# Plot holes in reality **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 17, 2014, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533 "2014-02-17T08:22:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2014, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/161 "2014-10-17T17:33:31Z")
The story of [Alcibiades](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades) sounds like it was made up by someone who had no knowledge of history whatsoever. More like some guy telling you about the wacky adventures his D&D character used to get into back in the 80s. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2014, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/162 "2014-10-17T17:58:47Z")
> [@Nars\_Glinley](#): > > Well, it does follow September, which is from Latin for 7. And precedes November and December, which are Latin for 9 and 10. July and August are the culprits, I believe. ---
**Author:** ![fachverwirrt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/94ad74/32.png) [@fachverwirrt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fachverwirrt)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2014, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/163 "2014-10-17T18:23:14Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > And precedes November and December, which are Latin for 9 and 10. > > July and August are the culprits, I believe. January and February, actually. July and August were just renamed (originally “Quintilis” and “Sextilis”). Originally the Roman calendar had ten months and started in March. January and February were added later originally at the end of the year, but eventually they migrated to the beginning. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2014, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/164 "2014-10-17T18:52:19Z")
Are you trying to tell me that months migrate? ---
**Author:** ![fachverwirrt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/94ad74/32.png) [@fachverwirrt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fachverwirrt)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2014, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/165 "2014-10-17T19:05:37Z")
Not at all. They could be carried. ---
**Author:** ![johnspartan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a183cd/32.png) [@johnspartan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/johnspartan)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2014, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/166 "2014-11-19T14:24:32Z")
So… you’re gonna have message boards and videos of cats and entire novels and entire encyclopedias and instantaneous conversations with people on the other side of the world… on a device with no wires or cords that’s smaller than a hi-fi radio… and it’s all accomplished by having a series of numbers… oh but the numbers can only be 1 or 0, nothing else. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2014, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/167 "2014-11-19T14:42:26Z")
America goes to prolonged and bloody wars on several continents against communist ideology, but leaves Castro’s Cuba almost within sight of mainland and just turns loose nuts like Jesse Helms to yell at them. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2014, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/168 "2014-11-19T15:35:04Z")
> [@nevadaexile](#): > > It’s very difficult to get there. > > The main road leading into the town has been blocked off and traffic is diverted around where it used to be. You really have to watch for the signs leading to it or carry a map with you (it was, surprisingly, not on GPS at the time) There are also signs warning people about trespassing and that you’ll face arrest if you do so. > > When I was working in New Jersey 5 years ago, I drove over to see it. While I got some good pics, I also got ran off by a state trooper as they have problems with people trying to loot items and with trespassing. Are you sure you went to Centralia? It’s hard to find only in the sense that you can drive right past it without noticing because it looks like everything else in the area. I visited there a few years back. Frankly, there isn’t a whole lot to see. Most of the buildings have been demolished and the rubble carted away. A municipal building and a church are still standing and were both, apparently, still in use. The cracks in the earth, the buckled section of highway, the cemeteries and other stuff that people photograph are all clustered pretty closely together on one hill. If you stand near the cracks in the ground, there is a noticeable odor of burning coal. There weren’t any signs or state troopers. There were, in fact, locals and sightseers a-plenty. The sightseers were walking about taking pictures while the locals were tear-assing around the nearby fields and hills on their quads and snowmobiles. There was also active strip mining in the immediate area. Some of the locals said that the Centralia itself would be stripped in the next year or so. Don’t know if that happened. If it did, there is now even less to see. It is widely believed among the locals that the whole mine fire crisis was wildly overblown and that it was mostly a government assisted resource grab by some powerful corporate interests. Centralia is interesting, but not at all in a Silent Hill sort of way. You can see all there is to see in a very short time. What is of more interest is to visit some of the nearby villages, have a beer, and chat with the locals about their history. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2014, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/169 "2014-11-19T15:54:48Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > America goes to prolonged and bloody wars on several continents against communist ideology, but leaves Castro’s Cuba almost within sight of mainland and just turns loose nuts like Jesse Helms to yell at them. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The upshot of which was that there was a tacit agreement that the US would never invade Cuba. Not that there weren’t a few half-baked plots to assassinate Castro, or that the US didn’t worry a LOT about Cuba backing other revolutionary movements in Latin America. But Cuba turned out to be containable, so not the US’s biggest priority. ---
**Author:** ![Bam\_Boo\_Gut](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8c91f0/32.png) [@Bam\_Boo\_Gut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bam_Boo_Gut)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2014, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/170 "2014-11-21T15:15:58Z")
[quote=“Lumpy, post:169, topic:681533”] The Cuban Missile Crisis. The upshot of which was that there was a tacit agreement that the US would never invade Cuba. QUOTE] But the US maintains a Naval Base / Detention Centre ON Cuba … :smack: ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2014, 6:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/171 "2014-11-22T06:39:59Z")
> [@K364](#): > > That the Sun is 400 times the size of the moon, and 400 times farther away - which makes the perfect fit for solar total eclipses/annular eclipses and viewing the corona. This one always bothered me. ---
**Author:** ![MLS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2014, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/172 "2014-11-22T19:07:55Z")
To make it weirder, the moon and sun didn’t always have that relationship. IIRC the moon used to be closer and is very slowly moving farther away. Long ago all solar eclipses were total, and were not as dramatic as they are today. In the distant future there will be no total solar eclipses, only annular. ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2014, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/173 "2014-11-22T21:22:01Z")
