Memory ain't what it used to be.

  

  Mirror Mirror on the wall... Or was it Magic Mirror on the wall?

  Are you sure?

   Did Mickey have suspenders?, Did Mr Monopoly wear a monocle?

  Which design was in the underwear, Cornucopia with fruit or not?

   I remember the cornucopia, and I'm old enough to remember the guys dressed up as fruit talking to confused people in locker rooms.

  I buy Jif peanut butter, but I do remember buying Jiffy, which never existed apparently, and while maybe I'm mixing Jif with Skippy, and somehow the brain comes up with Jiffy.    

  Why does it seem like the entire world is gaslighting simple and relatively unimportant details of our collective memory?

  Is it a simple mental trick where memories overlap and override each other over year, nostalgia replacing cognitive accuracy?

  Or is it the concept of confabulation where the mind simply adds in detail to a less than detailed memory, which increases with age and the expected memory loss as the years travel past.

  But I wonder if it may be something more.

  I used to have a great aunt who lost her husband in the first World War (excuse me, the "Great War") and would tell me stories of the age, from the next decade which saw amazing growth to the 30s which brought great pain, but even though her recall of the week before was suspect, her recall of her younger years was dead on, to even the school subjects she learned, and later on, taught.

  I wish I had somehow gotten her school books, as they make modern public education look like a cliff notes (remember those) version of, well, everything.

  Aside; If you can, buy a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen and let it be an opening into a world of education that simply doesn't exist anymore in favor of the ever present Narrative of what your supposed to know.    NOT knowledge.

  Point is, I don't believe she ever experienced something along the lines of a Mandela Effect, her memories were not perfect, but they were always firm in their reality, and if she remembered a scene from the Black Pirate, as I would remember watching the silent epic staring Douglas Fairbanks years later, or some detail in her recollection of a vehicle or food.

  What I remember of her memories (of which in hindsight I dearly wish I could go back and record her conversations which I would absorb with rapt attention the moment she began to well wander off on her own tangents.     hmm, maybe it's hereditary?) is that they always return to me when I learn another small tidbit of daily life in the interwar period.

  So when did the Mandela Effect actually start?

  The Mandela Effect began to gain traction in almost every corner of the internet shortly in the 2010s, seemingly to be a new phenomena that has grown with more and more examples of these "wrong" memories that just don't explain away as we tend to accept lapses in memory.

  Why are these so strong?

  Example; (edit; and a bit of rambling tangent)

  My own personal Mandela Effect is not a totally uncommon one.

  I am a HUGE 007 fan, read the books, watched and own all the movies, and do regular rewatches of this actor's Bond or another and due to my age group have a rather strong fondness for Roger Moore's portrayal.   

  But more than that...   wait, stop, quick trivia;

    Aside from Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the rare return of a Bond villain whom, especially as a child, I would cheer with every appearance.

  Of course, I mean Jaws.

   

      Sadly, Richard Kiel is no longer with us, but of all the media, books, comics, etc that have been written in the 007 universe, can we PLEASE have a Jaws centric book?

     Anyway, 

     His survival at the end of Spy Who Loved Me was one of those grand moments in a theater when you find yourself cheering with everyone else when he pops out of the water and starts to swim.

  When he shows up in Moonraker (do yourself a favor, look up the disco Moonraker theme and give it a listen.   It's hilariously wrong in the very best way) and you realize he's now working for Drax, it's a moment of great joy for a fan, and then later in Brazil Jaws survives another encounter with 007 but this time crashing a cable car and ends up buried under rubble.

  Here's how I remember it.

  Jaws raced down the mountain on a cable car behind 007 and Dr Goodhead (70s peak Bond girl naming) and they drop out of the way as Jaws looks up and there's the huge concrete building at the end of the cable.   

  Oops.

    Cable Car slams in and boom, debri rains down everywhere, but he's survived so much more so we aren't worried.    He usually gets up and brushes the dirt off of his clothes and walks it off.

  Only this time he's helped from the rubble by a tiny waif of a girl with big bespectacled eyes and blonde pigtails who helps him to his feet.

    He turns and smiles his menacing smile, and we have had a movie and a half of getting to know that terrifying smile.

 

    But instead of running screaming into the distance, the girl simply looks up and smiles...

   And I vividly remember his smile with a glint of sunlight off of his grill of staggered stainless steel teeth, and when she smiles back up at him her teeth are covered in a glinting row of shiny silver braces.

