But he was at work when this happened, not asleep in the same room.
Hey, some of us sleep like rocks. If someone did that to me, their greatest fear would be me sleepwalking in the middle of it.
True story from 1992:
I had a good friend who was single and often came over to have dinner with my wife and me. We were in our 30s and sometimes my friend and I would stay up late, drinking beer and listening to classic rock, while my wife went upstairs to bed.
One evening, my friend had simply too much beer to drive and so he slept on our couch in the den. The couch was in a direct line with a door to the kitchen and our kitchen door to the back deck. The back door and the couch were about 24 feet apart.
I had promised my wife I would install a storm door that weekend, so I got up and started to work at about 8:30 AM while my friend was still asleep. Yup, he slept through the whole thing. The funniest part was that he noticed the new door while he was getting coffee. I mean, I had to cut down the old door, use a drill, saw, and electric screwdriver, and generally make a big racket for more than two hours to get that door installed and adjusted…all of it literally within the line of sight of my friend as he slept.
Ever since then, I’m a believer when it comes to doing things around people who sleep soundly. I’ll bet I could go in and empty my wife’s closet right now and she’d never stir.
Cops come to arrest somebody for a major crime, the person they’re about to arrest asks if they can go to another room to change. Cops says yes and stay outside the door. Then the cops hear a gunshot from inside the room and then look at each other with a knowing expression as they slowly walk to open the door.
Nobody is freaking out about the fact that there’s an armed person on the other side of the door and the gunshot could be something other than suicide.
My husband will sleep through anything, except, I have learned, the sound of his son crying. I’m that case, he’s usually out of bed before me.
I am however fully confident I could clean out our closet without waking him up, especially if it was in the middle of the night.
Police being armed with hand grenades (the explosive kind not flash bangs)
Seems like every single monster movie from the 50s to 80s has local police bust out the hand grenades at some point once the monster gets too big.
They usually empty their service revolvers into it first, even after it’s clear they have no effect. Then the monster gets really angry and consumes or otherwise eliminates them.
I always like it when one cop tells another “Be careful! Don’t hit the girl!”
I normally expect to hear
“Where is she?”
“Up there! The one with the spotlight on her!”
I may have posted this, I now I keep meaning to, but the total lack of defensive moves while fighting. I’m reminded of it tonight because I just watched Billy in Stranger Things walk up to Max with balled fists and punch her in the face, and her empty and unrestrained hands don’t move from her sides. I don’t think I saw Buffy Summers block a punch in 7 years.
I know it happens in real life - we all saw Chris Rock get slapped - but it’s insanely common.
A family story is my father’s father remarried after his wife (my grandmother) died, then at her behest moved with his daughter (my father’s sister) from Minnesota to Santa Barbara leaving my father in the care of his grandparents. After a few years father and daughter took a walk down to the beach, then returned a few hours later to find the house stripped.
I don’t know if it was as thorough as DD’s buddy. Since she was separated from her beloved little brother for ten years my aunt didn’t like talking about it. That she was brought along to be an unpaid nine-year old housekeeper didn’t help.
My brother slept like that. He and my younger sister shared an apartment, when our parents sold their house and moved to AZ forcing them to either go with them or find a place of their own. They chose the latter option.
My sister had two dogs (dachshund and beagle), and one night when she got off work at 11:00 pm, she took the dogs out to potty. As they came back to the apartment there was a bit of a tangle at the door, and the dachshund slammed (and locked) the door with my sister outside. She rang the doorbell and pounded on the door for ages. Then, she went to her neighbor whose bedroom shared a wall with my brother’s bedroom. She and my sister had to pound on that wall for another ten minutes (maybe more) before he woke up.
Oh, and I got in this thread today to mention something I described in another thread: after working for years in libraries, I’ve never seen a librarian do the self-consciously elaborate SHHHHHHH when shushing someone talking IRL. Just saw it in a movie day before yesterday.
And then throwing the gun. But perhaps that was only at Superman.
When did it happen in The Sopranos?
I can think of Tony coming home to Carmela throwing all of his shit out the window and Carmela shocked to find Furio’s house empty because he’s unexpectedly lamb chopped it, but that doesn’t really fit the wake-up-to-an-empty-house scenario.
It almost happened on Mad Men, with Don coming back home to an empty apartment, but he wasn’t there when it happened.
When Vito left Johnny Cakes, S6.
Ah, when you said “empty home” and other people mentioned it happened to people they knew, like taking the furniture and stuff, I thought that’s what you meant. Not just the drawers and closet maneuver.
At least Vito didn’t take his new motorcycle. Nice parting gift for Jonny Cakes.
I call the back.
I’ve never had to be concerned about quicksand.
I haven’t, either, but I’ve gotten stuck in a hard-to-escape clay pit that eventually claimed my shoes.
My horse and I got stuck in some when I was a kid. I don’t know exactly what quicksand is (doesn’t it have to have crocodiles?) but we were crossing an old gravel quarry after a rainstorm. Evidently there was a pit that filled with a kind of gravel slurry, looked solid, and we just walked right in and sank. I bailed, struggled out, and he did too, separately. We were shaken up and my God so wet and filthy. I remember getting back to the stable so cold and up to my neck muddy.
Quicksand is a naturally occurring fluidized bed, in which the individual particles of sand are supported by upwelling water. As such, you’re not going to find it in the desert (like that scene in Lawrence of Arabia where one of Lawrence’s twin helpers sinks into the sand as they’re going from Aqaba to the Red Sea), but you can encounter it near the sea shore or natural springs.
It’s much more common to get enmired in large pools of mud or clay (like I did), where you can’t reach solid ground, and when you push down with one foot to raise the other, you only succeed in planting the pushing foot deeper in the medium.