> [@Bam\_Boo\_Gut](#): > > But the US maintains a Naval Base / Detention Centre ON Cuba … :smack: That one completely blew my mind when I learned about it, though I suppose its not that much different in principle than maintaining and embassy in the capital of The Evil Empire itself. For myself, a plot hole in reality (or at least an extraordinary coincedence), Israel becomes a nation once again at pretty much the exact moment nuclear weapons are invented. So all those biblical stories of apocalypse have two ingredients in place (a) Israel being resurrected and (b) the physical means for almost total destruction of humanity. Before that, barring natural disaster, it was all hyperbole, not any more. Oh and Chernobyl meaning Wormwood. I don’t really think there’s anything to any of the above but its certainly odd. ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2014, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/174 "2014-11-22T21:26:59Z")
[quote=“Bam\_Boo\_Gut, post:170, topic:681533”] > [@Lumpy](#): > > The Cuban Missile Crisis. The upshot of which was that there was a tacit agreement that the US would never invade Cuba. QUOTE] > > But the US maintains a Naval Base / Detention Centre ON Cuba … :smack: Not very surprising when you look at the history of the base. ---
**Author:** ![fachverwirrt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/94ad74/32.png) [@fachverwirrt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fachverwirrt)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2014, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/175 "2014-11-22T22:03:53Z")
> [@MLS](#): > > To make it weirder, the moon and sun didn’t always have that relationship. IIRC the moon used to be closer and is very slowly moving farther away. Long ago all solar eclipses were total, and were not as dramatic as they are today. In the distant future there will be no total solar eclipses, only annular. That doesn’t make it weirder, it makes it totally unremarkable. At some point in the moon’s history, there has to be a point where its apparent size matches the sun. It just happens to be now. ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2014, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/176 "2014-11-22T22:27:00Z")
> [@faithfool](#): > > That Silent Hill is real. Somewhere in Centralia, Pennsylvania, the earth is on fore under the ground and it just continues to burn. That just can’t be right and is better suited to the horror movie franchise that sprang up around its mythology. Curious. I just went to Wiki to read more and the page on Centralia is blank! ---
**Author:** ![Rune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e68b1a/32.png) [@Rune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rune)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2014, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/177 "2014-11-22T23:55:17Z")
That a big part of the Muslim part of the world went apeshit over some silly cartoons made by a smaller regional Danish newspaper. That a school teacher in Somalia was almost lynched because there was a teddy bear called Muhammed. Those things are just too silly to be taken serious. ---
**Author:** ![DKW](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dkw/32/3118_2.png) [@DKW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DKW)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2014, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/178 "2014-11-23T10:59:00Z")
Cuba…eh. Realpolitic and conflicting agendas. We narrowly avoided a huge, huge disaster with the Missile Crisis and wisely decided to cut our losses. No particular surprise. If you want real insanity, try Afghanistan. By the 20th century, it had been well-established that there are certain nations that are pretty much unconquerable. Canada. Israel. Russia. China. Switzerland (how d’ya think they managed to stay neutral all these decades?). But none with a more impressive record than Afghanistan, which is how it came to be known as the graveyard of empires. We knew this. That is exactly why when the USSR invaded, from a propaganda perspective that was a freaking gift from God. An operation guaranteed to net the Reds nothing but a massive pile of corpses. All we have to do is provide some support…a bunch of missiles, a pile of money, maybe a few spare horses if they’re running low…and the biggest victory of the Cold War is ours. Even better, a Mideast nation sees that those infidel capitalist pigs are actually pretty swell guys, and we gain a much-desired bulwark against pesky states like Iran and Syria. So what happens? We provide support, the Ruskies are sent home with their tails between their legs…and…NOTHING. We just flash V signs and thump our chests and _do absolutely nothing with a nation we helped defend_. Not even the capitalist exploitation you think would be automatic. Whatever happened to ad victor spolarum? Well, you know how that story ended. One awful day in September, we were hit hard. So we responded by invading Afghanistan. The nation we once defended (admittedly with a different bunch in charge). The graveyard of empires. …which didn’t make sense even from a revenge standpoint, as the terrorists weren’t from Afghanistan. They were Al-Qaeda, a group primarily located in Saudi Arabia. The mastermind, Osama Bin Laden? Pakistani. …and it jumped right into “utterly insane” territory when you realize we had, not very long ago, invaded _another_ one of those unconquerable nations, Vietnam, by all metrics our most catastrophic defeat ever. So we didn’t even have the excuse of an aura of invincibility. How did any American with more than ten functioning brain cells think that picking a fight with Afghanistan was anything other than a colossally horrible idea? ---
**Author:** ![Rune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e68b1a/32.png) [@Rune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rune)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2014, 11:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/179 "2014-11-23T11:45:59Z")
> [@DKW](#): > > How did any American with more than ten functioning brain cells think that picking a fight with Afghanistan was anything other than a colossally horrible idea? Afghanistan picked a fight with the USA. Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, they had training camps, etc. in Afghanistan. They had to be wiped out. Bin Laden wasn’t Pakistani either. Although you’re correct that the USA should have bombed the shit out of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia too. ---
**Author:** ![EPoch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f6c823/32.png) [@EPoch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EPoch)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2014, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533/180 "2014-11-24T05:01:26Z")
That one of the most bloodthirsty and violent commanders in Africa is nicknamed [General Butt Naked](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked) and commands the Butt Naked Brigade, that went to battles naked except guns and shoes. With command of his army came horrible atrocities and 20,000 war crimes. As if someone with those tactics and that name would commit that _many_ crimes, is this some kind of horrible comedy were you finish but still waiting for punchline? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533.md?page=8) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/plot-holes-in-reality/681533.md?page=10)