the advantage of being mangled

The advantage of my having a funny-looking foreign family name is that, if my wife picks up the phone and it's a telemarketeer asking for Mister Insert-mangled-pronouciation, she can truthfully say "Sorry, there's nobody by that name here", after which she gleefully hangs up.

when the strings are too obvious

Tonight TCM ran a featurette about "The Wizard of Oz" and that's when I found out that, until I pointed it out, my wife had never realized that Star Trek's Balok was a homage to the Great and Powerful Oz.



I guess sometimes something can be so obvious that it's invisible - for example, that, in "Thunderbirds", Jeff Tracy had named his five sons after Mercury astronauts.