I hate to tell you but calzones pre-date your panzerottis. My friend and I ate one every time we went to the mall back in the 70’s.
No, but I did have a handful of relatively ancient trailers kicking around. It was not unheard of for a light audience on a slow night to see a trailer for “Rambo: First Blood Part II coming in May 1985” amid the standard previews. I also had a CD of sound effects that I would occasionally pipe into a theater (e.g. a loud toilet flush).
Besides Lost Gloves brought to me by Mangetout I’ve noticed Lost Shoes.
I think there is a conspiracy or something.
Please tell me what it is.
Kerning is essentally proper typesetting; allowing lower-case characters to nestle in under overhanging parts of taller ones, so badly kerned text would have the o in ‘Tom’ aligned starting at the right-hand end of the top bar of the T; proper kerning would allow the curved side of the o to tuck in a little underneath the top bar of the T - if it’s done really badly, it can make one word look like several.
Oops, it’s probably worth mentioning that bad kerning can go the other way too; cramping characters together when they needed a bit more space - it can also be manifest as ‘joined-up’ handwriting fonts not actually aligning properly at the joins.
Since reading a book on film theory, I always spot clunky exposition.
Exposition is a movie device to reveal backstory to explain characters’ motivations. In its worst form involves a minor character whose only purpose is to explain, in words, something which the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to film.
When I first heard about this I noticed it in “Double Jeopardy”. If I remember correctly, a woman wanders up to Ashley Judd, points to Tommy Lee Jones, and says something like “hey, isn’t that the guy who lost custody of his daughter after a DUI infraction? Yep, that’s him. He also lost his job and now he’s really disillusioned and runs a halfway house.”
Previous threads on this subject (specifically the FedEx logo)
Things You’ve Never Noticed, and Now You Can’t Stop Noticing
An experiment: Tell me if you can see the arrow
IIRC, the plural is “mongoose”, just as the plural of “sheep” is “sheep”
“Well, if you can have snakes, then I ought to be able to have mongeese. Or mongooses. Which is it?”
“One Mongoose. Then you won’t have a problem.”
"Yeah, but what is it’s pregnant and has mongoslings? Then we’re right back where we started.’
—semi-remembered from Fredric Brown’s “The Freak Show Murders”.
I notice these ever since I saw Fight Club. In real life they don’t look much like the ones in that movie, though. You mean the dots have no function? Why do they survive?
I mainly notice this in the South and West: flashing arrow signs. They’re marketed as “signs no business can do without” and they are everwhere. I suspect its because they’re sold at Sam’s Club or one of those mega-Wal style stores.
Ain’t that the truth. Mine is poor registration. I didn’t notice it so much before I started working in the printing industry. Now I can’t ignore it.
My boss teased me about three months ago regarding ending my sentances with prepositions. Now, I see them everywhere.
Whenever I’m reading a book, they stick out like sore thumbs. I mentally pounce on news anchors. I edit my sentances before I speak them. I can’t stop noticing them!
Same here, Fight Club was what did it for me. I never used to notice them all that much, now I sometimes find myself actively looking for them. I think that the ones I see in the cinema do look kinda like the ones they showed in the movie, but I haven’t watched it in a while so it may just be my faulty memory filling in the gaps.
Backflow preventers (scroll to the last picture on the page.)
They’re one of those ubiquitous but invisible pieces of infrastructure, but I work on them now and see them everywhere. Nobody else ever knows what I’m talking about.
Kearning is only ever going to get worse, because it’s hard for cold type to do it right, and by now nobody cares anymore. (What I really miss is ligatures – it’s getting so that you don’t even see them in books anymore.)
–Cliffy
Jews.
I keed! I keed!
Scratch off lottery tickets. In New York, anyway, there is a code underneath the scratched off part that reveals how much the ticket pays off. It’s usually a letter. If the letter is a Q, X or Z, you don’t have a winning ticket. This is a pain because often, the game on the ticket involves scratching off a bunch of spots (depending on the game) to reveal “lucky numbers” or whatever. If you come across one of the randomly floating letters, you know you’ve lost right there and then. The fun of the game is ruined.
Of course, scratch offs aren’t that fun when you lose, are they?
Wild, speculative theory: the film has a life beyond the first-run theaters. Sometimes, colleges and the like will rent films after they’ve gone through their initial run, to have showings in the little auditoriums that dot campuses. These smaller theaters don’t have the huge “platter”-style setups that big theaters have, so they can’t splice the film all together. They use a system of two smaller projectors, with one 20-minute reel each. When one ends, they (seamlessly, if they’re good) switch off the first projector and start the second. Then, they rewind the finished reel, and set up the next reel on the free projector.
So, the cigarette burns may still be useful to cue the projectionist in those cases. No one seems to mind if they’re on the film during the movie’s initial run.
Wild parrots in cities. There was a movie about them in San Francisco, and now I’ve noticed them in two other cities. Well, that’s not everywhere, but it’s more than one would expect, I imagine. Normally I ignore bird sounds. Now I look up to see if they’re parrots.