One more example of mistranslating Panzerfaust, in this case the code word for the German takeover of Hungary when it switched sides:
Operation Bazooka.
This one is a doozy because it’s in the two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler written by historian Ian Kershaw, who has a doctorate from Oxford and is fluent in German.
Possible new example from an episode of Wednesday. Two people are working on taxidermy animals, and one of them has something weighing on their mind. Other person says something like “I wondered why you combed that opossums’s tail for half an hour.” Opossums of course pretty famously have completely hairless tails, but I’m not sure if the writer made a stupid mistake or if they were implying that the person was so distracted that they were combing something with no hair.
Snoop Dogg would have called him ‘Ill’in’
Combing a possum’s tail sounds like a creepy, kooky Addams Family thing to do. Like cutting the heads off roses.
Just saw that, and it as my take as well. Later on, Morticia drops a rose stem on a grave after beheading it by hand – she wasn’t carrying her snips with her.
Note that even with “Xmas in July”, most of us don’t have white Christmases. Very few Southern Hemisphere locales get regular snow in winter. Mostly upland places. But your Aucklands and Wellingtons, Sydneys and Melbournes, Johannesburgs and Cape Towns, are not winter wonderlands (very often - there’s the odd exception like the 2011 NZ Antarctic storm or the 2012 Jo’burg snows).
Reading the title of the thread I thought this would be about news media.
One time I was watching CNN and they were talking to a reporter in Havana covering a hurricane that was hitting the city moving south to north. At the end of the segment the anchor asked if there was any news about how Guantanamo Bay and the detention center was faring. The reporter didn’t know. Now I don’t expect the average American to know Cuban geography. When I first learned how big Cuba is I was surprised. But these were professional journalists and news broadcasters doing a story on the country. With a map of Cuba on the screen that they didn’t bother to look at. Havana is over 500 miles from Gitmo. It’s like asking someone in North Carolina how things are in New York City. I was watching this broacast from Gitmo. It was a beautiful day. Weather couldn’t have been nicer.
A scene in Citizen Kane used stock footage from a jungle movie for the backdrop to a garden party Kane throws on his estate. The “jungle movie” was King Kong, and there are pterodactyls flying around in the scene behind Orson Wells and his guests.
That reminds me of a time when the Aurora Borealis was going to be visible in Indiana, so people were gearing up for it, and reporters were interviewing astrophysicists and the like.
One reporter asked the dr. she was interviewing “Is there any particular direction we should look?”
He seemed surprised, and it took him a minute to regain his composure, and then he said “Well…north.”
In an episode of Family Guy, Stewie tells a rabbi, “I think your whole religion is a sham, just so you can get extra holidays off from work!” - to which the rabbi responds, “Oops, gotta go - it’s Buchwuch!”
The writers couldn’t have done ten seconds of extra research to think up a convincingly Hebrew or Yiddish-sounding nonsense word that didn’t have a “w” sound in it?
When I was the Astronomy TA at Macalester, the observatory was usually open in the evening, except when the weather was bad.
A first semester student once asked me “How can you tell if it’s too cloudy to see stars?”
Look outside, duh! 
Unless the Moon is waning past the third quarter.
The number of moons of Jupiter is another bad choice - every time we send a probe there we discover new moons, so any pedant’s knowledge of this quantity is just about guaranteed to be out of date eventually.
The actual answer is nineteen trillon, one hundred and seventy billion. So it looks like someone did look up the answer, but it got mangled somewhere along the line. A script editor, perhaps?
Or the actor flubbed the delivery, and the editor didn’t know the correct answer, and used footage with the wrong information.
No, it wasn’t. It was a point about a science-obsessed child knowing more about a subject than the adults around them, even the teachers. Which I doubt is a rare thing. Such people are self-taught.
Oh, absolutely. I found myself knowing more than my teachers on many occasions, or so I recall. However the number of moons of Jupiter is an example of where the state of knowledge is always being updated, so anyone who claims to know the correct figure is wrong. If we counted all the lumps in the ring system the answer could be in the trillions, and constantly changing.
Well, the North Korean regime does seem to think that “hereditary monarchy” is the current stage of Marxist sociological progression…
A Nuclear Power Plant that goes critical causes a nuclear explosion.
So many works of fiction get this wrong, it even shows up in Chernobyl somehow despite that miniseries being so well researched. You’d think this would be widely known by now in popular culture.