And there’s the “Little House” effect–People living out in the middle of nowhere with no washers & dryers always have perfectly clean, freshly ironed clothes. Hell, they look better than what I’m wearing as I type this.
One thing I love about The Big Bang Theory is that they do not explain their jokes, and some of them are very obscure. My absolute favorite:
Raj: What happened?
Sheldon: Obviously another carnal fiasco with the shiksi goddess.
Howard: Shiksa. Shik-sa.
Sheldon: Forgive me. Yiddish was not spoken in east Texas. And if it was, it wasn’t spoken for long.
I find it annoying that movie and TV characters are able to have conversations in nightclubs and parties at a normal speaking volume. One of the reasons I hate going to nightclubs is that the only way to have a conversation is by yelling in someone’s face.
I hate when someone has a perfectly good plan to do something, and that plan fails due to some incredibly rare, unforeseen, or complex set of circumstances. Everyone just throws their hands up and say “Oh well, the plan failed, back to the drawing board”. If the plan doesn’t work, try it again! Tweak it a bit!
If Wile E. Coyote had tried the jetpack and rocket skates again and this time didn’t decide to make out with a female coyote made out of dynamite, he would have been picking road runner bits out of his teeth with its bones by now
Only time I’ve ever seen this trope upended is when Lisa Simpson picked the lock on the bathroom door to get Maggie after Homer failed the first time. She even said something like “I just tried the lockpick again, I don’t understand why we only try things once”
It was also touched on when THE POWERPUFF GIRLS did an episode where the cartoon supervillain reviewed his previous plan (use a mystic artifact to turn all the people of the world into dogs) and why it failed (our super-powered heroine, now a mundane dog, bit him in the butt such that he dropped the shatterable artifact).
So he modified the plan: change everyone except the super-powered crimefighters into dogs, thus preventing them from biting his butt as dogs. I mean, yes, granted, they could still bite his butt without being dogs, but he’s a step ahead by dint of having armored his butt just in case, so no worries.
To be fair here, duct work can get big. My office went for the ‘industrial everything’s exposed’ look (aka the “Bob, is that a sewage pipe running down the corner of your office?” look). The HVAC duct work is certainly big enough for me to crawl around in.
I appreciate that; wanted to have the facts before I shot my mouth off. But I’m not 100% sure the support system (it usually looks like metal straps) would handle a grown man (or, in the case of “Aliens” half a platoon). I keep thinking of Groundskeeper Willie chasing Santa’s Little Helper through the school duct work, when it collapses in the gym: Make way for Willie as he lands on Chalmers. I said, “Make way for Willie,” you bloated gasbag.
Bad guy takes off in his car. Good guy gets on the roof of the car and hold on with his finger tips. All BG would have to do is slam on the brakes. Oh, and while GG is on the roof, BG shoots through the roof and GG twists his body this way and that to avoid the bullets. He never gets hit.
An whats with all the bad phone connections? That is the reason a person on the phone has to repeat what the person on the other end just said, right? This contrivance is so ingrained that sometimes, even if they film the other end of the phone conversation, Person A still repeats what Person B just finished saying.
12 people attacking at once? How would they all fit? More realistically, if they haven’t trained to attack together, more than one or two would probably end up getting in each other’s way more than they would bother the hero. And I have seen some fights in old Jackie Chan movies where partners took him on and did a good job beating on him. Until he managed to take out one, then the other was at a disadvantage because his tactics were based on having his partner.
That one actually makes sense, an engineer says “OMG! We’ve actually found unobtaimium!” and everyone on the project just calls it that until the name sticks for good.
Depends on the set up of the sprinkler system. I worked in a plant where if you set off one sprinkler (By say, hitting it with a raised forklift.) all the sprinklers in that section would go off. Shut down the plant a couple of times while I worked there.
Okay. I got another one: shouting someone’s name at their back as they are walking away.
“Bob! Bob! Bob! Come back, Bob! Bob!..<repeat 50 more times>” Bob doesn’t so much as look back or slow down. The person being shouted after *never *does.
I’m not sure which is most annoying:
the plaintive, repetitive shouting of the name
the fact that the person shouted at never looks back or slows down
the combination of 1 & 2.
Wait. It’s the combination.
This is closely related to the one where the person shouts into the phone that the OP has already hung up. In older movies, the caller taps repeatedly on the buttons in the cradle where the phone handset rests. Now there’s nothing to tap. And BTW, cell phones don’t have dial tones.
