Slip ups in books and such

I am reading Chuck Palahniuk’s newst, Tell All, a satire on Hollywood of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. I saw one of those mistakes that pop up in books or on TV or in movies, when something is described that cannot be correct. The facts are different. In this case, a cyanide poinsoning victim is described as going pale, being pallid. Wrong, Chuck. Cyanide complexes to hemoglobin even better than oxygen, thus its poisoning effect is depriving the body of oxygen. Analogous to carbon monoxide poisoning. The stronger bonding means an even brighter red skin color.

His last book, Pygmy, had another. A mention of one of the newer synthetic transactinide elements, seaborgium or hassiom or meitnerium, but the action supposedly takes place in the earlier part of this decade – before the name was proposed and became official.

I love these sorts of things. The jet contrails in the sky for movies set well before the airplane first flew, et cetera. One of those Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns had one. It was set towards the end of the Civil War. They used dynamite. Alfred Nobel’s discovery of packing TNT in inert powder was in 1867 or so.