Tag: Reality Check

Huckleberry

JACKSON: So, I hear the huckleberry crops are gonna totally suck this year!
[Sookie just looks at him.]

Huckleberry is an American dialect word for the shrub fruit known as the bilberry – a variant of the English dialect word hurtleberry or whortleberry. In America, the term huckleberry is applied to several different species of berry, including dangleberries and blueberries.

The peak season for huckleberries finishes in mid-September, so by this time of year the huckleberry crop would normally “suck” anyway. No wonder Sookie gives Jackson a look.

The huckleberry crops serve as a reminder of Huckleberry Finn.

Boobs

RORY: I couldn’t possibly stretch them out. Your boobs are way bigger than mine.
LORELAI: That is not true. Your boobs are totally bigger than mine!
RORY: You’re crazy!

According to websites which give celebrity bra sizes, Lauren Graham is a 34B and Alexis Bledel is a 32B. If so, they have the same cup size, so Lorelai is not “way bigger” than Rory. Likewise, Rory cannot possibly be stretching out Lorelai’s clothing when she borrows it as she is slightly smaller across the back.

Of course Rory’s real crime isn’t that she stole Lorelai’s sweater – it’s that she has “stolen” her parents. It’s telling that Lorelai claims it’s her favourite sweater, which is news to Rory. In the same way, the parents she didn’t value somehow become far more attractive when Rory has them.

Deviated septum

LORELAI: You got your fabulous flair from me.
RORY: I also got my deviated septum from you.

The nasal septum is the bone and cartilage which separates the right and left sides of the nose, dividing the nostrils. A deviated septum is one where some displacement has taken place in the septum. It’s a common condition – most of us have a deviated septum to some degree. It is most often caused by facial trauma, or is apparent from birth, either during fetal development, or through compression during childbirth. It is only rarely genetic, so Rory may have “got” her deviated septum from Lorelai (while being born), but didn’t inherit it.

In severe cases a deviated septum can cause problems with breathing which may require a minor surgical procedure. It is unclear whether Rory ever needed or received this surgery.

Environmental blight

When Rory tells Luke that she went golfing with her grandfather, he tells her that golf courses are an environmental blight because of the chemicals golf courses use to keep the grass green.

Golf courses use pesticides and fungicides to care for their turf – the same stuff home owners put on their lawns. By area, golf courses actually use less chemicals than regular lawns, but the vast expanses of grass on golf courses mean that by volume they use a lot more. Aware of the environmental impact, many golf courses are using less chemicals than before, and some have gone completely organic.

The main environmental problem with golf courses is the enormous amounts of water they use to keep the grass green, leading to further scarcity of this limited resource.

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.

Country Club

In real life the main country club in Hartford is the Hartford Golf Club in West Hartford. It does look like the sort of place where Richard Gilmore would feel at home.

It doesn’t have a rose garden, which Emily told Richard to be sure to show Rory at the club. However, Elizabeth Park in West Hartford has a famous historic rose garden and is less than ten minutes drive from the golf club. While this probably wasn’t what the scriptwriter had in mind, in real life it would be possible to take Rory golfing and to see a rose garden in the same morning.

Exterior shots of the golf club were filmed at Brookfield Farms in Thousand Oaks, California – the same place exteriors of the Independence Inn were filmed.