OMG. Every show set in Florida tends to get the feel wrong (except for Kath and Kim and The Glades, IMO) but this is ridiculous.
Anyone caught planting a Brazilian pepper anywhere in Florida would be hanged from the damn thing. We had one the front yard we cut down that grew back. Then we cut that down and doused it in gasoline and it grew back. Then we cut it down and ground the stump. And it grew back. We finally ended up digging down several feet to eradicate every trace of root and it’s been gone for 10 years now.
I’m still expecting it to grow back.
Such a simple and stupid thing to fix.
For mine, I’m thinking of Dexter, with its front plates on Florida cars and State / Assistant State Attorneys being referred to as District / Assistant District Attorneys. Florida doesn’t have DAs – we exclusively call them State Attorneys. And we don’t issue front plates.
I don’t suppose anyone can explain why Quincy, MA should be pronounced “zwin-ZEE”? That comment went right by, and nobody blinked an eye at the suggestion that it would be anything other than “kwin-see” or “kwin-zee”.
I have to agree with you here. I managed to correctly say the proper pronunciations, every time, for (among others) Swampscott and Peabody, and now I hear this? Forget it, I’m going to pronounce them all wrong on purpose just to watch my Massachusetts friends grit their teeth!
Robert Ludlum novels are rife with these. I could generally move past all the silenced revolvers, because that’s become such a common error. One just brought me straight out of the novel, however, and I haven’t picked up a Ludlum book since.
It was, I believe, in one of the Bourne novels, where our hero has to get somewhere really, really fast. He ends up in an Air Force plane with a pilot to fly him. It was either an F-102 or an F-106 (it was one of the Convair “Deltas”, I remember that much). I instantly thought, “wait a minute, those are single-seat fighters.” But then almost as quickly I considered that there could be two-seat training variants around, so it didn’t bug me all that much (it turns out there were in fact training variants).
And then the steward comes down the center aisle of the plane and brings our hero a cup of coffee.
What. The. Fuck?
You don’t need to be much of an airplane buff to see that neither the F-106 nor the F-102 are exactly spacious aircraft, with no room for a third person, let alone aisle, or coffee machine. It would have been so easy to either pick a suitable transport aircraft, or just eliminate the steward, coffee, etc. As I recall they were not necessary to the scene anyway. All you needed was to go to your local library and grab a copy of Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft. I haven’t read a Ludlum book since. Pulled me absolutely, 100% clear of the narrative.
Walter Wager did this in several of his novels. The heroine carried a .357 Magnum, but was always seen checking the clip. This was long before Coonan ever started building semi-autos for that round.
I was curious about this so I looked it up. There actually are some silenced revolvers although they are rare and difficult to make. For a layman’s overview of the technical issues:
There’s a series of urban fantasy novels that have the herione in one of the early novels cocking the hammer on her Glock. Made worse by the fact that according to her bio, she is a military brat and I imagine has had some exposure to a gun nut or two.
A nitpick but- in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods there is a mortuary in Cairo, Illinois run by Mr. Ibis and Mr. Jaquel who are, in fact, manifestations of the Egyptian deities Thoth and Anubis. It is said that the city has been named Cairo for thousands of years because it was actually founded by ancient Egyptians, and Ibis and Jacquel were instrumental in having it formally renamed that in the 19th century.
Shouldn’t have bothered me considering the already wild premise, but— Cairo in Egypt wasn’t named that in ancient times- it’s actually a medieval city. Also its name is Arabic- Cairo’s a form of al-Qahira- so it’s not an Egyptian name to begin with.
Another from Golden Girls (which I’m beginning to think wasn’t a very reliable documentary): when Rose is having a health crisis she goes driving at night and doesn’t stop until she gets to Tuscaloosa, AL, then she turns around and goes home and tells Blanche the attendant at the Tuscaloosa truck stop said hi (and Blanche recognizes his name).
The irritant on this: while it’s true Alabama’s a state away from Florida (assuming you don’t go to Georgia), Tuscaloosa’s 800 miles from Miami. Unless she was in a jet she didn’t drive 1,600 miles in one night. (Miami to Tallahassee or even the Okeefenokee- maybe.)
OOH! One of my favorite pet peeves. You’d think that fashion would be the ONE thing hollywood would get right, right? I was watching the pilot for one of the summer cop shows, the one with Piper Perabo (sp?) playing a CIA agent. In one scene as she walks away from one of the main male characters (a cute blind guy) he says (about her sexy, EXPENSIVE, clicking stilettos) “gotta love those kitten heels”.
Um. No, kitten heels are NOT stilettos.
This is less likely to be common knowledge for hollyweirdos, but shouldn’t be THAT hard to check. Like another poster mentioned, CSI. Primarily CSI Miami. They’re constantly showing different types of so-called “analyzers” which are, in real life, what are known as Rae Systems meters.
