h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When I watch a TV show, which is kinda like a movie done real fast, but the plot takes years to resolve,
I can't help second guessing the on-set advisors and script alterers, particularly when something goes strange.

It was an episode of "CSI: Miami" last night.
The actor said," That's a bulletproof window."
The other actor said,"But not to a 30 caliber."
Now, somewhere along the line, someone in the prop department substituted a .30-06 Browning air-cooled belt-fed machine gun for what should have been peeking out of the butt-end of the offending Dodge van: a .50 caliber Browning air-cooled belt-fed machine gun, which they probably couldn't get in where ever they were shooting the exterior fight scene, or, and this is my vote, someone figured out that even as wide as the interior of the van was, an M2 Browning is kinda hard to manipulate and it leaves the actor whose face needs to be seen during the scene crouched back by the front seats of the vehicle.
Okay, I can accept that.
But all the on set-script person or the weapons advisor (of which I am sure there was at least one, because you don't just let anyone play with a fully automatic machine gun, even a blank-firing one, without expert supervision) had to do was have our little friends, the actors, (who seem equally oblivious of weapon's lore, despite the fun they have playing with them every week) say,"That's a bulletproof window", and then "Not to armor-piercing ammo."
That still doesn't make perfect sense, but it would have made story sense to the unknowledgeable and half-knowledgeable audience.

Instead, we are left with the bitter taste of the usual horse pucky, the minddead firearms bias of the LaLaLand people who have no qualms about taking fantasy and making it a nightmare.
Of course, on second thought, knowing the way LaLaLand works, the actors could have said something correct and the sweatening idiot (this was a location shoot, so it could have been looped weeks later and sweetened minutes before it went on the air) inserted the goofy line. Which still means that someone should have been paying attention...

Enough of that. A little truth, as I understand it.
Nothing and I mean nothing, is "bulletproof". "Bullet resistant", okay.
A material or surface that can sustain one hit or penetration or maybe five, is going to be in serious trouble when number six through twenty comes along.
Above a certain caliber and bullet weight, if you hammer at something long enough, it will be useless.

Now, there was another incident in TV cop land the other night, on a show called "The District".
A miscreant was firing an AK-47 (or maybe an AK-74, I didn't look that closely) at a Dumpster.
Two of the continuing characters were behind the Dumpster and our miscreant was trying to kill them.
One of the other characters said,"They've taken cover. They are behind a Dumpster."
And then the star of the show said,"That won't last long. He's got an AK-47."

That was enough reason never to watch the show again, right there.
Remember when I said "Above a certain caliber and bullet weight, if you hammer at something long enough, it will be useless", above?
Well, the reverse is also true. Below a certain caliber and bullet weight, you can hammer at it all day long and the object in question will suffer very little damage.

One of the most "bullet resistant" things on the planet is a metal Dumpster. I mean, come on, they are designed to be "truck resistant"! If you are behind it and someone is firing a shoulder arm at you, the chances of his hitting you through it are pretty slim.
Have you every heard the phrase "ricochet"?
Now I know that for almost a century of sound movie making and fifty odd years of classic radio, the *peyooow*, *fing*, *snooo* noises have indicated, with a shower of sparks or at least a puff of dust, that a bullet has missed it's intended victim and impacted or bounced off a solid object.
Ricochets actually do happen and they can occur in the strangest manners, like off water or a nail or a staple.
I have seen ricochet marks on metal where the slug had dug a curved gouge and then boomeranged elsewhere and that was just on the steel-clad bottom of an aluminum skillet.

In this particular episode of "The District", at the distance that fellow was shooting from, and at the angle he was shooting at the Dumpster, those folks behind it might have been bothered by the noise, but they could have taken a nap without worry. Most of the 7.62mm slugs should have either disintegrated (many of them are hollow with some stuff like kapok or wood in them)or bounced off the thick metal. Instead, we are shown squibs opening up holes all over the place, with hardly a ricochet in ear shot, as far as I can remember.

