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smeddley: (Science)
Thursday, July 7th, 2011 12:42 pm
Supernatural.

Not the most scientific of shows, no. And I'm willing to go with them on the 'facts' about the supernatural - what werewolves really look like, how you actually kill a vampire, etc.

But what bothers me is when, even after I've suspended my disbelief and accept the 'rules' of their world, they deviate from them. Oh, it's rarely a huge, glaring error, it's the little things.

The devil's in the details, if you pardon my pun.

I was brushing my hair today, and while emptying my hairbrush I realized that tangle mat of hair was, in effect, my 'remains.' (For those of you not familiar with the show, they destroy ghosts by salting and burning the remains - all of the remains. Even a lock of hair can create a ghost, and there have been many episodes where they've had to hunt down bits of a body... which also brings up the rather unpleasant idea of organ donation and what would happen in that case... anyway, on issue at a time). I've been shedding 200+ little bits of 'remains' ever day, not to mention bits of skin and things surgically removed (you never see them hunting down a foreskin or a preserved organ taken pre-death, at least I haven't yet!).

Okay, you say, maybe it only counts as 'remains' if it was on the body at death. Still there's the pesky detail of a funeral home brushing hair (do they incinerate it? I can't imagine, it's not a biohazard) and yes, eventually the hair would decompose, but...

And yet, that (by their own storyline) is most definitely not the case! There was a ghost of a girl preserved in her doll, which had hair made of her own hair (apparently that was a 'thing' at the time). And the girl had her doll long before her death, so the hair was taken pre-death. Which brings us back to the matter of the hair you shed every day.

In your hairbrush. When you get your hair cut. Perhaps in a wig or donated to the place that makes hairmats to soak up oil spills (which I'm going to guess really slows down the decomposition process...).

It's just not as simple as they make it out to be, digging up a grave and torching the body (on that note, man are they good, neat, grave diggers! Fast, too, with just a shovel!).

In other nit-picky news, they showed the Impala with an impossible Kansas license plate in a recent (for me) episode. I know why they do it, but it was annoying, anyway.
smeddley: (Science)
Thursday, May 19th, 2011 10:00 pm
I can't stop thinking about the massive earthquake that's going to destroy the Earth (or, at least, make it Hell on Earth) this coming Saturday. Not that I even remotely believe it's going to happen, but still, I continue to try to logically construct a scenario where such an earthquake could possibly even exist. And I continue to fail.

I know. Can't make sense out of crazy. But I keep trying.

1) The DoomsdayQuake will begin at the International Date Line and move West.
Directional quake, eh? Nice to know it's not one of those standard quakes, you know, the kind with an epicenter and a spreading radius of shaking/damage. Been there, done that, time for something new. And, really, I suppose an omnipotent god could accomplish that - really, an omnipotent god could just turn the entire planet into sponge cake and we'd all drown in the sticky sweet syrup... which I might have believed more. Interestingly enough, I find my suspension of disbelief is actually easier the further from the truth a story is. Ask me to watch a TV show about traveling through other planets via wormholes? No problem. Show me an episode of CSI where they get DNA from a place someone brushed up against a piece of furniture? Now just you hold on, there, mister!

2) The DoomsdayQuake will hit each place at 6 pm local time
Um, have you looked at a time zone map lately? Here's one I even colored for your convenience:



The time zones are colored, rainbow-style, from right (IDL) to left. I'll just let that sink in for a minute.

We're no longer talking about a giant, rolling earthquake that sweeps the globe. We're talking about a hit-and-miss style earthquake that observes time lines - could you straddle a time line and have one leg shaking and the other not? What about Northern Greenland and Antarctica, where there is no official time? What about the people on the International Space Station? Oh please oh please oh please tell me there's going to be a 'space quake'! What about the precise North and South Poles? What if you're flying? Will departing souls puncture the aircraft causing depressurization? Should people flying on Saturday actually pay attention to the safety lecture on oxygen masks? (I kid, I kid, you should always pay attention)

And they haven't mentioned how long the DoomsdayQuake will last. Will it hit one time zone, shake for twenty minutes, and then there's a forty minute lull before it strikes the next time zone? Will it shake for an hour, then turn off when the next time zone activates? Inquiring minds want to know!

There are lots of other questions to ask, most of which I'm sure are unanswerable, but I really need to get to bed, because I still have a job to go to tomorrow. We tried to lobby for the day off, on account of the end of the world and all, but oddly, they didn't buy it.