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Journal pudge's Journal: Newsflash: TV Writers Not As Smart As Their Characters 6

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.

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Newsflash: TV Writers Not As Smart As Their Characters

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  • Yeah, I pointed that out to my wife when we heard it. Way to screw up the opening scene, dipwads! I'm barely an amateur, but I knew it was in the first half of the 20th century when it was changed and that it used to be around March 5th (I later looked it up and it was March 4th - at least I was close!).

    And then, in the last scene, they show his plane flying over the ocean, with absolutely no land in sight. Hmmm. From Washington DC to the Easternmost major airport, MHT, is nowhere near the water. Yes
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  • Bartlet dryly quipped that she could blame Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin
    What you say is true... but brings me greater sadness is that nobody noticed that Adams and Jefferson weren't delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. They were in Europe at the time. Even though still wrong, it would have been better to say "blame Hamilton, Madison and Morris".
    • Oh, you know I knew that. But as it was the first Congress, not the Constitutional Convention, who decided it would be March, and as Bartlet did not specify the Constitutional Congress, I didn't feel it necessary to belabor it.

Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable. -- Gilb

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