Which leads us to the philosophy behind the remark,"He's got an AK-47."

The phrase, name or designation "AK-47" means many things to many people. To the knowledgeable it is a weapon, pure and simple. An old, ubiquitous, dependable weapon. To the disknowledgeable, those not only ignorant of the matter but willing to remain so, the "AK-47" is the Excalibur of the madman. It has magical powers. It actually compels the user to murder, just by it's evil aura. It can shoot through cars, buildings, concrete, steel and the "bulletproof" vest of a virtuous man. They need to be banned, confiscated, broken, burned, melted and the slag buried so no nice people will have to use a toaster made from it.

Some people in the U.S. Congress are considering not renewing the "Assault Weapon" ban which has a "sunset clause" in it.
Some people in some state governments, like Illinois, Ohio, and California, to name a few, are clinging tight to their state "laundry list" firearms bans that they instituted back in the eighties after watching too many clips from Rambo films.
If the Congress don't save the people from themselves and the NRA, then the individual states, who are still peeved that they can't put Colt, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Browning, Remington, and Winchester out of business by sueing them for manufacturing something that is clearly marked as being deadly despite the movies and television's ability to let the good guys survive with a scratch after being shot and the bad guys lose their heads and limbs with a single unaimed shot with the "world's most powerful handgun"... or some such, the individual states will perturb and protect their own people in their own little ways, circumventing the whole point of the constitution in the first place, which was to stop the custom of every little colony having it's own customs and trade barriers and to allow free trade across all state borders within the entire nation. Of course, most of that idea went out the window with the slave trade and the rest went out with prohibition, where some states ratified it and others didn't, some states enforced it and others didn't, and in the end, the Feebies had to rise up on their hindlegs and invent the FBI in order to get everybody to behave. I won't mention the BATF.

But, as I said earlier about the crazy vets, the topicality and yet timelessness of fictional TV and it's ability even as FICTION to influence the popular mind, means that if the producers and writers want to ease in their vote on something that is really none of their business, unless they want to stand in front of the cameras as a PERSON and state their opinion, then no one can stop them.

When I watch a detective show, or a forensic's show, or just a plain character-driven cop show, I want to see some writing and some acting and I want to do a little guessing about what's going to happen. I don't need to be stopped in the middle of my suspension of disbelief to hear a sermon from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about and who probably wouldn't care if they were given the opportunity to learn.

I never realised dumpsters were that safe!
No wonder they are popular overnight spots for some. I cannot imagine being able to get in one but I will remember them as a useful shield from now on!

I do hate my time being wasted by an obvious flaw in the script.
It tweaks me to have invested in them only to be taken as a fool at some point. Movies are even worse being longer.

BATF - I have not a clue as to what that is. Sure you do not want to say? I see both sides added so much to the gun bill that neither would vote for it!

That is more than I knew about guns before, I will take your word for it. What do you think about the gun show loophole? It has been a big topic in our state. How about the safety regulations or locks issue?

I read somewhere the over whelming majority of guns are sold in 3 states due to a law they have. Georgia and Indiana were 2 of them. I do not recall the other or what extra room was given in the law. Seems it had to do with pawn shops , it was not gun shows.

The BATF, a department of the Treasury, were the one's who started the Waco fiasco. It stands for Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

I'm not sure they even exist anymore. Bush seems to have diluted them by transferring their duties to other departments since he came into office.

The political maneuverings yesterday in Congress were just part of the usual horse pucky. It didn't really mean anything substantive.

The gun show "loophole" has voluntarily been closed by many dealers who want to stay in business. At the shows in our town, which occur about four times a year, the cops are on hand and the dealers require a yellow transfer form be filled out. Trading, weapon for weapon, apparently isn't much of a problem, as long as the paperwork is filled out. Items labelled "curios and relics" by the Treasury can be bought and carried home. The Brady background check is voluntarily performed for expensive and regulated weapons. And the county "waiting period" for handguns is also observed.

