They say ignorance is bliss...

and sometimes, just sometimes, I agree with it.

On one hand, I do believe that people should keep learning stuff until the day they die. Knowing as much as you can, and from as much topics as you can manage, it's the ideal way for me to go through life.

We are watching at home NCIS, third season. My favorite character (apart from Abby, for obvious reasons) is Ducky. Damn, the man is good! He knows a lot about a lot of different things. And the best part is, he shares the knowledge! Why people keep telling him to shut up? I want to work with somebody like him! Sign me up, right now!! But Jethro... Yes, I get he is charismatic and all that, but the guy is... Well, Ducky told him yesterday he had been waiting for 3 months to see Giselle, and Jethro muttered something about being sorry for him not been able to see his girlfriend. Imagine a co-worker of yours telling you a jewel like that. What would you think of him? Because I would personally think the guy was a dork, and uneducated, and dumb as a bucket. What would a woman on a date with him talk about? No pop culture, no cultural references, no cinema, no ballet, no theater... It's no wonder the guy has divorced 3 times! He only knows how to work, and not even that. His team does all the research for him. He can barely turn on his own computer!!

And on the other hand, even though Jethro does not watch TV (his own words), I am sure he would enjoy TV shows more than me. NCIS is quite well done in terms of scientific research, unlike CSI, which we no longer watch for that reason; the day we saw the team using a centrifuge to do a DNA analysis, we called it quits. Having a scientist watching shows with you keeps you on edge when there are mistakes about lab work. But when a popular series like Vampire Diaries does things like these, it makes me cringe:

And what is wrong with these shots, you may ask? Well, the first one is fairly obvious. They are playing football! We are taken back to Civil War years - think Gone with the wind. Can you imagine Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler playing football? Really!? Why not making them go horse riding? Play with dogs? Train falcons? Football. Right. Maybe they think audiences can not relate to the Salvatore brothers unless they are doing something that today kids do... Really? They will not see just two brothers playing and spending time with each other? Are they suggesting that young people today are really that stupid?

The second one. Not so obvious, I admit it. But a mistake, nonetheless. They are lacing the corset wrong. Corsets are laced in the waist line, not at the bottom of the back. And with a pattern of Xs method, not with shoestring lacing, since this method does not allow the corset to be fully closed. - and it ends breaking the corset. Since the majority of people today does not wear corsets, it's understandable that somebody does not know how to lace one. Well, Google is your friend. Even YouTube. Search "how to lace a corset". You'll get tutorials, pictures, even videos on how to do it properly. It takes 2 minutes. Why the costume people did not do it? Because they thought nobody would notice, or care? And they would call themselves professionals...

When seeing this, two other movies that showed corset lacing came to my mind. Titanic by James Cameron and Gone with the wind. I went to them to check. And lo and behold:

Rose is also having hers laced wrong...

But Scarlett's are OK!

Why a major production can pay attention to these things and not a popular series? Is it really because people (audience and makers) don't care? Is it because they just assume that, same as Jethro, we are ignorant and uneducated? Well, I refuse to call myself ignorant. And if I see a mistake in YOUR production, I will point it out, and announce that it is in fact YOU the one that is uneducated.