6.05.2025

Then there's the Mandela Effect. If you don't know what that is do a quick search right quick for the Berenstein Bears. See? Now you're in the warp hole with the rest of us. The name for the concept comes from an apparent shared assertion that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. It comes with a whole set of collectively reinforced memories of a big funeral and the political fallout and everything. I'm not from that universe, but the Bears thing? Yeah, I know that's wrong. To contribute to the craziness, I just want to point out that the first book in the series was published in 1962, aka known as the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis (at least to some of us). The notion that things got knocked out of wack when the ICBMs started flying and that discrepancy somehow jumped membranes and became part of our world sounds as logical to me as a lot of other things folks take on faith. I prefer to think it's just an example of a time travel screw up, along with the missing cornucopia on the Fruit of the Loom underwear logo. A lot of things wrong with the world could be hung on shitty time travelers, if you think about it. And now you're thinking about it, instead of doing whatever you were supposed to be doing. Good for you.