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The Mandela Effect: False Memory

Nostalgic to read all your cinema comments...very much agree.

Big part of the cinema for me in the old days were the sweets.

And the plastic bags of pre-made popcorn...bought not so much for eating, but for lining up on the wooden bannister at the front of the upstairs balcony, and using a technique honed from Subbuteo, flicking onto the heads of the people downstairs.

Interval was for a quick visit to the loo, then buying a choc-ice or a tub of Cornish vanilla ice cream from an usherette.

The adverts were Pearl & Dean; plus a local curry house, a local mini-cab company and a local record shop.

Hands up who cheered when the film reels would break and there would be an unscheduled interval!

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Victory said:
Nostalgic to read all your cinema comments...very much agree.

Big part of the cinema for me in the old days were the sweets.

And the plastic bags of pre-made popcorn...bought not so much for eating, but for lining up on the wooden bannister at the front of the upstairs balcony, and using a technique honed from Subbuteo, flicking onto the heads of the people downstairs.

Interval was for a quick visit to the loo, then buying a choc-ice or a tub of Cornish vanilla ice cream from an usherette.

The adverts were Pearl & Dean; plus a local curry house, a local mini-cab company and a local record shop.

Hands up who cheered when the film reels would break and there would be an unscheduled interval!

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Pearl and Dean are still going, three minutes walk from this cinema!
 
Victory said:
Nostalgic to read all your cinema comments...very much agree.

Big part of the cinema for me in the old days were the sweets.

And the plastic bags of pre-made popcorn...bought not so much for eating, but for lining up on the wooden bannister at the front of the upstairs balcony, and using a technique honed from Subbuteo, flicking onto the heads of the people downstairs.

Interval was for a quick visit to the loo, then buying a choc-ice or a tub of Cornish vanilla ice cream from an usherette.

The adverts were Pearl & Dean; plus a local curry house, a local mini-cab company and a local record shop.

Hands up who cheered when the film reels would break and there would be an unscheduled interval!

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We used to do that .. and buy rubber johnnys, blow one up and throw it over the balcony so it would bounce off people's heads.
 
Xanatic* said:
If that is the way you all behaved at the cinema, I can see why people stopped going.
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I have only ever misbehaved once at t'picatures and it was totally justified. Have a repost.

~~wavy lines~~

I am the QUEEN of cinema-annoyance.

When Chariots of Fire came out the then Mr and I dumped the kids on my old dear one afternoon and went to see it. Place was nearly empty. We went upstairs and noticed my sister and her husband sitting downstairs directly underneath.

We had a big bag of food and drinks so for the entire showing we dropped litter on them from the balcony. Orange peel, sweet wrappers, tissues, little juice cartons, shells off monkey nuts, you name it.

I thought they'd move, or at least look up and recognise us, but they didn't. Bro in Law was stubbornly insisting they kept to their seats because 'Those little bastards aren't driving ME out!' or summat.

At the end The Mr and I legged it, giggling, leaving Sis and Bro in Law surrounded by rubbish. Bro in Law was APOPLECTIC with rage and never shut up about it for years. I assumed they knew who'd done it, but they didn't.

I finally told Sis about 10 years ago. She said it'd been one of the worse days of his life - him being a self-righteous prat an' all, y'know - and still brought it up several times a year as an example of the total corruption of Today's Youth. Not sure if she ever told him!
 
Vardoger said:
Might have been a different song in a different house then. Ask your cousin about it.
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I talked to my cousin last night. She's 10 years older than me, and remembers the house where she lived then. She said I was such a pesky little thing, and nearly drove her crazy with that album, but doesn't remember anything about Free Four till later years, although she said I was known in the family for my love of Floyd and most of them except for her thought I was a bit strange for it. I asked her why and she said they all thought I was odd anyway and that was just one more thing.So, I guess I'll just put it down to misremembering things.
 
The Royal Mint bringing out commemorative coins in Jan 2021 celebrating great British authors. Leaving aside that the designer must have been suffering from a Mandela Effect of his own, or else sloppy research, the one with the Martian Tripod from HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. (or, as the designer has it, a quadrapod).

This brought back a memory of being on holiday and seeing a civic statue of such a Martian Tripod unexpectedly emerging from the ground in a civic square in a very English town, one of those that, in the book, got totalled by the aliens. It's a vivid memory: turned a corner, and saw something that if I'd expected to see it, would have been high in the Top Ten Of Things You Would Not Expect to See In A Staid Southern English town. (Or something - if I'd been in a position to compile such a Top Ten then by definition I'd have been expecting to see it, and therefore...) you do not forget something like that.

Only my memory is very clear on this being Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Very clear. So I looked it up on Google. No mention whatsoever of such a civic statue in Tunbridge Wells. But the statue I clearly remember seeing is in Woking, Surrey. A place I have never consciously visited.
new £2 coin, four-legged Tripod


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AgProv said:
The Royal Mint bringing out commemorative coins in Jan 2021 celebrating great British authors. Leaving aside that the designer must have been suffering from a Mandela Effect of his own, or else sloppy research, the one with the Martian Tripod from HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. (or, as the designer has it, a quadrapod).

This brought back a memory of being on holiday and seeing a civic statue of such a Martian Tripod unexpectedly emerging from the ground in a civic square in a very English town, one of those that, in the book, got totalled by the aliens. It's a vivid memory: turned a corner, and saw something that if I'd expected to see it, would have been high in the Top Ten Of Things You Would Not Expect to See In A Staid Southern English town. (Or something - if I'd been in a position to compile sich a Top Ten then by definition I'd have been expecting to see it, and therefore...) you do not forget something like that.

