Mandelaed: What if it never appeared on TV in Flash Gordon in the 21st or Buck Rogers in the 25th century?

Has metal bucket head man “Mandelaed” me?

What if metal bucket head man, as I like to think of him, never actually appeared in the 25th century Buck Rogers black and white TV series in 1950 or 1951, or in 1954 or 1955 in an episode of Flash Gordon from the 21st century?

What if … none of it was real, or at least that there was no metal bucket head man (it’s hard to describe the appearance of the character exactly, but over his head, if he had one, or in lieu of one if he didn’t, appeared to be something reminiscent of one of those upside down old silver metal wash pails or buckets, yet the rest of him looked more humanoid than like a robot, although he didn’t speak in either case), but I remembered him from my childhood as real?

Well, never fear, the explanation may simply be that I was mandelaed and am displaying a classic case of the “Mandela Effect,” as it is called, although in my case it may or may not be a case of being privately mandelaed, rather than the collective misremembering of common events the phenomenon is usually identified with.

“This form of collective misremembering of common events or details first emerged in 2010, when countless people on the internet falsely remembered Nelson Mandela was dead,” notes Neil Dagnall, reader in applied cognitive psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, in a Feb. 12 piece in The Conversation, based in Toronto. “It was widely believed he had died in prison during the 1980s. In reality, Mandela was actually freed in 1990 and passed away in 2013 – despite some people’s claims they remember clips of his funeral on TV.”

Paranormal consultant Fiona Broome, discussing the possibility of alternate memories and alternate realities, was one of the two people who coined the phrase “Mandela Effect” during a conversation in Dragon Con‘s “green room” in late 2009 to explain this collective misremembering, and then “other examples started popping up all over the internet,” Dagnall says. “For instance, it was wrongly recalled that C-3PO from Star Wars was gold, actually one of his legs is silver. Likewise, people often wrongly believe that the Queen in Snow White says, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall.’ The correct phrase is “magic mirror on the wall.”

In an Oct. 13, 2016 article, BuzzFeed staff writer Christopher Hudspeth, lists 20 examples of the Mandela Effect, ranging from the common misspelling of Oscar Mayer, the famous brand of hot dogs and lunch meat, as Oscar Meyer, to the Monopoly board game mascot, Rich Uncle Pennybags, having a monocle, when he doesn’t.

In a similar vein, as I wrote here in a March 25, 2015 post headlined “If there was a biblical equivalent to a mondegreen, it might well be the famous 45th verse from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/if-there-was-a-biblical-equivalent-to-a-mondegreen-it-might-well-be-the-famous-45th-verse-from-the-fifth-chapter-of-the-gospel-of-st-matthew/) when you “mishear the lyrics to a song it is called a mondegreen, which is a sort of aural malapropism. Instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word. The word mondegreen is generally used for misheard song lyrics, although technically it can apply to any speech. A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.” Hudspeth cites the example of “We Are the Champions” by Queen where “many of those familiar with the song remember the final lyrics being ‘No time for losers, ’cause we are the champions … of the world!’ Guess what? There is no ‘of the world!’ The song just ends, and it’s driving people crazy because they feel 100% sure that they’ve heard otherwise in the past.”

Broome explains the Mandela Effect s differences arising from movement between parallel realities (the multiverse). This is based on the theory that within each universe alternative versions of events and objects exist.

“Broome also draws comparisons between existence and the holodeck of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, writes Dagnall. “The holodeck was a virtual reality system, which created recreational experiences. By her explanation, memory errors are software glitches. This is explained as being similar to the film The Matrix.”

Broome has described the Mandela Effect this way: “The ‘Mandela Effect’ is what happens when someone has a clear, personal memory of something that never happened in this reality.

“Many people – mostly total strangers – seem to remember several of the exact same events with the exact same details. However, those memories are different from what’s in history books, newspaper archives, and so on.”

Other theories propose that the Mandela Effect is evidence of  changes in history caused by time travellers.

The X-Files, appropriately enough, had a fine real-time nod to fake news and the Trumpocalypse, while at the same time staying campy and conspiratorially self-referential in its treatment of the Mandela Effect this year in season 11, episode four, “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” which aired Jan. 24. Writes Brian Tallerico on Vulture, the culture and entertainment site from New York magazine: “We’re introduced to the Mandela effect through the story of Reggie Something, played by Brian Huskey. We meet him in full Deep Throat mode, chewing sunflower seeds in a parking garage, having a clandestine meeting with Mulder. He knows he’s going to seem crazy, so he gives Mulder a very personal example of the Mandela effect, revealing to him that his favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Lost Martian,” doesn’t really exist. Of course, we know it doesn’t, but Mulder is convinced that he saw it when he was a kid. He rummages through his belongings to find it, leading to the great line when Scully suggests it might be a different series: “Confuse The Twilight Zone with The Outer Limits?! Do you even KNOW ME?!?!”

