1400: D.B. Cooper

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D.B. Cooper

Title text: 'Why on Earth would someone commit air piracy just to finance a terrible movie decades later?' 'People are very strange these days.'

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: This is only an outline. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

This comic suggests that hijacker with the epithet D. B. Cooper (who forced the aviation industry to make several changes in security measures) and actor/director Tommy Wiseau are the same person, because the fate of one and the past of the other are unknown. Cooper's case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history and is still a popular culture phenomenon. [1]

Cueball mentions that Cooper's true identity and what happened to the money are unknown and suggests that his theory explains both stories. Only $5,880 of the $200,000 in ransom was ever found.

The title chalks up such a weird motive for hijacking to the impression that "people are very strange these days."

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

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Discussion

Feels like a conspiracy(?) 108.162.227.35 12:15, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Isn't it a reference to the Malaysia Airlines conspiracy theory? http://humansarefree.com/2014/07/busted-mh-17-was-in-fact-lost-flight-mh.html?m=0 - Renee 108.162.245.75 00:44, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

No.141.101.98.12 10:31, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Oh, this is a hilarious comic! --Dangerkeith3000 (talk) 15:14, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Could someone explain what "the Citizen Kane of ____" is all about? --NeatNit (talk) 17:05, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

"Citizen Kane" is regarded as a masterpiece landmark film, and other films are often compared to it as a highly favorable compliment. 173.245.52.211 18:08, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

"Citizen Kane" as a reference point here is more meaningful that that. Apart from being a landmark film, "Citizen Kane" was also made by a movie-newbie at that day, namely Orson Welles, who not only played the title role, but also directed, co-wrote and co-produced the movie, very much like Wiseau did with his landmark film; the only significant difference thus being "Citizen Kane" the best and "The Room" the worst movie ever made. 141.101.88.223 13:14, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

This is really just a curiosity, but what is unusual about the phrasing "You are tearing me apart"? (I'm obviously not a native speaker) Ly mar (talk) 17:12, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

• Beyond using "You are" instead of "You're", not much. The oddness of the line is mostly through the delivery in the film, not the grammar. ImVeryAngryItsNotButter (talk) 17:14, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

photograph

Is this the first xkcd to feature a full color photograph of a person? 108.162.216.52 17:38, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

con·tem·po·rar·y

adjective: contemporary

   1.
   living or occurring at the same time.
   "the event was recorded by a contemporary historian"
       dating from the same time.
       "this series of paintings is contemporary with other works in an early style"
       synonyms:	of the time, of the day, contemporaneous, concurrent, coeval, coexisting, coexistent More
       "contemporary sources"
   2.
   belonging to or occurring in the present.
   "the tension and complexities of our contemporary society"

"In 1971, a man referred to by the media as D. B. Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 and escaped with the contemporary equivalent of over $1 million in ransom money."

So that can be either 1971 dollars (contemporary to D. B. Cooper's time) or 2014 dollars (contemporary to the present time).

(A lot of people think definition no. 2 is the only definition, but it isn't.)

--RenniePet (talk) 00:49, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

I appreciate your work to improve the explanations here. But, such theatrics over a one word edit are unnecessary. lcarsos_a (talk) 02:14, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

I've changed it now so it's clearer anyway141.101.98.12 10:31, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

I created an account solely so I could remove the anomalous use of "beg the question". [2] Gidklio (talk) 04:31, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

What is a "European accent"? Any accent that is not Indian, Chinese, or Japanese? --Frerin (talk) 10:15, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Yeah - or Australian, or Inuit, or African, or South American or any other accent that's not from a cultural/language group primary to Europe (and definitely not North American [clear from the context of the sentence]), but more specifically, not any European form of English (so, perhaps, Icelandic, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, and many other possibilities) which might be hard for an untrained listener to specifically identify as anything but "European". Many languages have commonalities due to geographic proximity, not only in terms of accent, but also syntax and vocabulary, which would modify the learners' ability to accurately acquire and render a foreign language in the same ways. That is, someone who natively speaks Portuguese and someone who natively speaks French will have similar troubles in learning subtleties of American English but which would contrast from those troubles encountered by someone who's native language is Hindi, Tagalog, or Yoruba. Brettpeirce (talk) 13:41, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

According to one reddit user, Tommy Wiseau is from Poland, and his last name was "Wieczór" [meaning "Evening"] or variation of it. 141.101.88.219 17:10, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Just popping in to note that Cooper's fate is no longer unknown, his niece came forward in 2011. He was survived the jump with some injuries but had lost the money in the process. Real name Lynn Doyle Cooper, died 1999. 173.245.54.169 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Nice try, but the real Dan Cooper wouldn't have used an alias that shared his last name. That's the kind of amateur mistake that always leads to discovery & arrest, but the real guy was pretty damm sharp and one hell of an operator to pull it off. Not that this guy didn't tell his niece he was D.B. Cooper; just that he never told her he was kidding...

--172.68.141.4 17:57, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Not to deny or confirm that, but the Wikipedia article on D.B. Cooper states that 9,710 of the bills are still missing (290 bills were found in Washington State wilderness in 1980). If one does not spend the money one holds (because even if it is to be invested or laundered, someone will notice the serial number(s) and report it; the numbers are now available online, not to mention the look of old bills; the average replacement rate for US bills is about two years, so seeing a large bundle of slightly-peculiar looking 1970s-era bills may engender a slight sense of difference), one will not have enough to make an independent film, because money is only useful to us when it is used. PS. I'm sorry for the length of this comment, but it's just getting all the details ironed out and fixed down - my apology is just making the comment longer? OK... 108.162.249.225 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Ummm... The pictures are red linked :'( 108.162.245.40 22:48, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

I have to ask: was the use of the inappropriate French word "baton" (stick) in the transcript a deliberate joke about European mangling of English? A native speaker of American English would write, "pointer". Nitpicking (talk) 12:21, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

To bring a native British English perspective to this (whether we do "European mangling of English" is a problematic suggestion in at least two distinct ways!), I'm not sure I'd call it a "baton" - which is something a conductor would use to guide an orchestra or a relay-runner would carry along their share of a running track - but not a "pointer" either. A "laser pointer" would be a pointer, but comparatively modern.

At school (long ago enough to have blackboards rather than whiteboards) I'd call the held stick what it often was, outside its life as pointing object. So often it was either a ruler (30cm/1ft for most, perhaps a 1m/1yd stick for the ambitious or exuberant gesticulator) or, occasionally, the rubber (i.e. the "Board-rubber", the chalk eraser; and youthful innocence/ignorance and local vocabulary meant we never ever thought of that word as meaning a condom!) possibly being held on the off-chance that it was needed to be suddenly thrown at a disruptive or inattentive pupil - as it often ended up being.

The alternative of the day (transparencies on OHPs) would be to cast the shadow of the felt-tip pen used to scrawl upon the horizontal acetate sheet being shone up and across onto the projector screen.

My only experiences in the post-whiteboard world, save for those business-sized paper-pads and those thick marker pens ('sharpies', though not yet well known by that pseudo-brandname), is to call it a cursor, because it is a projected desktop with a mouse cursor doing the job of pointing. When it isn't a form of shadow-puppetry with the bare hands of the lecturer being made to cast some form of pointy shade upon the output. 141.101.99.20 23:55, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

They're the same guy. I don't know how you didn't notice it before! Z1mp0st0rz (talk) 19:50, 15 April 2024 (UTC)