  (cue the theme music to The Love Boat, this is the early 80s after all)

  Awwwww, this is a PERFECT moment in a 007 film and....

  Wait.     Why the hell is my copy of Moonraker wrong?

 

  And I'm wondering if this DVD is different from my VHS copy.    I look up if anyone tried to "improve" the film with some upgrading or other bullshit.   Nope, never had braces.

  What the actual...      BULLSHIT.

  A few hours later I learned I was experiencing the Mandela Effect.     

  But the braces made so much more sense, it creates a reason for an attraction that in any other sense would seem. 

  Mismatched?

  Without the braces it has lost something.

  Although in my head, the braces still exist.

  Even if they do make a cute (however odd) couple and in the end help 007 save the day, with Jaws giving his very first scene of dialogue with a surprisingly soft and gentle voice;

"Well, here's to us."

  But no worries, later on you learn (if you listen sharply) that they both survived and I can only hope spent a great life after Bond.

     And that is how I learned what a Mandela Effect was.

          One theory for the basis for the Mandela effect originates from quantum physics and relates to the idea that rather than one timeline of events, alternate realities or universes may be taking place and mixing with our timeline.5 In theory, this would result in groups of people having the same memories because the timeline has been altered as we shift between these different realities.

   From https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-mandela-effect-4589394

   I wonder, I remember this and so many others and they all seem to have begun in late 2000s and early 2010s.

   Did CERN's Large Hadron Collider punch a hole in reality when it fired up in 2008?  Things that simply weren't consided to exist when it was first opened up.    Higgs boson discovered as real, not theory, the existence of Tachyons, Dark Matter?

   The peak of end of times fears in 2012.

   Stephen Hawkings final paper on multiple universes, parallel realities.

  Perhaps the Mandela Effect is simply the walls between these universes/realities slipping, perhaps from the impact of tearing at the fabric with tools like the CERN LHC, or maybe something as simple as what choice you make in each of our own daily lives, and we all create each universe by simple choices every minute of each day.

  Change the route you decide to drive home, accept or decline a job interview, decide to pick up a book on a whim.

   On the one hand, has this been ongoing since the dawn of time, and the universe (universes?) is simply a ever growing tapestry of lives weaving in and out of potential choices, or are there actual worlds where another guy was elected, where magic and ghosts are accepted every day reality, where silicon and modern plastics were never invented and we all live in a much larger world.

  Where we are either already among the stars in a hundred small colonies or another where we are surviving in the ruins of World War 3?

  The potential realities are endless.   

  Post note.    If I do do a Bond movie review, it will probably be Jaws' tenure during the two Roger Moore films,

 

 or the non Brocolli helmed film that remade Thunderball into (in my humble opinion) a much better and more enjoyable 007 film, Never Say Never Again.

 

   A cleansing practice?

    

   Bizarre Cosmic Horror parody/infographics are awesome.

 

  

 

   quote from David Lynch

 

     We all need a moment of awwww, now and then.

  Meet the Quokka, a marsupial native to the southwestern region of Australia.    

    Sometimes it's said that everything in Australia is deadly, but this critter is the absolute exception to the rule.

 

 Whether it's playing or tuckered out have you ever seen anything more adorable?

     It's okay to smile back.

        Take Care.

 

   A beautiful example of dieselpunk artwork;

 

  You start with an example of something that is the future, as seen in a different time when the future was seen as nothing but fantastic possibilities.

  The interwar period emerged from a war unlike any other and spent a few decades where anything was possible, steam power had given way to the petrol engine, ocean liners were competing with airships, and the future was closer than ever.

    This;

  Can become this;

  I've shown the second picture before, but the first one is where you can see the inspiration.

  Another avenue of inspiration is, well, not every invention that we take for modern convenience is exclusive to this century, but a hundred years ago we had something very familiar to the modern Waze or Garmin GPS, several decades before the first satellite was launched into space.

    Here's a closer look;

  It seems to have been as simple as road maps printed in scrolls very much like (some older readers may remember) the AAA Auto Club TripTik that the automotive traveler could have printed in convenient (far more than the gas station folded maps that used to be everywhere) little flip books to help them on vacation, or any long drives.

 

  You flipped pages up and could read little bits of trivia.

      By the end of the 20th century you could go to websites like Mapquest and print your own. 

    Then GPS units you could plug into your car's cigarette lighter, and finally the app you can install on your phone.

     The phone, of course, means you can use a smart phone's connection to your smart watch and...

 

        How cool is that?

 

 

 

       Okay, this one made me laugh pretty hard.

