Not to be a killjoy or work too hard defending one of our cheesiest actors, but it probably isn’t as stupid as that. In the movie Knowing, Cage’s character has a long list of numbers. Without spoiling too much, they turn out to be dates, map coordinates, and death tolls of various natural and manmade disasters. So without hunting for the meme, I’d bet he was googling the location and death toll.
This thread is so long this has likely already been covered, but did people ever actually invite their bosses over for dinner back in the day?
I think in white-collar management circles a la Bewitched (president of boutique advertising firm having dinner at the house of an account executive) something like that would have been normalish. Probably not ubiquitous, but not rare. What would be unusual to the point of a little unrealistic would be the president of a company having dinner at the house of one of his low-level worker drones from Sector G.
What I’ve seen depicted in TV and movies was the boss more or less inviting himself over.
And the employee’s job status hinges on the success of the dinner.
I actually started a thread about that very subject, and specifically the “Family Circus” trope of the boss coming over for dinner, which of course Mommy has to prepare.
Last time it happened, Daddy’s boss was a woman.
I do remember that in that thread, people told stories of their parents inviting the pastor, or the kids’ teachers, over for dinner.
I grew in the 1970s (graduating high school in 1984) and at the time, sit-down dinner parties were common. I can’t remember specifically, but I assume that my father’s department head or dean might have been at one of these. Certainly other professors were.
Has anybody ever heard an executive open a business meeting by saying “Gentlemen…”?
Saw this one again recently. There is a bomb with a digital clock attached as a timer. The bomb is disarmed by cutting a wire. The timer stops with a couple of seconds left. Why would the number freeze? Either you are cutting the power supply to the clock and it would go out completely or more likely you are disconnecting the timer from the detonator. In that case the timer would continue to work correctly and go down to zero. It just would send a signal to the detonator.
A detective will have a exactly one case from the some of the following scenarios.
An actor on stage
A chess player
A roller derby person
A musician
A magician
A radio personality
A boxer
A TV chef
and so forth
I HATE TV show bombs. Just a week or so ago, one of the FBIs, or was it Will Trent (same day…) had a bomb with a mechanism that, when you cut one wire, it made the counter jump ahead(!). WHY would anyone do that? To taunt bomb disposal experts is the only reason, because it makes no sense otherwise.
Listen, if you can see the explosive, and the detonator, pull the damn detonator out of the explosive! Easy, done. On the other hand it is trivial to design a bomb that cannot be disarmed. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin, and legalities, is too narrow to contain.
The one I saw was on one of the FBIs. When one of them was on the phone with the expert to get instructions on how to disarm at least they paid lip service to looking for the detonator. They also severely overestimate the strength of explosives. This one was 25lbs of C-4 or equivalent. The bad guy put it on the roof of the next building over to take out the target. It’s not a nuke. 25lbs is going to damage the roof of that building but since it was just laying there with no tamping and no shape charge much of the force would be expended into the air. The next building over would get a lot of glass broken but that’s about it. Not worth being the guy who disarms it with 4 seconds to go.
…especially after it goes off.
As I’ve said before, the proper sadistic thing for a bomb maker to do is to have a bomb that detonates when the times gets to 1:30, That’ll screw with the Intrepid Hero who still thinks he has a lot of time.
It rarely makes sense to have a time detonated device anyway. A command detonated or victim detonated device would be more useful but less dramatic.
It depends on what your goals are with the bomb.
If it is ransom, then you want it to be protected from being disarmed, but stoppable.
If you just want to blow shit up, just put a dummy countdown timer on it that doesn’t do anything. (“that’s the beauty of it!”) Give the bomb disposal people something to do before they die.
The best (and probably only good) movie with overly-complex bombs was Juggernaut, but the point of those bombs was to fuck with the bomb disposal folk.
What about 1:30 after it gets to 0:00? Everyone would think the hero saved the day, or that it was a fake.
Columbo could handle more than one at a time.
I’ve also noticed that all of the other detectives assigned to assist on one of his cases are real dolts. They don’t notice things like a pistol in the pocket of the murderer’s overcoat they’re hanging up, and they stop searching through a suspect’s things once they find something that’s not what they’re looking for.
Ex-special forces soldiers in their 30s/40s with body-builder physiques somehow have trouble beating up in hand to hand combat skinny dudes 10 years older than them who don’t look like they’ve lifted a weight in YEARS.
Unless you’re Seagal and then it’s the opposite.
Not to mention how ridiculously long fist fights can last without any blood unless it’s a drop or two at the start to provide extra motivation upon discovering it.
There’s the real-life case of the Harvey’s Lake Tahoe bombing, which was a little of both. It was for ransom AND impossible to diffuse with lots of booby traps. If the random was paid, instructions were to be given to make it safe to transport to a safe detonation area. Spoiler The FBI tried a shaped charge on it and it exploded inside the casino, but with no injuries or deaths.
It did have a timer, but no visible time display.