From the Right Stuff

Henry Luce: Now, I want them all to meet my people who will write their true stories, Naturally these stories will appear in Life magazine under their own bylines: For example, "by Betty Grissom", or "by Virgil I. Grisson", or...
Gus Grissom: Gus!
Henry Luce: What was that?
Gus Grissom: Gus. Nobody calls me by... that other name.
Henry Luce: Gus? An astronaut named "Gus"? What's your middle name?
Gus Grissom: Ivan.
Henry Luce: Ivan... ahem... well. Maybe, Gus isn't so bad, might be something there... All right, all right. You can be Gus.

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There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-Douglas Adams
Aim high (but don't blow yourself up)!- Homer Hickam

In Soviet Russia, UFO report you!- Phil Plait

Clear skies Maksutov.

A common Caper cliche: Whoever you thought was getting away clean with the loot, isn't.

And if you sneak into somebody's room/office to search it, you will get caught.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

Or how the guy always gets the girl. Why can't the girl get the girl sometimes?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Corollary: If you sneak into someone's office after-hours to search his computer, the owner of that office will inevitably show up just as you're retrieving the information in a tamper-evident, time consuming way. You'll become aware of the key jingling at 35% completion with three minutes of copying to go, and six seconds later when the office door opens, you'll be hidden around a corner with all of the data on your minidisk. (Who uses minidisk burners in their office PC anyway?)

Everything will be put back as it should, and security will fail to detect you until you're stepping through the door, into your car you parked in the open out front, plates readable to the bad guys.

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[Dr. Horrible]___________________________[Penny]
Listen close to everybody's heart________And you believe there's good in everybody's heart
And hear that breaking sound_____________Keep it safe and sound
Hopes and dreams are shattering apart____With hope you can do your part
And crashing to the ground_______________To turn a life around

Bound, which ironically avoids the cliche of misdirection in caper flicks.

And, if you get caught in the act, the room will be dark and the person will be backlit, in the doorway.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

The silhouette will look like the villain or authority figure you were trying to avoid, but when they turn on the lights, it'll turn out to be a friend of yours.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Or a bumbling security guard. (Security guards are always bumbling.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

...or they wouldn't be security guards.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

And they could never catch anybody unless the hero helped.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

And they are always sitting at their desk eating.

I imagine that security guards could have their own category of cliches.

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"That's Not Blight. It's New Jersey" - The Wall Street Journal

Now the only problem is how to stop my eyes from bleeding.

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"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Hey, that reminds me of the description of movie ratings:

In a 'G' movie, nobody gets the girl.
In a 'PG' movie, the good guy gets the girl.
In an 'R' movie, the bad guy gets the girl.
In an 'X' movie, everybody gets the girl!

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

And more often than not, they are fat.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

Awful, isn't it? I wish I could find a well-designed page on the subject.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

People riding roller coasters always sit in the front seats.

The corollary to this is: If a gun goes off in Act III, it must be shown in Act I.

Violating this results in a whole slew of other movie flubs, where a character pulls something out, like a gun or a bomb, to Save The Day, when the audience had no clue that he was carrying a deadly device to begin with.

It's the materialist's version of Deus Ex Machina.

Destroying the Evil Magic Villain's Evil Magic Producing Item will destroy the Evil Magic Villain . . . you hope.

For example, what if Frodo tossing the ring into the volcano only made Sauron stronger? Or what if it ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and destroyed Middle Earth? The only reason the heroes all believed that destroying the ring would destroy Sauron--and nothing else--is because Gandalf said so--but how do we know he was right?