Mandela Effect, John McAfee, And Whale Sex

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet

If someone commits first degree murder in Canada, is that 34 degrees in non-metric murder?

The posts have been pretty heavy recently, so I thought I’d do a changeup before we dig back into the heavy stuff next week.  I’ll start with a bit about John McAfee:

John McAfee was being interviewed by Wired magazine back in 2013 (LINK).  In the middle of the interview, McAfee pulls out a revolver and dumps the ammo.  “This is a bullet, see?”

The interviewer responded:  “Let’s put the gun back.”

McAfee puts a single bullet back in the revolver and spins the cylinder, which holds only five bullets.  From the article:

Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession.

There are only five chambers. “Reholster the gun,” I demand.

He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”

To be fair, a good stage magician could do this, so I have to doubt it since I wasn’t there.  And McAfee?  While he was a “presidential candidate” he Tweeted® out about the really important issues of the day:

Really.

This is probably number one in my category of “answers to questions no one really ever asked” file.  But, yeah, John McAfee actually Tweeted© that.

The closest argument is that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, John McAfee really does die a lot in alternate realities, like all those Mario® corpses I accidently killed by walking into turtles in Super Mario Brothers™.

What’s the Many Worlds interpretation?  Simply this, that whenever a clerk asks “paper or plastic” the answer is “yes”.  When there’s a decision or a probability that something happens, all the things happen.  The catch, though, is that the Universe branches at this point, and those decisions and probabilities themselves bring new universes into being.

I won’t go into the details, since you can read if you’re interested and you’d be bored if you’re not, and I’ll bet the incredibly intelligent Frequent Commentors will engage in a lively debate as to the relative crackpot level of Many Worlds.  For this post, let’s just call it a convenient way to create a nearly infinite number of parallel universes right next door, but (probably) disconnected from our reality.

I put in the probably because for a long time I’ve thought that the Many Worlds interpretation might explain the Mandela Effect pretty well.

I actually ran into the Mandela Effect before it existed during a conversation with The Mrs. one evening.  We were watching a TV’s Funniest Game Shows on Fox® when we were newly married.  Richard Dawson was narrating.  I have written about this once before, but this is a (slightly) different take.

Me:  “What?  Richard Dawson is dead.  He died in 1989 of lung cancer.  I remember reading it in the paper one morning.”  In fact, I remember it specifically as in January or February of that year.

The Mrs.:  “Yup, I remember the same thing.”

I used the pull-start on my Briggs & Stratton two-stroke Pentium® computer and dialed into the Internet and, after the modem made those squeaky-fuzzy sounds found . . . Dawson was alive.  This was despite The Mrs. and I having had exactly, down to the month, the same memory of his death, from the same time and cause.

I wonder if parking would be difficult in a parallel universe?

It’s not called the Richard Dawson effect, it’s called the Mandela effect because a group of people were convinced that South African leader communist Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, versus his actual death in 2013, and this surfaced around 2010.

One of the biggest examples of this that people share is something simple – the Fruit of the Loom® label.  I had a memory of this logo looking as a variety of fruit sitting in front of a fruit cornucopia.  I even asked (while The Mrs. was cooking dinner a few years ago) for The Mrs. to describe the logo.

The Mrs.:  “An apple, and some grapes, maybe another fruit, all sitting in front of a cornucopia.”

Me:  “Which side is the cornucopia on?”

The Mrs.:  “The right side.”

I showed her the picture below of the logo with the cornucopia.

“Yes, that’s it, exactly.”

Except the Fruit of the Loom™ people say they’ve never had a logo with a cornucopia.  They say they’ve never had a cornucopia in their logo, though they been asked about it plenty.  But it’s not just me.  The painter of the album cover for the 1973 album Flute of the Loom had some thoughts about the logo:

And the way I remembered it on my t-shirts and underwear?  This logo looks exactly like it, though I’m nearly certain it’s a fake:

The only other really big one for me is the character of Jaws from the James Bond movie Moonraker.  I’m not old enough to have seen it in theaters, so, like every male since forever, I was watching it on TV the night it premiered for the first time on network TV.