     The great Calvin and Hobbes

    and one of Gary Larson's;

D i e s e l p u n k

 

 

    In the realm of "Punk" fiction in all it's guises, In my humble opinion, I find the most immersion, the most creativity, and the most realistic suspension of disbelief in the worlds of Dieselpunk. 

    Science fiction has a pretty rigid set of rules by which we can all agree, things like artificial gravity, warp drive, and irritating things like sound in the vacuum of space or relativity, and this is concepts that compete against the storytelling device.

    But the scientific beliefs of the 20s and 30s were much more open to exploration, from psychic or paranormal phenomena, notables like Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini would attend seances, ideas that geomagnetic anomalies and ley lines and things like alternate dimensions that would give us the birth of a great many alternate theories that have not stood the test of time, but also many that did.

    On top of that, it was also the birth of Cosmic Horror that would influence so many of the writers that followed.

   A good example would be At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft, one of several authors who explored those alternate theories amongst Robert Howard (Conan) Robert Bloch (Psycho) as well as others, like Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan) who would, with his Pellucidar series of books that ventured from airship to a hollow earth theory that still has fans today.

    For examples and a fantastic primer on it's siblings, Steampunk and Atompunk, I strongly recommend https://neverwasmag.com/ one of the better examples of the genre out there.

    Give them a visit, if you like these genres, they are very worth the visit.

    We all are familiar with Cyberpunk, from the Matrix to Ghost in the Shell, and all the stories that flow from that concept (thanks to William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Philip K. Dick, and the multitude of other brilliant writers who've explored these worlds)

    We are also familiar with the wealth of artwork, aesthetic beauty, and fiction that have grown out of Steampunk, which covers everything from Westerns (Wild Wild West to Brisco County Jr to Westworld) to Victorian tales from Sherlock Holmes to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and all the science based tales that emerged from the period from the late 19th century thru the early 20th century.

   Clothing and jewelry of the most amazing creativity and beauty and music as varied as Professor Elemental to Abney Park to a return to covers of Victorian era music like the compositions of Erik Satie.

  Bridging the gap between the Steampunk era to the Cyberpunk we have Dieselpunk.

 

 

  This is an age that blends the individual craftsmanship of early and unique motorcars from Duesenberg to Ford, clothing that anchors itself into the days where men wore suits, but with the wild exploits of flappers and vibrant nightlife with new inventions, scientific concepts from Darwin, romantic explorations of Egyptian Tombs and their curses, the cosmic horror of authors like H. P. Lovecraft in Pulp periodicals, books that would birth Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

    Add to the time,  these stories and characters are usually inhabitants of vast futuristic cityscapes as they would have been envisioned in those days a retro futuristic metropolis of every ailment and wonder as any modern city would promise.

 

   Jazz and Swing (brought back in examples like Postmodern Jukebox and Caravan Palace) created whole new genres in entertainment that would take the world by storm.

  Anchored in the Interwar Period between WW1, and WW2, we have a often overlooked era that can overlap both into Steampunk and forward into the Cyberpunk or Atompunk age, with examples that echo the same classic feel and hand crafted tactile artistry that feels rooted in both the Cassette Futurism of the Blade Runner films as much as they emulate both Film Noir and classic silent works like Metropolis.

 

  Stories with characters from Indiana Jones and Allan Quartermain to comic characters like Batman and the Art Deco inspired animated series that begins with searchlights shining down on a darkened Gotham from patrolling airships to Sandman and Hellboy.

 

  They can exist in a fantastic future past where flying cars stream between thousand foot tall skyscrapers or a muddy rainy alley that a battered detective pauses under a yellowed streetlamp to light a cigarette before getting a cup of coffee at the nearest Automat.

    Also;

   I plan give some examples with individual reviews in the future, from the artistically gorgeous films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (Delicatessen and City of Lost Children) to the HBO series and films of Philip Marlowe or the magical Cast a Deadly Spell to the Richard III updated to WW2 staring the amazing Ian McKellen, to properties like The Phantom, The Shadow, and The Rocketeer.

 

     In addition, I want to give more in depth reviews of Comics, Music, more focused tv series like Babylon Berlin, the HBO series Perry Mason, as well as older series like Boardwalk Empire along with others. the nearly forgotten TV Series, Tales of the Golden Monkey, and it's almost equally fun parallel in the animated Archer series, itself brilliant Season 9 Danger Island run (and probably the film noir inspired Dreamland the previous season)

    Stay Tuned.