, if that’s his idea of plot development. (I wonder if the copyeditor caught it but was stetted; I know that’s happened to me at least once when an egregious historical error that I caught was allowed to stand because it would have wrecked a character’s motivation to fix it.)