It is pretty much of a non-issue.
Every pawn shop and dealer that I have dealt with have been scrupulous in following the rules, even though they are sometimes weird and a pain in the ass. But then, the law often penalizes people who are following the law. Sometimes a new law makes the law-abiding criminals, while the real criminals just do what they please.

The "assault weapons" ban is also a non-issue. It doesn't deal with the previously existing inventory in the country, it only deals with the sale of "new" and "newly manufactured" weapons, most of which were suitably modified within the rules a decade ago and are still being sold.

The original Republican bill (the one from yesterday) was designed to keep firearms manufacturers and dealers from being sued to death by gangs of lawyers who have nothing else better to do. Many cities that have large numbers of firearm deaths also have many other serious problems. The CDC and the Product Liability bunch have also gotten involved. Again, basically because it makes the news.

If every firearms manufacturer in the world went out of business tomorrow, there would still be enough functional weapons in the world to give everyone in the U.S. three.
Many of the rifles in use around the world are more than thirty years old. Some of them date back to World War I.
In the newsreel footage of the current Haitian revolt, there were many old U.S. made M14 rifles. These are actually kind of hard to get. Since most of them are easily modified to fire full automatic, the Government sold a very few specially welded ones through the Civilian Marksmenship Program. Those in Haiti must have arrived there through interesting means.

"How about the safety regulations or locks issue?"

The product liability weasels, again.
Firearms are tools that make holes in people, animals, places, and things.
I used to own a pistol that had "safeties" all over it. It scared me to death even when it wasn't loaded. I've got a revolver now that I keep unloaded. The ammo is near it, but I know that the only safety on that revolver is in my head.
The locks are a joke. An intelligent child can disable them. If your kid is that smart, then teach them safety.
Not just firearms safety, but safety thinking in general.

This country, like many others, is crawling toward the point where the manufacturer of a product has to be way smarter than his customer.
Foolproofing is expensive.
That money could be better spent in the schools teaching kids and teachers about pulling their heads out of their behinds.
Hopefully, some of them might make it into Congress someday and maybe a few people there will be able to blink without tickling their prostate.

"I do hate my time being wasted by an obvious flaw in the script.
It tweaks me to have invested in them only to be taken as a fool at some point. Movies are even worse being longer."

Yep. But, of course, with a movie, you don't have to stare at the same faces every week at the same time. Unless you have a four-year-old who is into "Lilo and Stitch".

"I never realised dumpsters were that safe!"

They really aren't. At close range, a pistol, rifle, or shotgun can make them look like a sieve. But in the specifics of that script, no problem.

It's all a matter of basic physics, a class that most scriptwriters, including Micheal Crichton, apparently missed in college.

101010, this site is quite amusing on the subject, particularly in the area of silencers and muzzle noise levels:

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/mpmain.html

Sadly, it seems to be down today, but should be back eventually (Moderator, don't kill my link! )

My pet peeve is with movie and TV doctors who haven't got even rudimentary medical knowledge. I'm a diabetic, and so probably oversensitive to the mixing up of "hypoglycaemia" and "hyperglycaemia", but there was an episode of the X-files that was frankly beyond belief... (Even more than usual! )

Scully, touted two or three times in every episode as "a medical doctor", found a diabetic shaking and twitching on the floor at the end of an episode. The man was obviously twitchy and confused, so Skully rushed to give him an insulin injection - WRONG! The symptoms were those of someone who had too much insulin in their system, caused by forgetting to eat after an injection. More insulin to someone in that state would be fatal - it's a common method of euthanasia in Scandinavian countries where that sort of thing is, if not legal, then tolerated.

But, for the best example of this, you just need to see "Panic Room", where the child seems to have been given a mix of diabetes and epilepsy, picking and mixing the symptoms for the convenience of the plot. Oh, and they make the same injection mistake as Scully there too - the child is twitching because there's no food to be had, which is correct, so they start giving her injections. Now, if it was glucose being injected into a vein that might make a little sense, but the needles are obviously for subcutaneous use so it's yet more inappropriate and potentially lethal insulin use.

