Freeridin – they weren’t mashed, they were fly covered liquified potatoes.

Yep, next thing we know, he’ll be crying about some store clerk’s cute remark about mashed potatoes for years on end.

Trouble is that far too many scriptwriters seem to get their background information from a guy they met at a pub.

In addition to geographic and ethnographic howlers, I mentioned the gold paint suffocation bit in Goldfinger: I actually heard a teacher tell a class that the notion that a head-to-toe paint job could result in suffocation was actually a fact. She was American, not Finnish: apocryphal urban legends spread by Finnish teachers tend to focus on the dangers of drugs.

What does that prove? Once when I saw Psycho, there was deafening laughter from the audience during the shower scene. Still, I don’t think that Hitchcock intended to make a comedy – apart from that last internal monologue by Norman Bates, perhaps.

The scene in Pulp Fiction that I mentioned wasn’t particularly humorous: it was simply an example of sloppy scriptwriting.

What is the correct way to revive someone who suffers a lack of sense of humor? Sounds like you need a scoobie break.

Depends on what you mean by “close”.

At the beginning of February in 2004 there was, indeed, an extremely heavy snowstorm by Helsinki standards. Nevertheless, the amount of snow that came down (less than 50 centimetres) was closer to zero than it is to two metres.

A meteorologist interviewed at the time
http://www.freeyourmind.fi/toimittajat/orolma/2004/lumipyry010204.php
said that snowstorms of that magnitude occur about once every ten years.

“…and they closed Vantaa and the plane landed in Oulu where I had to take a train home from. It happens…though infrequently.”

Indeed, there was an interruption to air traffic to Helsinki “for several hours”, according to accounts at the time. I challenge anyone to produce evidence of a situation in which Helsinki-Vantaa would have been snowed in for days on end, as the Gilmore Girls clip suggests.

But don’t get me wrong: my point here is not to wail about Americans getting inaccurate information specifically about Finland on US TV and cinema; a couple of examples that I mentioned earlier had nothing to do with Finland.

If we look at the Westerns of John Ford, “My Darling Clementine” was supposed to take place in Tombstone, in the south of what was then Arizona territory. However, the set was obviously placed in Monument Valley, in the north. Another John Ford movie, Cheyenne Autumn (Credited as the first one in which Ford takes a sympathetic view of the plight of Native Americans), injects a certain amount of realism by having actual Indians play Indian roles, and speaking an Indian language with English subtitles. A friend of mine who knows something about these things says that the movie is a cult favourite on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, because the “Cheyenne” Indians in the scenes are in fact, speaking Navajo – and what they say differs significantly from what the subtitles suggest.

Other cases that come to mind is the suggestion in the Bond movie Goldfinger that covering a person’s body in gold paint will cause that person to die of “suffocation” for lack of oxygen to the skin, and the notion promoted in Pulp Fiction that administering an injection of of adrenaline directly into the heart muscle is a good way to revive someone who has overdosed on heroin.

They make the Kela employees look like Mother Teresa.