On NUMB3RS last Friday, Peter MacNicol's character, Larry, who is the brilliant scientist who knows a lot about everything, made the very pedestrian mistake of saying "begs the question" when he meant "raises the question."
Far worse, though, was on the series finale of The West Wing. President Bartlet, an extremely knowledgable student of history, is asked by his wife whose idea it was to have Inauguration Day in January. Bartlet dryly quipped that she could blame Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, implying she should stop complaining, unless she wanted to impugn our wise Founding Fathers.
Except, of course, that until the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, Inauguration Day was usually held in March. President Bartlet never would have made such an obvious mistake. And it's frankly quite sad that no one else caught the error before the episode was completed.
Inauguration Day
ziggy on 2006-05-15T16:38:38
Yeah, that was a pretty bad howler.
Not as bad as ABC's Oh-my-God-Avian-Flu-is-going-to-kill-us-ALL! sweeps-movie last week. I expected it to be horribly bad. But just for kicks, I flipped it on a few seconds early in the first fifteen minutes.
The high drama ultra magnification of virus particles being transmitted from patient zero, to a cocktail napkin, to a bartender, to an olive, to a martini, to patient three was a little too much to bear. Even if the overdramatized transmission wasn't over the top, the representation of a flu virus as a big blue spiky sphere was just laughable. (Yes, it looked like a pollen grain deeply embedded in fibers and whatnot. No, viruses do not look like some stock OpenGL shape.) Times like this make me happy that South Park is on DVD.
:-)
If this "movie" ended with the Lone Ranger singlehandedly saving the world from pandemic flu with a couple of his silver bullets, while Kermet, Ms. Piggy, Tonto and Trigger sing "Life is a Cabaret" in some a broadway number, it wouldn't have lost
too much of its authority or gravitas.
Had a similar moment with Sherlock Holmes
I'm glad I'm not the only one bugged by this. I finally got to the Masterpiece Theater
Sherlock Holmes movie sitting on the TiVo, and it was generally well done. But they have one scene with Holmes, an accomplished chemist, sticking his nose in a chemical bottle to smell it. As far as I know, this is something a true chemist would never do. Just bugged me enough to break the narrative for me.
Re:Had a similar moment with Sherlock Holmes
pudge on 2006-05-16T16:27:14
Well, Holmes is not a true chemist. ;-)
And: go Carolina!
Nah, just kidding, I hate the Whalers. Of course, I hate every team in the East that is not the Bruins. But I hate Carolina more than most. I also hate Buffalo more than Ottawa, but oh well.
Go Sharks! Failing that, Go Oilers! Failing that, Go Ducks!