Back then, every guy at school had seen Moonraker the night before.  And the one scene that made us all laugh?  When the great, hulking character Jaws had been rescued by a tiny little blonde girl named Dolly.  Jaws smiles at Dolly, exposing his metal-filled mouth.  And the funny, payoff scene is when Dolly smiles back, and exposes a mouth filled with braces.  Love at first sight, and hilarious.  You can see it in the clip below:

This is exactly how I remember it.  Exactly.  And exactly what the guys were talking about at school.  And, like the t-shirt above, it’s almost certainly a fake, too.

When I discussed the scene with The Mrs., despite never watching Moonraker together, she remembered the braces as well.  In her words, “Without the braces, the scene just doesn’t make sense.”

But when I checked the streaming version of the movie, well, no braces on Dolly.

Can I explain Richard Dawson, Fruit of the Loom©, and Dolly?

No, I can’t.  And the memories are interesting because they’re so very specific.  It’s almost like there’s something else at play.  Back to the Wired article on John McAfee:

To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol. ” Let’s do this one more time,” he says, and puts it to his head.

Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly and nothing happens. “It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber,” he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have proven faulty. I’m missing something.

. . . I’m not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside and pulls the trigger. A gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. “You thought you were creating your reality,” he says. “You were not. I was.”

He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It’s still warm.

If John McAfee really is dead, you damn well better believe it’s consensual.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

48 thoughts on “Mandela Effect, John McAfee, And Whale Sex”

  1. My understanding is there exists exactly zero physical experimental evidence which suggests any “interpretation” of QM is a better fit to the observations than any other. Since there is no evidence, QM interpretations are religion, just like string theories.

  2. Huh. Had never heard about whale sex before. There’s a Moby Dick joke in there somewhere.

  3. AI is going to make this look like child’s play. No one will know what anyone has said or done. That will be the time for the “aliens” to appear, and that will change everything.

  4. And speaking of McAfee and Moby …

    “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
    ― Philip Kindred Dick (I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon)

  6. I predict that in years to come there will arise a complementary ‘Keith Richards effect’. When his name comes up, people will wonder, “How old is that fossil now?” only to discover, to their utter astonishment, that he died years earlier. Of course, this won’t be for some time, but you heard it here first.

    1. The Rolling Stones just released a new song, ‘Angry’. The album drops next month.
      Keith actually died decades ago. His mummy is very life-like, however.

  7. The Copenhagen Interpretation set back science by a decade and has held it in that retarded state ever since. Unlike the strictures of the CI, there is no ‘woo’, and certainly no ‘hoo’ in real science.

    I figured out one part of the Mandela Effect. Everybody knows that the lion shall lay down with the lamb – but that isn’t in the Bible. The actual quote is: Isaiah 11 6 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
    7 And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

    We all remember lines from various devotionals, which are what most sermons come from.

    1. That’s the whole point that it is a mandela effect. The lion DID lie down with the lamb in the bible but it has now changed to the wolf. Your bible tract argument is bogus. Try again.

  8. Love that photo of Joe Slovo and the Mandelas raising the commie fist with hammer and sickle logo in the background.
    Roger Moore dresses up like a clown in Moonraker and I loves me some Carly Simon and Shirley Bassey.
    Philosoraptor says light post is still heavy and he drives no Chevy to the levy in the fall because American Pie will never be in short supply.
    Luit of the Froom, Froom of the Lute, get no stains on your Hanes if at all possible.
    They cut all that off if you get carried in and lost a killer Don Vito shirt that way before a fundamental transformation in the whirling sound tunnel forge, hell was the NFL channel and being cuffed to the gurney but the Flash Gordon mind sucker machine only makes you stronger.
    If it doesn’t kill you it makes you able to out monster the monster as Fab Freddy Nietzsche said.
    Always give thanks to God for he is the master of all of those universes as the cosmic field marshal.

  9. ‘like all those Mario® corpses I accidently killed by walking into turtles in Super Mario Brothers™’

    You are still going with ‘accidentally’ I see. OK whatever.

    As with galactic structure and DNA, events take place ‘within’ a spiral, with a fold-over element. You can’t push the river, but it’s open to suggestion. Ole Moses figured that out.

  10. What people actually remember, from the South African prison, was the death of Steven Biko. His death was noticed, but Mandela got a lot more attention, so people fused the two ideas together.
    I remember that the cornucopia was a common graphical element around Thanksgiving Day, in my youth, so perhaps when people saw the collection of fruit in their underwear … wait … maybe that’s not quite what I should say … Well, anyway, they saw the fruit, and mentally completed the scene. That’s something that our brains do.

