"Valentich did have a life vest inside the cockpit, so why he didn’t attempt the highly complex technique known as 'getting out of the plane' is unknown."
Uh, because planes crash, planes sink, pilots die or get knocked unconscious when hitting water at speeds where it might as well be concrete, immersing a person in water often has the side effect known as 'drowning', and the ocean is a big place.
You might as well be incredulous whenever a car drives into a pond or canal and the people drown. "Why didn't they get out of the car?" Because it's more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Not exactly. David Gerrold realized that it bore some resemblances to the Robert Heinlein story. He wrote Heinlein, who said, "Don't worry about it, I probably stole the idea from 'Pigs Is Pigs' by Ellis Parker Butler.
A corollary to this would be, why do you almost never see British people working in restaurants in Britain? Truly. Almost invariable, the waiters are French, Italian, German, whatever -- anything but British.
In the Martin Cruz Smith book HAVANA BAY, there's a converted wood-burning taxicab in Cuba.
It's a novel, but I would bet that this isn't made up of whole cloth; the author probably had seen some precedent.
It should be noted that, in the book, the car can only go a few miles per hour, the idea being basically, well, it's better than walking from the airport carrying your luggage.
I would guess that the MGM cartoon character that they worried Inspector Gadget's trenchcoat-and-mustache look too closely resembled was Inspector Closeau from the PINK PANTHER cartoons.
He wasn't "recently created" at that time (1965), but the resemblance is pretty distinct in the still from above.
I have to recommend the movie FAIRY TALE: A TRUE STORY, which has Peter O'Toole as Doyle and Harvey Keitel as Houdini. Yes, it's a fictionalized version of events, but I think it depicts the friendship between Doyle and Houdini very well. It's a telling of the Cottingley Fairies photo hoax, which Doyle fell for hook line and sinker. Now, in the movie, fairies are real, but, the movie still plays pretty fair with the truth; the photos are still hoaxed. The movie's actually a pretty interesting examination of belief and whether hoaxes are by definition malicious, or more along the lines of what Houdini does; a magic trick to bring a little more wonder into the world.
I always think of that (maybe apocryphal) tale of the guy with the pet octopus, who has a feeder fish tank on the other side of the room. He chastises his roommate for feeding the octopus too often, since the feeder fish are decreasing. "I'm not feeding the octopus!" his roommate protests. Finally, he stakes out the room and notices the wet sucker marks on floor. Octopus has been opening its tank, climbing down, squelching the ten feet to the other tank, opening that latch, taking a fish, going back to its own tank.
The picture here looks kind of like that thing that appears on the transporter platform to announce Troi's impending wedding in that one episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.
"Valentich did have a life vest inside the cockpit, so why he didn’t attempt the highly complex technique known as 'getting out of the plane' is unknown."
Uh, because planes crash, planes sink, pilots die or get knocked unconscious when hitting water at speeds where it might as well be concrete, immersing a person in water often has the side effect known as 'drowning', and the ocean is a big place.
You might as well be incredulous whenever a car drives into a pond or canal and the people drown. "Why didn't they get out of the car?" Because it's more complicated than you're making it out to be.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/medieval-tapestry-masterpieces.php
It's a novel, but I would bet that this isn't made up of whole cloth; the author probably had seen some precedent.
It should be noted that, in the book, the car can only go a few miles per hour, the idea being basically, well, it's better than walking from the airport carrying your luggage.
He wasn't "recently created" at that time (1965), but the resemblance is pretty distinct in the still from above.
They're going to say twenty-one ten.