Real Life section maintenance

Next crowner (which if we hold off on the ones you just added can start on the 9th) is looking like:

1. It Can't Be Helped (dialogue trope and thus too common, attracting ROCEJ violations and complaining) we missed this one a while ago!

2. All Love Is Unrequited (narrative trope, technically not possible that all love is unrequited, attracting misuse of the "you've probably had this happen to you before" variety)

3. Missing Episode (narrative trope as RL doesn't have "episodes", attracting misuse)

4. Wham Shot (narrative trope, related to the NRLEP Wham Episode and Wham Line)

5. Creepy Good (morality trope)

6. Evil Brunette Twin (^)

7. Face of a Thug (^^)

8. Bad Humor Truck (^^^)

9. Reformed, but Rejected (morality, impossible in the same way 0% Approval Rating is impossible)

10. Can't You Read the Sign? (narrative trope, "signs being posted for important reasons" is too common, attracting misuse as "wacky signs" is not this trope)

11. Mum Looks Like a Sister (attractiveness trope, somewhat gossipy)

12. Banana Republic (national stereotype, Laconic insists that the trope is only for fictional countries, related to NRLEP fictional nations like Ruritania) Note: Under the condition that the page gets a Useful Notes page discussing the real world origins of the trope)

13. Ultimate Job Security (too common)

14. Husky Russkie (national stereotype)

15 & 16: Lastly, we never crownered the The Alleged Car and Crappy Carnival situations, to make them totally NRLEP or to move their sections to Darth Wiki or So Bad, It's Horrible or leave them as they are.

17: Pariah Prisoner (It did get a cleanup but there's still an arguement to make that it's too common and a little gossipy.)

18: Badass Boast (too common)

19: Became Their Own Antithesis (attracting ROCEJ and natter misuse, maybe too common?)

20: World's Most Beautiful Woman (sex trope, gossipy)

21: Red Is Heroic (morality trope)

22: Big Ol' Eyebrows (too common personal appearance trope)

23: Anti-Hero (morality, narrative)

• Gunners in the British Army are issued ear defenders to protect from the sound of the chonking big gun going off when you're stood right next to it - but they make it hard to hear orders, so they generally only cover one ear permanently during fire missions.
• Actor Tim Barlow, while serving in the British Army, was left profoundly deaf from firing a high-powered rifle.
• Modern earplugs that can allow different amounts of sound into the ear via switches are issued for 21st century US ground troops (and presumably others). However, many soldiers prefer to leave them out and risk eardrum damage if it means a better chance of hearing something that happens to be both quiet and vital to his or her survival, not to mention it's one less piece of kit to hassle with in a warzone. Colonel Kathy Gates, audiology consultant to the US Army surgeon general, stated in an Army Times article that soldiers who wear the issued earplugs properly are protected from most hearing damage.
  • The USMC experimented with issuing every single Marine a suppressor in 2016, even on the heavy machine guns. The result was drastically improved communication.
• The Spokane, Washington Police Department suppressed all of its rifles in 2016, noting that the suppressors were cheaper than paying out disability claims for hearing loss.
• Range Safety Officers, who spend their most of their entire workday on the firing range keeping an eye on things, often play it very safe by wearing both earplugs and earmuffs.
• Orchestras:
  • In orchestras, players who sit in front of the trumpet section are issued earplugs because if you sit in front of any decent trumpeter when the music gets loud and/or intense, you face the very real threat of having your eardrums ruptured.
  • Some orchestras will put pieces of plexiglass between the brass players (especially trumpets and French horns) and those who sit in front of them. In a decent concert hall, it will make no difference to the sound in the audience, but it can help keep your bassoonist from being deafened when the horns play "Bells Up."
• William Shatner suffers from tinnitus because of standing too close to explosions going off on Star Trek, as did the late Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley. The last specifically from the FX explosions at the beginning of "Arena".
• Danny Elfman suffers similarly from hearing loss due to his days in Oingo Boingo.
• Many rock and roll musicians, especially from the days before it was common practice to include earplugs. Special mention though to Pete Townsend of The Who, who is now nearly completely deaf as a result of being too close to Keith Moon's drumkit when he blew it up, and Roger Daltrey says that his and Pete's respective hearing losses began in opposite ears because they were facing each other at the time it exploded. And all that guitar as well...
• This is the reason that drummers and guitarists generally wear some kind of ear protection while practicing or rehearsing (and during modern studio recording which isn't being videotaped/recorded, a commonly used trick is the aforementioned switch earplugs or to wear earmuffs that are combined with headphones — that reduce the sound allowed in to a non-damaging level — IF the band is rich enough to afford either, which a lot of starting bands aren't). The only problem is that none of these tricks (short of the earplugs, for a drummer who isn't very visible) work onstage and in recorded studio lives, meaning that while some hearing damage is lessened (because it is cumulative, and every little bit you can reduce helps) most hard rock / heavy metal musicians will end up with some by their 40s or 50s unless they take long breaks or are just very, very lucky. Singers are the worst affected because they usually can't wear ear protection even while practicing or rehearsing and their own voice can even do the damage (as with Kyo of Dir en grey, who ruptured an eardrum with his own screams). Bassists are next, as they generally can't wear ear protection during rehearsal since they have to keep time with the drummer — which also puts them closest to the loudest and most likely to cause said damage part of your average band short of standing directly in front of a guitar amp or a particularly loud screamer's face.
• A real-life aversion of this can be seen with astute observation while attending an air-show. When the military jets do their low and fast flyovers, one will notice children in the audience often cover their ears. Unlike the adults, who by that point have sustained enough cumulative hearing loss that the sound does not hurt their ears. Thanks, loud music.
  • Also at race tracks, especially the "minor-league"^note for lack of a better term tracks where you're only a few yards from the track. Those cars are loud. AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson had to quit a tour because driving race cars without earplugs threatened him to go deaf.
  • The key is not just in the loudness but the spectrum. Hearing degenerates with age in any case, and older ears do not pick up the higher frequencies at all. The kids, who have the full range, probably absorb more energy and/or are hearing parts of the engine's "scream" that the adults don't. It's also the reason why children are better at hearing bats in their caves; the squeaks are mostly well outside the range of human hearing, but the bats' lower end of emission overlaps better with children's upper range of reception.
• Locomotives in the U.S. use loud air horns which most places require engineers to blow when they go over crossings as well as in emergency situations. While most modern horns are mounted toward the middle of the locomotive, in the past, they were mounted right above the cab. Since most cabs lacked air conditioning, the windows were left open. Naturally, a lot of old engineers have at least some degree of hearing loss. Nowadays, cabs are insulated and air-conditioned. Hearing protection is also mandatory when the cab window is open. As with jet aircraft, you'll often notice that it's children who cover their ears when a train blows its horn.
• Averted harshly when Krakatoa erupted in the late 19th century. The eardrums of sailors as far as 40 miles away were ruptured outright, and the sound ^note an estimated 310dB at ground zero, theorized to be the loudest in human history persisted as far as Perth, Western Australia where it was mistaken for offshore cannon fire.