    I’ve tried an experiment where I have a colored lamp blink at odd intervals, green or red, in the periphery of my vision. I can’t tell what color it is until my eyes focus on it, and from then on, it holds its color until the next cycle, even when I look away and only see it at the edge. Learning to see what is actually THERE is a skill that takes artists a long time to master.

    1. The girl in Moonraker definitely had braces, and I watched it more than once,..,.what’s going on here?

  11. Another Mandela, Is it Jif or Jiffy Peanut Butter? No there’s Jif & Skippy. No “Jiffy”.

    1. My idyllic childhood memories are now ruined, Lamont. Gonna go cry now into my Goofy Grape Kool-Aid.

      1. Oh well, enjoy Gilbert Grape KoolAid. We had a crazed Afro (we think) that went on an I-26 shooting spree in our neigboring county at 1130AM (Berkeley, so it might be on “On Patrol/Live”). Suicide & 10 wounded, one cop.

        Coastal areas like Chucktown have few major arteries. I came back into town at 4PM and it took me 10 minutes to escape re-routed outgoing congestion. Then a crazey-as*ed 30 minute detour to reach El Casa Anda.

    2. Oh come on. It’s JIF, it’s always been JIF. It’s what choosey mothers choose (remember Anette in the ads) and has more peanut taste. Jiffy is that popcorn in the tinfoil pan that you burn on the stove.

      Actually I’m Mandela-ing on you; Annette Funicello did peanut butter ads for Skippy not JIF.

      1. Drew, have actually been to the Jiffy Pop plant in Seagrove, NC beck in the mid-90s. At least it was back then. Darius Luck of Luck’s Foods. Pronounced “duh-RI-us”.

  12. Having a little bit of WilderTime under the settin’ tree with Q and talking about the Dawson Effect.

    Short answer: It is either demons or the NWO jokers messing with us mixed with human misperception. Multiple World theories are bogus.(But great story-fodder)

    Oh and SomeWhither is plausible. But it has the demons and the NWO in. Great story.

  13. John, once some years back I wrote a short story where the narrator (really me, let us be honest) met with versions of himself in a tea house where different choices had been made at key points of his life. It was an interesting journey into the potential (and logical) outcomes of decisions I had made (to be fair, I think I got the best of those decisions).

  14. Entangled universes leak stuff. I think the big examples you use are all explainable.
    It’s the little things, and it’s very rare. I’ve seen three in my life. The last was about 10 years ago. I put a used twist tie down on the table, did whatever I did, and reached for the twist tie. It was gone. I looked around, on the ground, nothing. I looked back at the table. There it was.
    You’re more likely to see these phenomenii if your life is uneventful by choice. Your doppels are going to be more like you, more ‘entangled’ in some fashion. Sounds nutty, but if you pay attention and wait years and years between examples, you can also bore people in comment sections.
    Travis Taylor incorporates quantum entanglement in some of his fiction. I really loved the ‘Warp Speed’ series.
    I just finished ep. 40 of the ‘cast. You guys interrupt Mark a lot. At one point, John kept interrupting until Mark shut up long enough for John to make his comment. Mark seems like a great guy, and he’s obviously intelligent, and obviously very patient. (I’m very much enjoying the youtubecast. Wish it was through a less fascist web service, though.)

    1. Indeed on weird events. I have several.

      I’ll keep that in mind when I’m hosting. I generally only bull through when I have a joke that’s set up . . . .but thank you, I’ll be more mindful!

  16. “Flute of the Loom”?

    Seliousry? Arways with the anti-Sinotism. Just you wait unitr the Anti-Defamation Reague gets wind of this!

  17. I can’t believe no one mentioned the Berenstain Bears (or should that be the Berenstein Bears?!)

  18. Korsakoff syndrome:
    * Memory gaps filled with created memories.
    According to the numbers, about 80% (eighty-percent) of alcoholics — and other addicts? — suffer from Korsakoff.

    1. Some, sure. But everyone I talk to? (Dolly) and most everyone I mention it to? (F-o-t-L). There is something there, but I won’t say what, exactly it is because I don’t know.

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