Wednesday, March 15, 2006

The downside of knowing too many random facts

One of my favorite episodes of The X-Files is on TV right now, "Agua Mala"... I got one of my favorite sayings from it, "All the nuts roll down to Florida" (I know people said it or some variation thereof before The X-Files, but I was but a mere child when The X-Files was on the air, and it was new to me at the time...). In this episode, Mulder and Scully go to Florida to investigate a missing persons case, having been tipped off by one of Mulder's informants, Arthur Dales, that something wasn't quite normal about the disappearance. Well, apparently, having not checked the weather report before coming to down, they get caught in a hurricane hitting the southern Gulf coast of Florida. They take refuge in a Collier county apartment building with a very sick Sheriff's deputy, a totally whipped Latino man, his very pregnant and moody girlfriend, a looter, and a paranoid, well-armed crazy neighbor. Oh, and there's a salt-water monster stuck in the building's plumbing system... The very same monster Arthur had called them about...

Well, what kinda ruins it for me is this (and I didn't notice this until I started taking college science classes)... We find out at some point that the creature can only live in sea or at least very brackish water... As long as the water is fresh, they're safe. Well, the deputy develops a fever of 106 degrees. If they don't get his temperature down, he'll die. So Scully has him put in a bathtub of cold ice water (what a wonderful way to shock his system!), and he gets attacked by the creature and dies after a box of Epsom salt, conveniently perched precariously on the rim, falls into the tub. Mulder even says that that's what killed the deputy at the end of the episode... ::sighs:: Epsom salt, despite being called "salt," doesn't have sodium in it... It's magnesium sulfate! And it might contain practically non-existent trace amounts of arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, mercury, nickel, lead, selenium and zinc... But no sodium! Or chlorine, calcium, or potassium... All of which it would need in significant amounts in order to create sea-like salt water... ::smacks forehead and sighs:: I suppose the writers of The X-Files and their fact-checkers had to screw up at some point...

And another thing I noticed when I watched it this time was that the hurricane wasn't a very bad one... or shouldn't have been (only a Cat 1) and seemed to be moving awful slow for a hurricane. Also, the airport was open and the police were on the streets way too long for being in the middle of any technical hurricane. And, if that wasn't a bad enough goof for people who live through these things seasonally, Arthur waited out the storm in his *single-wide trailer*, and after it was over, there was no damage to it... or to any of his neighbors' trailers... Just a few palm fronds scattered about... Ha! Yeah, right!

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