{"id":15443,"date":"2016-12-21T18:32:00","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T02:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2016\/12\/21\/15443.html"},"modified":"2016-12-21T18:32:00","modified_gmt":"2016-12-22T02:32:00","slug":"the-mandela-effect-and-other-m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2016\/12\/21\/the-mandela-effect-and-other-m\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mandela Effect and other memories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I find the whole <a href=\"http:\/\/www.snopes.com\/2016\/07\/24\/the-mandela-effect\/\">Mandela Effect<\/a> thing intriguing. (A group of people remembering something that didn't happen.) Here's one I hadn't heard about: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/science-tech\/internet\/2016\/12\/movie-doesn-t-exist-and-redditors-who-think-it-does\">a nonexistent Sinbad movie called <cite>Shazaam<\/cite><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Which makes me think of three things from my own life:<\/p>\n<ul>\n  <li><p>When I was in fifth grade or so, I read a great library book called <cite>The Towers of February<\/cite>, by a Dutch author named Tonke Dragt. It was about a boy who wakes up with no memory in another world. I loved it, so I went back a little later to check it out again. The library had no record of the book having existed. It wasn't on the shelf or in the card catalog. It wasn't in <cite>Books in Print<\/cite>, which at the time I thought meant there was no record of it having been published. I spent something like fifteen or twenty years looking for the book, in bookstores and libraries, but nobody had ever heard of it.<\/p>\n<p>And then along came the Internet, and I found and bought a copy online. It really did exist!<\/p>\n<\/li>\n  <li>Sometime in the early '90s, I started having vague memories of a TV show about a white lion. I remembered having seen it as a kid, which was a little weird because we didn't have a TV for most of my childhood. But I had never seen or heard of any indication of it since childhood, and nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. Then <cite>The Lion King<\/cite> came out, and there were eventually articles about the possible connections between that movie and an anime TV series called <cite>Kimba the White Lion<\/cite>. Which was, sure enough, the show I remembered.<\/li>\n  <li><p>At one point in college, I checked out a book from the town library. I think the book was <cite>Summer of the Falcon<\/cite>, by Jean Craighead George, which was another book that had disappeared out of my awareness and memory for a long time. I think the library got it via interlibrary loan. When I was done with it, I took it to the library and returned it, setting it down on the check-in desk.<\/p>\n<p>A while later, I got a notice from the library saying that I had never returned the book. I told them I had. They told me I hadn't. I had an impassioned fight with them on the phone about it. I felt that my honor was being impugned, that they were calling me a liar. I refused to pay for the book, and they revoked my borrowing privileges.<\/p>\n<p>I was angry and bewildered about that for a long time, but felt pretty self-righteous about it. Until the day came when the library let me know that someone claiming to be a friend of mine (naming me by name, but not giving their own name) had returned the book, months after it was due.<\/p>\n<p>I still have no idea what happened. I think that I must have loaned the book to a friend (though I don't know who) and then forgotten I had done so, and created a false memory of having returned it. But the memory of returning it was very clear in my head.<\/p>\n<p>I suppose it's possible that I left the book on the counter and a friend of mine who had seen me do that immediately and sneakily picked it up and walked out with it without telling me. But it seems much more plausible that I just misremembered what happened.<\/p><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I find the whole Mandela Effect thing intriguing. (A group of people remembering something that didn&#8217;t happen.) Here&#8217;s one I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10,44,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-movies","category-television"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}