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Who’d a thunk it? Readers says it’s a toss-up when it comes to whether robo-journalists write better than human journalists

OK … we’ve all heard the phrase “fishwrap” applied derogatorily by critics assessing the quality of newspapers wherever they live from time to time.  Methinks some weeks that does a disservice to how my favourite pickerel from Paint Lake should be treated, but it isn’t just local newspapers that are problematically bad at times. Take the venerable Associated Press, affectionately known by working journos simply as the AP. They managed to move this alert last Wednesday: “BC-APNewsAlert/17. New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Bear has died. He was 90.” Actually, Yogi Bear, the beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoon character is only 57. He was created in 1958, making his début as a supporting character in The Huckleberry Hound Show, and was the first breakout character created by Hanna-Barbera and was eventually more popular than Huckleberry Hound.

Yogi Berra, the beloved baseball player, on the other hand, was created in 1924 and born in 1925. A native of St. Louis, Berra signed with the New York Yankees in 1943 before serving in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. He made his major league début in 1946 and was a stalwart in the Yankees’ lineup during the team’s championship years in the 1940s and 1950s.

Berra was a power hitter and strong defensive catcher. He caught Yankees’ pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game on Oct. 8, 1956, in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, the only perfect game in Major League Baseball (MLB) post-season history. After playing 18 seasons with the Yankees, Berra retired following the 1963 season. Berra was also famous for his string of truisms, tautologies and malapropisms, including “Nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded,” along with, “It ain’t over til it’s over” or, “Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked,” as well as, “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true” and, “If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.” My personal favourite, which I managed to inject into several columns, editorials or news stories over the years, was the well-known, “This is like déjà vu all over again,” which I had used again as recently as Aug. 24, less than a month before Yogi Berra died.

It was while I was pondering how a boo boo like the Yogi Bear/Yogi Berra obituary mix-up happens in journalism (I suspect the eagle-eyed Ranger John Francis Smith from Jellystone Park would have known the difference) that I came across the latest information on robo-journalism (not to be mixed up with Tory robo-calls during the 2011 federal election campaign, I should point out to my friends still remaining in Canadian journalism.) Turns out that unlike most human journalists, who are for the most part seriously mathematically challenged, robot journalists that already work for such illustrious newspapers as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes, the storied business magazine, have shown a natural aptitude for data, making them ideal for the sports and business desks, and as such are now about ready to branch out into breaking news and investigative journalism.

Neil Sharman (believed to be a human writer) and former head of research and insight at Telegraph Media Group on Buckingham Palace Road in London, writing Sept. 22 in TheMediaBriefing, also based in London, noted that robots, “Like junior reporters … can learn from and draw on a back catalogue of great writing – but with more powerful memories and analytical techniques.” You can read Sharman’s full piece here:  http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/robo-journalism-the-future-is-arriving-quickly

“Machines are adept at investigating data sets,” Sharman says. “Publishers have set them to tax records, homicide data, meteorological reports and more –looking for patterns and describing them. They’re thorough, not prone to error and they’re fast.

“The LA Times uses robo-journalism to break news about earthquakes because machines can analyse geological survey data faster than a human. It takes under five minutes to spot a story and get it online.”

Tim Adams, a staff writer for the “The Observer: The New Review” at London’s The Guardian newspaper, wrote a piece June 28 on Kris Hammond, a professor of journalism and computer science at Northwestern University and co-founder and chief scientist at Chicago-based Narrative Science, which developed a writing program for robots known as “Quill.” Hammond also founded the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He told Adams, “we are humanizing the machine and giving it the ability not only to look at data but, based on general ideas of what is important and a close understanding of who the audience is, we are giving it the tools to know how to tell us stories.”

Adams observes, “It’s not deathless prose – at least not yet; the machines are still ‘learning’ day by day how to write effectively – but it’s already good enough to replace the jobs once done by wire reporters. Narrative Science’s computers provide daily market reports for Forbes as well sports reports for the Big Ten sports network. Hammond predicts that 90 per cent of journalism will be written by computer by 2030. Automated Insights, one of Narrative Sciences competitors, based in Durham, North Carolina, does all the data-based stock reports for AP.

Adams also notes that “last year, a Swedish media professor, Christer Clerwall, conducted the first proper blind study into how sports reports written by computers and by humans compared. Readers taking part in the study suggested, on the whole, that the reports written by human sports journalists were slightly more accessible and enjoyable, but that those written by computer seemed a little more informative and trustworthy.”

Clerwall, an assistant professor in media and communication studies at Karlstad University in Karlstad, Sweden concluded that “perhaps the most interesting result in the study is that there are [almost] no… significant differences in how the two texts are perceived.”

In terms of narrative arcs, Hammond says, “Like any decent hack, the machine is coming to learn that there are only five or six compelling tales available: back from the brink, outrageous fortune, sudden catastrophe and so on.”

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