What is extremely common in TV or movies but almost never happens in real life?

Perfect breasts. If a woman is going to take her top off, she will have full, symmetrical, unblemished breasts. They’ll never be flat, or saggy, or one bigger than the other, or veiny, or have stretch marks or be oddly shaped.

Sleeping with a gun under the pillow, common in spy movies and Westerns, not in real life.

Hi, I’m Mike Lindell with the greatest product ever: it’s the My Pillow With Built-In Holster!

[h/t to my wife]

Nobody on TV or in the movies uses toothpaste. You see lots and lots of characters brushing their teeth, but … you really don’t ever see toothpaste in play.

Hard(er) to speak intelligibly with the foamy stuff in your mouth.

Or doctors that do any sort of patient care at all. Exceedingly rare. Honestly, House was more a comedy than anything… :wink:

And in TV commercials for toothpaste, they use over a inch of paste- whereas you are supposed to use about the size of a pea.

Isn’t once every twenty years “almost never”? I too hike extensively in the backcountry of the desert Southwest, and in a decade I’ve seen one live rattlesnake, about 5 inches long. Either I smell bad to rattlesnakes, or encounters are much less common than movies (and general perceptions) would have it.

In real life, it’s almost never not Lupus?

Likewise movies would have you think that in the jungle you can’t walk 20 paces without a giant snake leaping out of a tree on top of you or stepping on a poisonous snake. In 35 years hiking in tropical forests I can count on the fingers of two hands the number of times I’ve seen a dangerous snake.

Four rattlers in one two hour hike.

Now that was the most, sure.

Were you doing laps of a 30-minute trail loop?

Yeah, I guess it is about like how often a police person draws a gun. I have seen another half dozen or so that weren’t “surprises” like those two tho.

Nope, up the hill and down.

It was baby rattler season.

Or a criminal tells a cop to drop their gun AND S/HE DOES! Nope, nope, nope, and at least where I live, when an officer does use their gun, it’s usually to shoot an injured animal.

People on TV are always carrying empty to-go cups of coffee. Watch them next time if you don’t believe me — there’s nothing in that cup, cuz if there was, it would have spilled.

Your encyclopedic knowledge of “Dragnet” is indeed most impressive.

It really can be a little surprising just how dense rattlesnake populations can get in the right area. They’re very energetically efficient predators. I’ve gone looking for them in the context of herpetology field trips and you can really rack up quite a count, especially cruising desert roads early in the evening in spring.

Yep, cops are trained to never, ever drop their gun. Lower it, maybe. But never drop it. That just gives the bad guy another weapon. Maybe his gun is out of bullets, or is a replica.

Yeah, Alum rock park was overrun with ground squirrel, etc.

And of course that brings to mind the famous conceit that occurs in every episode of Law and Order: Briscoe and Green show up to ask you some questions about somebody you know who was the victim or perpetrator of some horrific crime, but you never stop what you are doing to talk to them about this shocking turn of events. You carry on polishing glasses or selling bagels or trimming a poodle’s nails while giving them half your attention.