My wife and I watch a lot of movies and TV shows. We love the s**t out of them. We try to see a movie at least every weekend and we have multiple shows we watch during the week. It’s hectic keeping up with that.

However, having watched all of these movies and TV shows, we have come to take away many deep and thoughtful life lessons. Things you can’t learn by living life, but by watching hours and hours of Hollywood entertainment.

So here are 17 things we’ve learned while watching all of these TV and movies.

You will always have need of a celebrity (for a charity performance or prom) at the exact time that celebrity is in town for a concert or filming a movie/TV appearance. If you need to get in to see them, it’s very easy to sneak past or distract their security people because they are always completely ineffective. The celebrity will never get pissed that their security people suck and everyone keeps sneaking in to their hotel room.

Large, studio apartments (with or without wacky roommate[s]) are affordable even for the most meager of budgets. As are furnishings from Potterybarn or Crate and Barrel. College kids and people right out of college have immaculate decorating sense.

If you are being held at gunpoint, start running away just as the shooter starts shooting and tip over a table/couch/chair to hide behind. The bullets won’t be able to hit you. Odds are the shooter is a terrible shot anyway, and will hit EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE ROOM except for you. If you do get hit, don’t worry, bullet wounds apparently don’t hurt very much as no one cries out or whimpers with a bullet in them. You mainly shrug it off and wait for someone to bandage you up (heavy, stuttered breathing and sweating may be the only symptom that you have been shot). You may also have a sudden urge to tell your partner to “go on without you”, even with a non-fatal bullet to the shoulder.

When you walk into a room and see the person you are trying to capture or shoot, call out their name or yell ‘Hey!’ or ‘Stop!’ first to give them a sporting chance to run. The element of surprise is overrated…and unfair.

If you are being bullied at school, seek out the friendly, ethnic janitor or find your apartment building’s gardener or handyman. All of these eccentric, foreign, older men were actually master martial artists back in their homeland and gave up the fame and glory of being badass tournament fighters to live the dream of being a janitor/handyman here in America.

You can defeat a master martial artist who has been studying for his entire life if you spend a few weeks/months learning to fight from the aforementioned janitor or handyman.

People in countries other than America speak accented English amongst themselves. If they speak their native tongue, it will only be one word here or there to cover up an exclamation of shock, surprise or a profanity.

People over 65 act in one of two ways; cranky old coot who doesn’t approve of what those young whipper snappers are doing or wild and crazy with the libido (and mouth) of a 20 year old.

You can leave work, even in the middle of the day, and no one will notice.

It’s easy for you and your 5 or 6 friends to always get the table and/or seats right in the middle of the coffee shop/restaurant/club. Even during high traffic hours.

When living or staying in Paris, you will always have a window that looks out on the Eiffel Tower. Similarly, when taking the Parisian subway, every destination takes you right next to the Eiffel Tower.

Everyone buys the same thing at the grocery; leafy green lettuce and a long loaf of french bread that sticks out just so from the top of the bag. And all groceries use brown paper bags with no logos.

Everyone has that one friend/drinking buddy that does nothing but speak in funny/snarky one-liners. The friend has no shame and hits on anything that moves.

If a guy’s best friend is a girl who’s secretly in love with him, the guy will not even notice her as a prospective girlfriend and only think of her as “one of the guys”. Oh, she will always be hot.

If a girl’s best friend is a guy that’s secretly in love with her, the girl will not even notice him as a prospective boyfriend and only think of him as “a friend”. Oh, and he’s always kind of a dork.

No matter where you are going, if you have to drive there, you will find a parking spot right in front. Even in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

When criminal investigators get satellite or traffic cam photos that are taken from too far away so you can’t see any details, all they have to do is “enhance” the image by zooming in really close to see those details. See how it works here. If zooming in doesn’t work (extremely rare), they just “process” the image through their photo software to get back all these missing details. Once you can see a perp’s face or his license number, they just run it against their “database” to see who he is.

http://blog.paxholley.net/2010/03/04/17-things-ive-learned-about-life-from-watching-movies-and-tv/