Tag: Errors of Fact

Cumquat

JACKSON: For some time now I’ve been toying with cross-pollination. Finally I’ve got it. I figured out a way to cross a raspberry with a cumquat.

A cumquat is a small cold-hardy citrus fruit native to south Asia and the Asia-Pacific. They were introduced to Europe and North America from China in the 19th century.

In reality, it is not possible to cross a cumquat with a raspberry. It’s clearly just a joke by the scriptwriter, but if you were determined to make this a semi-believable situation, yellow raspberries do exist, and Jackson might have bred one with an especially sharp, citrus-y flavour, making him over-excitedly believe that he had somehow crossed a raspberry with a cumquat.

260 Year Old Cat

BABETTE: Oh, Morey, don’t do this to yourself. He thinks it was the clams …
VET: It wasn’t the clams. Morey, in human years this cat was 260 years old.

There are two things wrong with the vet’s statement. First, 260 “human years” is just 260 years – the vet actually means “cat years”. Second, for a cat to be the equivalent of a 260 year old human, it would need to live to 60. There is no way Cinnamon is 60 years old – a cat might survive into its early twenties if kept indoors and well cared for. The oldest cat on record lived to 28.

The vet is confused, exaggerating, not good at mathematics, not good with English, and/or doesn’t understand how long cats live.

Luxembourg Gardens

MICHEL: I was attacked by a band of swans in the Luxembourg Gardens when I was a boy.

Le Jardin du Luxembourg, called the Luxembourg Garden in English, is a formal garden in Paris outside the Luxembourg Palace. The garden is owned by the French Senate.

Although there is a large pool in the Garden, it doesn’t have a “band of swans”; there is a fountain which depicts Leda and the Swan instead. This calls into question Michel’s story, and the fact that he gets the name of the Garden wrong makes one wonder if he grew up in Paris at all.

Flat earth

JACKSON: Hey, the world was flat until someone took a boat trip.

Jackson is promoting the modern misconception that people in the Middle Ages commonly believed that the Earth is flat. In fact people have known that the Earth is spherical since the Ancient Greeks – the mathematics to prove it aren’t particularly difficult. The myth seems to date from the 17th century, as a Protestant campaign against Catholic teaching.

The idea that it was the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World which changed everyone’s mind about the flat Earth comes from Washington Irving’s 1828 biography, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

Highly romanticised, it contained fictional scenes where some of the Spanish disagreed that the Earth was spherical. Even Irving pointed out that a flat Earth theory didn’t affect Columbus’ navigation, but rather the limited understanding of Earth’s size and position of the continents.

Antonio Banderas

LORELAI (to Mrs Shales): Why don’t you go up to your room and have a fabulous bubble bath, and I’ll send up some wine and a masseuse who bears a remarkable resemblance to Antonio Banderas.

Antonio Banderas (born 1960) is a Spanish actor. Successful in Spain during the 1980s, he made the transition to Hollywood in 1992 with The Mambo Kings. His breakthrough role was in Philadelphia (1993). His biggest success in the late 1990s was playing the title role in the action film The Mask of Zorro (1998).

Lorelai uses the term masseuse incorrectly: a masseuse is a woman who performs massage for a living; a man in the same role is known as a masseur.