I just ate a banana and it crossed my mind that banana peels aren't really as slippery as they're generally portrayed in cartoons and movies. I've stepped on banana peels before and haven't fallen; generally the peel just makes a squishy sound and gets goo on my shoe. What other common, everyday objects are often attributed unreal, vastly exaggerated properties in works of fiction? And I'm not asking about exaggeration based on ignorance -- such as a "hacker" who can break into "CIA mainframes" in 30 seconds -- but rather stereotypical portrayals that everyone knows are absurd. For example, onions that make their cutters bawl.
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A single candle that can light up an entire room? Torches that inexplicably burn forever. Cars that explode when shot? Cars that can be driven off high overpasses, down stairs, and through buildings, yet still perform well enough to outrun police cruisers?
Onions, when cut, do indeed bring tears to your eye. I don't think that qualifies as "bawling", though.
Sugar in a car's gas tank is another one... that just doesn't work. Sugar in a car's gas tank does no harm whatsoever.
If you don't already, I suggest watching "Mythbusters" on the Discovery Channel. They do a pretty good job.
Onions make me bawl.
Well, how about spinach? I've been eating spinach for almost 30 years, and I have yet to sprout huge muscles. Guess I'll have to try that gym thing.
Rolling pins. See any number of cartoons from the first half of the 20th Century.
The banana peel thing has an interesting story to it (which I read about from this book. Bananas and oranges were associated with immigrants in urban areas -- they were the only fruits that they could afford, because of the difficulty of keeping any other fruits clean. But the thick peels were good at keeping the filth of where they lived out.
So, as part of anti-immigrant propaganda, there were cartoons of filthy immigrants leaving orange and banana peels all over the streets, and people would slip.
Of course, it's better to slip in fruit peels than what previously covered the streets. Pee-yu.
1. How about storks delivering babies? (do cartoons count?)
2. Thieves wearing striped coveralls.
3. White picket fences. They say it's the mark of success. Anyone seen a white picket fence in front of a house lately?
4. Shoot-outs on TV. The good guys almost never run out of bullets, and usually only get shot in the left arm.
JP: Speaking of shoot-outs on TV... the good guys rarely get hit and, correspondingly, the bad guys have horrible aim.
So much for attempts at being true-to-life.
DD: But onions are so good for you. :)
I love onions, especially the sweet ones. Wrap a sweet onion and a pat of butter in aluminum foil and throw it on the grill or in the oven.... when it's done you've got yourself some good eats. :)
Fun question! Here's some:
Pepper causes sneezing too easily.
Magnets are too powerful.
Glue dries too fast and is too strong.
Rabbits are too smart. :-)
Electricity makes characters light up like a light bulb.
High-pitched sounds break glass.
Containers of poison come with a big skull and bones.
Hitting someone on the head just "knocks them out" without the life-threatening concussion.
Bullets knock people back when they hit.
Random pieces of wire can be used to quickly pick security locks.
Ten minutes of special martial arts training lets a 98-pound weakling beat up the big guy.
An arrow in the heart kills the sentry without giving him any chance to raise an alarm or even pull the trigger on his gun (in real life, guys with an arrow in their heart have hacked someone to death with an axe before they died).
Shiruken (throwing starts) are deadly weapons (in real life they wouldn't do more than maybe an inch-deep cut).
Knives can be thrown reliably to land point first in any target from any distance (real knife throwers throw from a carefully-measured distance).