They are made to*** detect*** different substances. But they’re shown on the show as being some sort of magical portable “analyzers”. In one episode Callie is carrying one across a parking lot supposedly reading the amount of gasoline from a set of footprints left behind by a burn victim. First off, she doesn’t even have the meter on (you can hear the darned things running, they’re annoying, and when they DO detect something above the pre-set alarm amount, they give off an even more annoying high pitched beeping), second, she’s not going to be reading the vapors from the footprint itself if she’s holding the meter 4 feet above the contaminant source.
And in a large asphalt parking lot, in FLA, in the heat of summer, are you going to read hydrocarbons? DUH! ya think?
I’m a woman and just added a new term to my vocabulary. Now, wouldn’t stilettos and kitten heels sound pretty much the same? Both have a tiny print. Click-click-cliketty… it’s not like the blind dude has been touching her feet!
In the MAD magazine parody of Trapper John MD, they stated that Donald Sutherland played Trapper in the MAS*H movie. Sutherland played Hawkeye; Elliot Gould played Trapper. That would have been so easy to check.
I feel so sorry for my poor girlfriend, who while having lived significant portions of her life in the South was born and raised in the Northeast. She now hesitates every time she tries to tell someone about Concord Mills (a big shopping mall near Charlotte) because she knows that we don’t pronounce Concord the way folks from around Massachusetts do.
I’ve told her that it doesn’t matter to me personally, so long as she keeps her Beauforts straight.
In case you don’t know, the town in South Carolina pronounces the first syllable the same as the first syllable in beautiful, where others (including North Carolina’s) pronounce the same as the first syllable in Hugh Beaumont’s last name.
This might be the third time I’ve mentioned this on these boards, because it annoys me so much: a really bad one in Burn Notice.
Fiona is held captive by a bad guy who doesn’t believe she was in a Madrid at a particular time (1998, IIRC - post-EU, anyway). So Michael has to go back to Fiona’s flat, find her passport and doctor it to make it look like she has a visa for visiting Spain.
Fail! She’s an EU citizen and would not have needed a visa for Spain. No way at all, coming in or out from any other place.
I know that show has a lot of errors, but this one is REALLY bad and could have been changed so very easily by changing it to somewhere she would actually need a Visa for - Madrid wasn’t important in itself. And the woman playing Fiona is English and bloody well should have known. ‘Change this one word, please! I don’t need a Visa for Madrid!’
(Yes, Fiona’s Irish, not English, but the same applies).
Like scifisam2009, here’s one I’ve mentioned before.
In George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream, one of the vampire characters mentions that he’s no Dracula. The reference makes sense to us but the novel was set in the 1850’s. A vampire of that era would have said that he was no Varney. Dracula was published in 1897. Most people in the 1850’s wouldn’t recognize the name Dracula and those few that did would think of an obscure Balkan warlord not a vampire.
This makes me wonder if Reynolds might have read Harry Turtledove’s American Empire series. In that alternate history series, the South won the Civil War and one of the results of this apparently was that Dakota was admitted as a single state. It’s not explicitly stated as being a point of alternate history but one of the characters was a Congressman from Dakota. An American would recognize this represented an AH point but somebody from the UK might not.
I have seen various movies where they show cars with front plates for Kansas also, and Kansas has never had front plates. I can’t think of a specific one but it always irritates me when I see it.
I also become irrationally angry when people screw up alcoholic drinks or order them incorrectly on TV or in movies.
I don’t recall the movie, but I clearly remember Phoebe Cates walking up to a bartender and saying ‘vodka’ and the bartender doesn’t say a word, just gets her the drink, which I think was vodka on the rocks.
Really? Because when I was tending bar I would have been asking her if she wanted vodka rocks, neat, vodka tonic or what the hell, and if she wanted the well crap or a top shelf brand.
Another science fiction example is from John Varley’s Millennium (the novel not the movie). The main character, Louise Baltimore, is a time traveller back to our present era from several thousand years in the future. In one scene she meets somebody in passing and she says that she thinks he’s black but she’s always had trouble telling the difference between black people and white people.
Now that, in itself, is not a problem. It’s easy to believe that in the future the idea of race will have disappeared and people of that era will have a hard time figuring out our racial standards.
The problem, however, is that Baltimore is supposed to be an expert on twentieth century American culture and a veteran of numerous time travel missions to this era. Throughout the rest of the book, she’s shown working undercover in various times and places in the United States, interacting with people, speaking fluent idiomatic English, making pop culture references, using 20th century technology, all without ever slipping up and tipping off anyone she encounters. It strains credibility that she would know American culture this well and somehow have never figured out our peculiar views on race.
