As Cold As Ice….

Sometimes something trivial happens in a film, something so small that nobody notices it, but these are the mistakes that should mean you don’t make it to the end of the movie, or you’ll put yourself through hell to get there when it should have been easy. This happened to me watching The Day After Tomorrow, now I loved this film, despite sitting next to a science author who specializes in climate change so yes I know the science is off but hey I sat between to paleontologists when I first watched Jurassic Park.

So the situation that you never know might come up in your everyday trying to survive lives…

…you’re stuck in an old library, it’s getting cold and you’ve been told it’s going to get a LOT colder; you retreat into the one room with a working fireplace. Time to burn stuff right?

Yes, yes indeed it is time to burn stuff, so you get the books, they’re made of paper they’ll burn well lets get them all in fact lets take every book in a massive library and chuck them onto the fire. Now here’s my issue, yes paper burns easily and hot but also quickly, so why did the theoretically intelligent people in the room not notice all the lovely wood around the place oak tables and hardwood chairs? You use paper to get the fire going and then small wood then bigger pieces and now suddenly rather than having to constantly throw books onto the fire you can have a nice steady fire roaring away, and who knows maybe you’ll make it to the end of the film in relative comfort.

So remember book burning is all very well and good, but the shelves they’re on burn so much better.