Yup. She must not have looked like Gabrielle when she was a child.
Not sure if this is all that universal, but I’ll put in a mention for the discarded pregnancy test that is mistakenly attributed to the wrong person. This happened in Schitt’s Creek, where Johnny and Moira find one and think Alexis is pregnant. It turned out Jocelyn borrowed Alexis’s room to test herself. I’d think any woman who tested herself would be more discreet in discarding the pregnancy test if it’s something she doesn’t want discovered.
It did lead to a funny follow-through. Johnny and Moira eventually did learn the truth, but David hadn’t. When he arrived, Alexis told him “Oh Day-vid, you’re going to be super busy. I’m having twins!” just to watch him freak out.
Especially since that trash bin is going to be emptied by either Johnnie or her husband.
And by the way how old Jocelyn’s son Mutt is, she had to be having a really late pregnancy.
Per his character biography, Mutt was born about 1984-1985, making him around 33 that season. Jocelyn must be at least around 50 even if he were due to a teen pregnancy.
I can tell you from having personally used them, and gotten a positive result, that the instructions they come with say that they fade, and you can’t read the results reliably after n amount of time-- I think it was 40 minutes on the one I had. I looked at it an hour later, and they weren’t kidding. It totally looked negative.
So I always laugh at shows where someone finds a pregnancy test in the trash DAYS after it was used and knows that SOMEONE is pregnant, just not who.
Can’t happen.
I don’t know that this counts as “extremely common,” but in the movies I noticed that people can swim in salt water with their eyes open even if they don’t have a mask or goggles.
It also bothers me that in the movies no matter how long the characters have been in sub-freezing temperatures they can always speak normally.
Now you do! At least, you know a faceless person on the internet that did.
In my college campus, they built a new bulding, and it had a ginormous main air duct. Us bored, fun loving, movie-aware students just had to go exploring. It wasn’t suspended, so it could support our weight. And it was about 6 feet square. Unfortunately, for us movie lovers, it didn’t go very far before it dead ended in an equally ginormous fan,
I saw somebody fall for that false trope. When I was in the navy and going to school in Pensacola several of us one Saturday went out to the Gulf side of the barrier island. For me, used to Pacific combers, the waves were unimpressive but the kid from Ohio went running out into the surf, dived through a roller and came up on the other side coughing and pawing at his eyes.
“This water’s salty!”
“That’s why it’s called salt water,” we laughed.
“I didn’t think it was that salty!”
At the end of Titanic, Rose can barely make a sound, so has to jump back into the water to get a whistle to blow.
I can’t open my eyes even in regular water. Dunno how people do it.
Ken Shapiro deftly lampooned this in his 1974 showcase The Groove Tube:
Thanks for the great trip down memory lane. I saw a double feature – Kentucky Fried Movie/The Groove Tube – in the theater when they first came out.
Hys-ter-i-cal !
It is a great double-feature but KFM is from 1977.
For a triple-feature I recommend adding 1987’s *Amazon Women on the Moon”.
That’s exactly how LPs work - you can see the tracks. So if you want track 4, you drop the arm in that track’s run-in groove. Or whatever the technical term is for the wider groove between tracks, I think properly the run-in is the wider strip of songless grooves leading into the whole side.
Add to that “driving shoot outs”.
How many actual cases are there where you have a bad guy and the cops speeding along exchanging gunfire from moving cars?
I really want to set up one of these in time for my death. I want people to come into the room and find pages and pages of newspaper and magazine articles tacked to the wall with pictures of people circled and different colored yarn connecting thumbtacks in completely random and unrelated articles. Not necessarily famous people, like a string connecting the insurance salesman of the year in Deluth, MN to an article about crop circles in England.
I think it would answer a lot of questions people might have. They’d come in, look around and and go; “Oh, I get it now.”
“Oh, I get it now - @Bill_Door was crazy…!” 
I can’t think of even having heard of one.
Another one that’s really common, but not realistic is the cops/FBI/NCIS agents getting some piece of computer/telephone hardware (or phone number/system address), and doing some combination of the following in like a couple of hours:
- “Breaking” the encryption
- Finding some kind of smoking gun email or file
- Hacking into the system and having full access to it
Or the flip side- some ne’er-do-well somehow hacks into the good guys’ network - they do something like shut everything down on the good guys’ side- lights blink, computers go nuts, elevator doors open/shut randomly, etc… or they start some kind of ominous timer that once it elapses, everything will be “wiped” instantaneously.
None of it works like that, folks. ALL these things take time- inordinate amounts of time, especially when you’re doing it right. In addition, not all these things are networked together, and if they are, it’s not like they don’t have their own security as well. You can’t just “hack in” to most systems, and when you do, what you have access to isn’t like in TV shows either.
Nor can you comb someone’s hard drive or phone all that fast either- that takes hours on end just to index it, and then you have to go searching for stuff, which also takes hours. That’s not even considering that you generally have to make a duplicate first using specialized write-blockers and things like that to avoid messing up the original in the course of your investigation.
Yeah, I actually used to do that for a living. Aside from using special software, write blockers and whatnot and maintaining proper chain of custody, there’s like a whole process to indexing, analyzing, obtaining results, and then putting them into a format where some attorney or layperson can understand it. Breaking any encryption or password protection might take days of having special software “brute force” through it.
At no time were we sitting there trying different combinations of the suspects birthday or kids names and whatnot.
Although one time when the company I worked for had their office robbed, we did sit down with the NYPD to scroll through the building security footage. So of course every time I hit fast forward or increase the zoom*, I would say “enhance…”
*obviously zooming in doesn’t increase the resolution like it does on TV.