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.