I am aware of that site.

Bossel and me and a buncha other people did a version of that as Edited Entry once, I believe.

My wife, my mother and my MIL are all diabetics.

As my wife, Uvula, is also a nurse, she has been appalled at the level of RL ignorance about Diabetes in both the hospitals and nursing homes she's worked in.
Often, she has had to educate her own GP and OB/GYN!
It's absolutely obnoxious.

Of course, she's no saint herself. When she was playing with the Atkin's deathet recently, I had to remind her that type 2 diabetics have to be careful about much more than carbs.

Indeed.

I just bought a boxed set of 50 "Mystery Classic" movies from the 1930s; the science in those is hilarious. At the risk of spoiling the plot for you, the secret murder weapon in "Mr Wong, Detective" (Boris Karloff as a Chinaman... ) was a collection of thin glass bulbs filled with poison gas, tuned to resonate and shatter with the sound of approaching police sirens.

They were never intended as comedies, but they are truly hilarious.

No,no,no,no, no....Yes!

We actually have that one, as part of a DVD set of detective crap, including Richard Diamond, Bulldog Drummond, Peter Gunn and Dragnet!

Yes, that was absolutely horrendously hilarious!
And Boris carried it off so well!

Sounds like we have the same DVD set; mine contains all of the above.

"50 Mystery Classics" on 12 DVDs, perchance?

(I actually have two copies of that movie, btw; it's also part of the "Mr Wong, Detective" box set I won as a prize from a website contest back in 2002)

Nah, just a two disk thingie from Walmart for 5.99.
TV Greatest Hits from the 50s or something like that. We also got a two disk thingie of "The Lucy Show" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show."
Shnooks has been watching the "Dick Van Dyke" shows over and over, while I've been in the other room watching "You Bet Your Life: The Lost Episodes" over and over.

My 50 movies cost me $29... That's not too bad, apart from the $21 to ship them to Scotland.

Still only $1 per movie tho'; now *that's* entertainment!

I agree.
Uvula and I were explaining to Shnooks about the old days last night.
We were watching a movie on video that I used to watch at matinees during the summer when I was twelve or so.
Shnooks didn't understand that in the old days you couldn't watch a movie whenever you wanted to, you had to catch it at the theatre or on the tube, and we didn't have tape machines in the house, so if you wanted to share a movie with your friends, you would have to tell them about it.

My most local (10 miles) movie theatre closed down when I was about 13. The next nearest (almost 30 miles) was too far away to be worth the hassle; that's how I became hooked on 1930s and 1940s movies - it was all I could get on TV.

I happened to catch a made-for TV movie yesterday, called "Contagious".

It starred Lindsey Wagner and a whole cast of others who needed an easy check that week.
It was a hokey noise about stopping a cholera epidemic, without mentioning where it came from in the first place, or the need to stop it in that "south american country". The script completely avoided the realities of the disease.

My wife, the nurse, was at her friend's house watching and marvelling at the lack of sterile technique in a movie that was made in 1997.

One of the peripheral characters spends half the flick ensconced in a sleeping bag at a remote forest location, attended by his children.
He has ghastly makeup, but the effects of the disease on him and the sleeping bag were not dealt with!

Nothing like dealing with experts!

Oh, and the thing opens with a scene of a drug mule with a burst balloon in his abdomen. The sanguine boss makes one of his minions perform a bit of surgery with a pen knife. In the long shot as they drive away, there wasn't much in the way of... um... fluid or matter in evidence.
Stooopid!

That's US Television for ya... You can't show one character have sex with another, but you can show them kill the other character just as long as there's not much blood.

I was watching a recent Japanese samurai movie earlier today that went in the opposite direction; the slightest flick of anything with a cutting edge led to spurts of blood pulsing two feet or more from the victim...

That reminds me of the first "Blade" movie, which had Kayro syrup all over the place!
I thought it stunk, anyway.