Hey! I have a 1911 EB set and it is indeed a kick-ass read, from those lost times when encyclopedias were a true academic resource instead of dumbed-down Readers Digest summaries of dumbed-down high school textbook chapters. After the apocalypse, you could reboot civilization with that edition.
I’m surprised we’ve made it to triple digits with no one mentioning “Gimme a beer.”
One problem could be the time frame of the story. Pajamas only became common among Westerners in the late 1800’s - they were a cultural import from the British Raj. A teen boy in a story set in 1840 might have been walking around at night in a nightgown and slippers. Even if it isn’t cold, the floor might be rough if the family was poor and so one might wear slippers to avoid getting one’s feet dirty or getting a splinter on rough wood.
I’ve seen this more than once. A good detective whodunnit or spy thriller, where someone whips out a .38 magnum revolver. Or worse yet, automatic.
Or a “.9mm” which I’ve read on occasion. Oooh, scary!
I read a piece once about how many movies show Greek or Eastern Orthodox services despite their actual adherents making up a very slim percentage of the US population. I guess the churches and services are just photogenic and look traditionally “churchy” without looking threatening.
Not in the slightest. In 1964 Harvey Einbinder published The Myth of the Britannica, showing in enormous detail how huge numbers of articles in the then current Britannica hadn’t been updated for decades, many still intact from the 1911 edition - or older. In particular the science in the 1911 edition was ridiculously bad even for 1911 and hopelessly obsolete in the atomic age. Add another 50 years of science to that indictment and you’d be better off with an old Boy Scout Manual. And that’s all separate from the rampant cultural biases that most of us today would find impossibly offensive and the omissions of people and history that we now consider crucial.
Or takes the safety off his revolver. (Yes, I know they made a few oddball wheelguns with that sort of safety).
One thing with guns on movies and TV shows is that guns have to audibly <click> when aimed. Sure, it’s part of the effect of letting the viewer understand that the characters are ready to fire but an automatic or semiautomatic weapon that is already cocked doesn’t need to be cocked again until the weapon is reloaded or the chamber is manually cleared.
I think we’ve covered this before, but: if the semiautomatic works in both single and double action, then you can be pointing it and ready to fire double action, or manually cock the hammer and then be hair-trigger ready to fire single action.
One summer I walked through Grand Central every day on the way to the subway. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a New Yorker call it anything but Grand Central Station. In fact I still use it as a metaphor for being crowded and busy.
I’m glad you mentioned The Stand, because there’s one snippet that always bothers me when I read it. I think it only appears in the uncut edition, but may be mistaken on that.
At one point, when he’s describing the paranoia and such of the “underground” reporting, (including fliers about the superflu virus, etc), he refers to the University of Kentucky at Louisville.
As someone who’s spent his entire life living in that region of the country (lived in Louisville for several years, and always lived in the metro area), I can honestly tell you that this place does not exist. The closest that anyone could to that would be with the University of Louisville, or the community college, JCC (which stands for Jefferson - the county Louisville is in - Community College).
Grand Central Terminal is the official name, so that would be a mistake if an omniscient narrator or maybe a train expert is speaking. I’ve never heard anyone call it that. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone other than a train conductor called it Grand Central Station- it’s usually just “Grand Central.”
We’ve had entire threads on this, but when an author tries to add realism by using geographic details from a place I’ve lived, it’s colossally irritating when they get it wrong. Unfortunately I lived in San Francisco for 15 years, and writers are stinky with abusing San Francisco.
Example: There was a book where the victim is an Army private (or something) that’s stationed at the Presidio. In the first chapter she leaves her house in St. Francis Wood and goes for an early jog along Park Presidio into Golden Gate Park.
This is an author whose research involved looking at a map, then stopping. St. Francis Wood is a neighborhood full of enormous houses that in no way anyone but Ray Odierno could afford, and “Park Presidio” is actually 19th Ave, which is one of the busiest streets in the City. Exercising along that street would be like going for a jog down the Schildergasse. And it isn’t even called Park Presidio until you get into the Park, which is like 2 miles from St. Francis Wood. I bet it looked like a perfect choice on paper, though. It was just all so unnecessary - we didn’t need to know anything other than that she went for a jog in GGP.
Oh, and the Presidio was no longer an Army base for years before the story was set.
Oh yes. Or having Venus or Mercury visible near the zenith, or long after sunset, or anywhere else that they cannot possibly be because they are INNER planets. Grrrr.
I think the thing about the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica isn’t that it’s the best encyclopedia, but rather that it’s the best one that’s in the public domain.
Or when the author used to live in a place, but has moved and hasn’t kept up with new developments. One author used to use Fort Worth as her heroine’s home, and was fine…until she moved away and assumed that the city would stay unchanged. We’ve had several landmarks either torn down or completely changed since this author moved.
I go nuts when a nearsighted person is described as having magnifying lenses for vision correction. I’m extremely nearsighted, and lenses to correct nearsightedness are REDUCING lenses, that is, they make images smaller. Lenses for farsightedness (which is what most older people get) will make images larger. A stereotypical bookworm is nearsighted, not farsighted, though.
Lack of internal consistancy to either book or series of books -
Anne McCafferey wrote a series about people who were placed into pods to keep them alive, and who ended up piloting ships, and being the admin managers of planets and stations.
In one book, The Ship Who Searched there is a 7 year old girl - daughter to a pair of archeologists who take her to their digs instead of leaving her in some fosterage situation. She ends up with a nasty virus that will kill her unless she gets put on life support.
So, towards the beginning, the brainship that brings their supplies gives her a little teddy bear, just like the one she had when she was a kid. So, it would seem that she was not in a pod until she was sold enough to remember the bear, and her parents.
When it looks like the little girl was going to be stuck in a bed on life support everybody whinges that it is so unfair that the brain program wont accept any kid not an infant.
<wha:confused:>
So what is it, was the ship accepted not as an infant If she was accepted straight out of the womb, into a program that is described in a later scene as so busy the kids had to be assigned 2 half an hour ‘play times’ because everything else was learning math, science, and how to be a person in a pod that they didn’t have regular childhoods.
The flip flopping sort of goes on through out the series - the poor pod brains alternately were popped in straight out of the womb, and had no semblence of family life, in one case she had a doting family that came to visit her and she played with her younger brother, or they were popped in because of an accident or illness after a regular childhood.
But then again Anne M. did that in the Pern series as well. In the first book Lessa had a sort of magic she used to blur her looks to make her less appealing to being raped by the userper and his soldiers, and to accelerate the decay of the castle and the food stored in it. Later books she lost this sort of magic ability and it became a series about what happens to a space born colony that gets dropped on a planet with little lizards that fly and can be genetically tweaked to be larger and flame, that is periodically menaced by a spore that is shot through space from a neighboring planet.
Superman actually has this. It’s called “tactile telekinesis.”
It’s hilarious that when people post about comic books they reference whatever version they read as a kid as canon.
“Tactile telekinesis” was something John Bryne invented in the 1980s. They ditched it as soon as he left the comic. It’s a horrible dirty secret that everyone is too embarrassed to mention today and besides that was 17 reboots ago. But it gets brought up regularly by fans giving away their age.
Of course, I’m someone still angry about Gwen Stacy dying.