- The BP Oil Spill. It was an okay premise (yeah yeah, yet another sinister corporation draining the planet’s life energy), but it just dragged on and on, it’s obviously become a zombie franchise. I keep expecting to see Tony Hayward happy meal toys. It’s hard to pin down the exact “Jumping The Shark” moment, because all the sharks are dead.
- George W. Bush. Whatever writer designed GW didn’t do much research about what real Americans are like, they must think every American lives in Texas, wears a cowboy hat and goes around offending every other country in the world. And besides that, he was such an inept villain of a ruler, I kept expecting a Disney protagonist to show up and save the world. I mean, whatever it takes to get a laugh, but what country would actually elect a guy like that?
- Nine-Eleven. Okay, sometimes the underdog can pull off an upset, but this is ridiculous. A handful of guys with box cutters take down the World freakin’ Trade Center? That’s about the point where I decided to watch something a little more *believable*, like Mission Impossible. What next, a Brownie Troop blows up Mt. Everest?
- Andrew Wiles vs. Fermat’s Last Theorem. I’m always a little ashamed to be a mathematician after watching things like “A Beautiful Mind” or “Pi”. Look, we’re not all crazy and obsessed, we don’t work on far-fetched crackpot theories in seclusion. A real mathematician is constantly trading ideas with other mathematicians, he doesn’t spend years filling up secret notebooks. What would’ve happened if Andrew Wiles had died just before going public with his proof? Did nobody think to maybe take something like that into consideration?
- Me and my girlfriend. An unlikely couple meet at a laundromat. There’s instant chemistry and in a few weeks they’re inseparable. Puhhhhhlease! Real couples meet through family and social connections, and then slowly build up a wholesome relationship starting as friends and gradually culminating in a first kiss several years later.
- The Barack Obama Election Campaign. As a Democrat myself, I was a little disgusted at all the blatant liberal stereotypes. The guy outright refused campaign contributions from lobbyists? Yeah, right, he wouldn’t have enough bank to make it through the primaries! Oh, but he was saved by a massive groundswell, a grassroots army which popped up out of nowhere… Suuuuure. I’m as idealistic as the next guy, but real life politics just don’t work like that.
- Genghis Khan. We all love a good villain, but nobody actually thinks of themselves as “evil”. The world just isn’t that black and white. That’s why I always roll my eyes when I see an over-the-top warlord like Genghis Khan. He massacres whole villages, leaving no-one alive. The part where I really lost my suspension of disbelief was when his underlings sacked the libraries of Baghdad and literally dumped the books in the river just to destroy them. Come on, does the Khan kick puppies and strangle kittens too? Who would follow him?
(Largely inspired by this)
FURTHER READING
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