Only my memory is very clear on this being Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Very clear. So I looked it up on Google. No mention whatsoever of such a civic statue in Tunbridge Wells. But the statue I clearly remember seeing is in Woking, Surrey. A place I have never consciously visited.
new £2 coin, four-legged Tripod


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I know Woking well - mostly for the excellent Woking Beerfest, where the commemorative pint glasses usually feature a stylised alien.
H G Wells moved to the town in 1895 and chose the nearby Horsell Common as the initial invasion point for his Martians.
 
This is driving me more nuts than usual. Trying to figure this out - I have Google Street View open and I am beginning at Tunbridge Wells railway station, orientating myself on a memory that the BBC regional studios are directly opposite ( noted this and wondered if my BBC-journalist brother-in-law has ever visited, concluded that he probably has). Turned right and went up the Mount Pleasant hill towards the town centre. Memory tells me we walked up the hill, that the Town Hall or council offices or whatever were on the right, a little way after that the shopping centre opened up, something called the Pantiles on the right - recalled it as Victorian and earlier buildings where any distinctive character has been buggered ,by building an identikit shopping mall around them - and that the memory of seeing the Martian statue was somewhere to the west of the main road, in a public square; the map view shows something called the Royal Victoria. (also recalling a wonky civic clock on four wrought-iron legs, seemed a bit twisty and bendy). GSV takes an age on this computer - movement is nowhere near as clean and fast and responsive as i'd like...
 
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Really strange that a statue I clearly recall seeing in Tunbridge Wells should turn out to be in Woking. I really do recall standing underneath and looking up at the alien and thinking - "This is really imaginative. I like this." it's not the kind of thing that goes on tour, is it, and spends a while in different locations before moving on?
 
Sometimes statues can be transitory though. They don't always stay erected permanently, particularly if they are an artwork rather than a large lump of carved stone.

Is there a Tunbridge Wells Facebook page? You could post a question on there. If the pages I belong to are anything to go by, they are peopled by elderly residents who can't wait to tell you how much better the place was years ago. Somebody on there may remember.
 
AgProv said:
... it's not the kind of thing that goes on tour, is it, and spends a while in different locations before moving on?
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Conceivable, but IMHO not likely.

If you're really certain it was that sculpture you saw, and it was definitely Tunbridge Wells where you saw it, you might contact the artist to see if either (a) it did a tour of temporary installations on its way to Woking or (b) he exhibited a copy or prototype elsewhere than Woking.

The one in Woking apparently has been there continuously since April 1998.
 
amazing what you (re)discover when searching for something tangentially related... I'd forgotten this minor gem existed. And that does look like the Pantiles....

 
This cropped up on Quora earlier and it surprised me!

I was sure the lyrics of the headbanging bit in Bohemian Rhapsody contained the following:

"So you think you can stop me and spit in my eye?"

But the official Queen lyrics website gives it as:

"So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?"

Have I been singing it incorrectly all these years, or did it change mysteriously when the universe forked sometime in the last 4 decades?
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
I was sure the lyrics of the headbanging bit in Bohemian Rhapsody contained the following:

"So you think you can stop me and spit in my eye?"

But the official Queen lyrics website gives it as:

"So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?"

Have I been singing it incorrectly all these years, or did it change mysteriously when the universe forked sometime in the last 4 decades?
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You'll be telling us next that Freddie doesn't sing "Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard"!

Actually, it's always been "stone" in my universe.

But don't worry. Nothing really matters...
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
This cropped up on Quora earlier and it surprised me!

I was sure the lyrics of the headbanging bit in Bohemian Rhapsody contained the following:

"So you think you can stop me and spit in my eye?"

But the official Queen lyrics website gives it as:

"So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?"

Have I been singing it incorrectly all these years, or did it change mysteriously when the universe forked sometime in the last 4 decades?
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Nope, I had the album when it came out and 'stone' was in the printed lyrics.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
This cropped up on Quora earlier and it surprised me!

I was sure the lyrics of the headbanging bit in Bohemian Rhapsody contained the following:

"So you think you can stop me and spit in my eye?"

But the official Queen lyrics website gives it as:

"So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?"

Have I been singing it incorrectly all these years, or did it change mysteriously when the universe forked sometime in the last 4 decades?
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I too have always known it as 'stop'. Even playing the song in my head right now as I type this, the way he pronounces it is certainly 'stop' and not the slightly longer intonation of the word 'stone'.

There's the mundane possibility that the official lyrics website is wrong, of course.

But I'd definitely go with the universe changed theory. :)


We have the original LP of that, so when I get chance I'll look and see what are the lyrics printed on there.


EDIT: I just played the relevant part from the video on youtube, secure in the knowledge that Freddie would sing 'stop' just like he's done countless times before. But no. He's now clearly singing 'stone'. Curse you, alternate universes!
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
I too have always known it as 'stop'. Even playing the song in my head right now as I type this, the way he pronounces it is certainly 'stop' and not the slightly longer intonation of the word 'stone'.

There's the mundane possibility that the official lyrics website is wrong, of course.

But I'd definitely go with the universe changed theory. :)


We have the original LP of that, so when I get chance I'll look and see what are the lyrics printed on there.


EDIT: I just played the relevant part from the video on youtube, secure in the knowledge that Freddie would sing 'stop' just like he's done countless times before. But no. He's now clearly singing 'stone'. Curse you, alternate universes!
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Yes, I always thought it was 'stop'. You're right about these damned alternate universes! It's confusing.
 
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