The scene where the character sees the blue police lights approaching takes place in Maine.
The Green Mile has someone saying “Avon calling.” The Green Mile is set in Florida in 1932. Avon was trademarked in New York in 1932.
King needs a good fact checker.
This is one King did do the research on. Avon began selling products door to door in 1886. And the Avon name was first used in 1929.
If Google Ngram is correct, “get a life” became popular in the late 1980’s:
Almost certainly, the thing that really caused the phrase to take off was William Shatner’s use of the phrase on the December 20, 1986 broadcast of Saturday Night Live. My memory is that I knew the term when Shatner said it during the original broadcast. This would seem to imply that it’s somewhat older than that.
This thread is far to anal. I cant imagine the hyperventilating when some find out that time travel didnt first happen until 2294.
Most that I have seen and all the ones I have used.
Hate to say it but King seems to have lost it after the accident. None of his later works have the same quality. I still might pick this one up but maybe not.
Also, A Christmas Story isn’t a documentary of what really happened to young Ralphie Parker on his best Christmas ever, it’s old Ralph Parker/the narrator’s memories of his best Christmas ever. Memories are not perfect, and this also is why the movie is impossible to place at a particular year. All the stuff may have happened to Ralphie, but unlike how he remembers it, it didn’t all happen the same year.
I’d argue that King lost it right around the time of “The Tommyknockers”, the first of his really bad novels.
The Wikipedia entry for “The Tommyknockers” says…
…I can see how being a successful full-time writer at the height of an addiction may condition you to ignore your nagging internal editor, and just write, write, WRITE!
Which may be the strongest contributing factor to the decline in quality of his work.
Some of his pre-“The Tommyknockers” works were also long (“The Stand”, “The Talisman”, “It”) but they somehow managed to hold the story together. His later works are all over the place, and generally seem to have tacked-on “how-do-I-write-myself-out-of-this-corner” endings*
*OK, the ending for “It” was also pretty tacked-on and terrible, but the rest of the book was fairly well written.
I actually liked Tommyknockers more than a lot of more recent works. From what I recall it wasn’t so much of a metaphor as he was so deep into coke he doesn’t remember writing much of it. In contrast his first book after the accident, Dreamcatcher, was totally forgettable. His biggest talent was always building characters. In Dreamcatcher I had a hard time following which character he was talking about because they were all so bland. The only interesting part was his description of his accident as it happened to one of the characters.
And of course those constant references to Midland/Odessa refinery smells reaching Dallas - when all he had to do is look at the map.
the world he writes about exists only in his big stephen king brain, that’s why east texas is a desert in the stand. his literary offenses are numerous and sometimes great but he creates great characters, which is about the best you can hope for from contemporary writers
In Ontario they have red and blue lights. In fact, it was only recently that Ontario police vehicles got blue lights. Before that, they had red and white lights only.
The first chapter of Cell is unintentionally hilarious to people who are familiar with the Duck Boat tours (not just me, I read it to several people on separate occasions, and they all had the same reaction as I did) but I haven’t enjoyed any of the books he’s written after his accident nearly as much as the ones written before then. Blaze was excellent, but written long ago despite only being published a handful of years ago.
//fanwank// What, you think Al’s Diner has the only wormhole in the world? And every time someone goes back they change a little something about the world. Hence, the world Jake goes back to is not the same world that you lived in, exactly.
It makes me wonder though, since wikipedia and other online sources of information have become popular do novels have fewer of these mistakes?
Before the Internet, I would literally work up a sweat in the library, moving from department to department in an effort to check facts, not all of which could be found. Computers sure streamlined that process–so there ought to be fewer such errors!
Stephan King? Altzheimery?
singular1, you might be getting a little Altzheimery yourself. Or are you just fucking with us? 
It must be closer, Mrs Todd can still drive it in under two hours.
“Get a life,” was a standard insult that Nell said to the Chief on “Gimme A Break.”
You might find this interesting. It’s an article containing a video which shows that Downton Abbey contains a lot of anachronisms in its dialogue: