My family had a couple of them. If you have a child who gets sick a lot, they come in handy.
We had a couple when I was a kid, and actually did the meal-in-the-bed thing a couple times. It’s not as much fun as on TV, what with the crumbs in the bed and possibility of spilling a beverage onto the sheets/mattress. Which is probably why it’s not done much in real life.
A lot of comedies have an episode or two where a normal person is put in jail. They are the only law abiding person in a cell full of prostitutes and/or violent people.
I guess it wouldn’t be that unrealistic, considering that the movie took place in 1943, IIRC. Steiner could have been a pre-war professional soldier, or an older draftee.
Maude would like a word with you.
And there’s always one law enforcement officer who is just outside the cell, providing an opportunity for conversation with the normal person once they’ve slinked away from the prostitutes and violent people.
(I predict the officer is going to be sarcastic. What do you think?)
Later, the character goes to a dive bar or other place where prostitutes or criminals hang out, and one of the people that had been in lock-up with them is there, and now they’re besties
Breakfast in bed on your birthday, or Mother’s/Father’s Day, is a tradition in my family.
Our trays don’t have legs, though. They sit on bean bags.
And such a wholesome tradition it is!
May The Onion never die.
Hey! She’s cute! 
My father and his friends used to swim naked down where he grew up, by his own admission. Leeches weren’t an issue.
Urban and suburban people tend to have much stronger emotions about the idea of leeches, than rural people have about actual leeches.
I’ve dealt with leeches a few times in my life. True, it’s not the end of the world to have a leech on you, but I really don’t like it. (I’m a suburban person, mostly)
Here’s one I just realized, although it’s more common in books than in TV/Movies (except, of course, for adaptations.
Man-made tunnels and underground complexes that are HUGE.
I’m not saying that large underground constructions don’t exist, or that there aren’t natural cave systems (like the appropriately-named Mammoth Cave) that seem to go on forever. Or that there don’t exist carefully-carved large underground spaces like the Wieliczka salt mines in Poland , where they not only mined salt, but wrought elegant rooms in the space remaining
No, I’m talking about places where relatively few people have worked for even a century or two and have produced underground complexes so huge (and apparently sturdy enough to have no cave-ins) that people can wander in them for long periods of time and get lost.
I’m talking about things like H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, or Lincoln and Childs’ Crimson Shore or the one I’m reading now, Cemetery Dance . Most natural caves and rock shelters are really pretty small, and don’t extend very far. Near me Pirates’ cave and Polar Caves don’t really go very far. Man-made structures like the chambers at “Mystery Hill/America’s Stonehenge” aren’t big at all. Colonial house cellars were tiny. Excavations like the connecting tunnel at Timpanogas in Utah took a huge amount of work and time (and, i that case, dynamite).
I think most people don’t realize that it takes a LOT of work to construct underground passages that are high and wide enough to walk through and well-braced or engineered enough to stand up to the pressures, especially if unattended for long periods of time. Underground mines can be large and extensive, but a.) they have huge numbers of people working there b.) they’re paid for by the sale of what’s mined there yet c.) they are in need of constant maintenance and repair, because they can collapse. Long-unattended mines are dangerous.
I can appreciate that the underground passages in Charles Dexter Ward were supposed to have been constructed largely with slave labor, but I still can’t believe they were as huge as described, or that they could last as long as they did with no maintenance. Granted that super supernatural power helped (witness how rapidly they disappeared at the end), that doesn’t explain most such tunnel complexes in fiction. I’ve see n the tombs that were the “hollow hills” in Ireland – after a huge amount of effort, they still weren’t that big. I’ve been to the Catacombs in Rome – narrow passages that still weren’t that extensive.
Face it – a huge underground complex you can easily walk through and that serves no economic purpose and isn’t regularly (and expensively) maintained is extremely unlikely. And most natural cave systems aren’t so large inside, either. You frequently have to wriggle or crawl through spaces. It makes for a creepy setting for your story, but it’s highly improbable.
Sort of related to that are the flaming torches one finds in such underground places in movies. So as the character enters this underground complex, they find a torch attached to the wall. They remove it from the wall, easily light it with a cigarette lighter or match and it burns brightly for a very long time (and with little smoke).
That always bothered me about Hogan’s Heros.
From what I have read, the Viet Cong tunnels were impressive, but they did not look like Khazad-dum.
Same here…I was walking on a large sandbar in the slough of a river, and there must have been an underchannel of running water going beneath the sandbar. I was at least 30 yards from the nearest water, walking on hard-pack sand, when I suddenly plunged through the sand into waist-deep quicksand. Over many minutes i was able to wiggle myself to where I could grab some branches and weeds to pull myself out, fortunately never going beyond chest-deep. I totally felt like I was in a 70s action TV episode.
The way to think about is while a cavern is permanent, at least by human standards, a mine is a wound in the earth. Plus they can have hazards caverns do not.
When I was living in Carson City, a local (who should have known better) and a visiting friend prowled in one of the Comstock Lode mines by Virginia City and suffocated when they came on a low spot filled with CO2.
Post-Soviet Union a lot of fictional works thought NATO would dissolve as well but wanted to keep the dynamic so suddenly in 2010 were seeing stories of the Red Star Alliance fighting the Atlantic Federation.
Of course now we just don’t need fancy monikers for these defensive alliances, it’s just Russia VS NATO realistically.