Full Nelson

Nelson Mandela, circa 2008, a full 25 years after his death.

Hello. We have an unusual newsletter today, featuring intensive Gene Poll Gene Polling. There will be several questions, and you are on the honor system. No Googling. Warning: Do not make assumptions about what you think we are looking for; it may mislead you. Search your memories and such, and give honest answers. If you don’t know for sure, guess based on what you think is correct.

Alert: If you plan on taking the poll, please do it now because there will be some spoilers below.

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Okay, before we proceed to an explanation and deconstruction of the weird and seemingly pointless questions above, a personal story.

In 1980, at the Trafalgar Theatre on Broadway in New York, I saw “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” starring Al Pacino, who was a bright new star, basking in the afterglow of The Godfather. I was blown away, and over the years discussed his performance with many people, many of whom had heard of it and at least two of whom had also seen the show. We agreed that the performance was flawless, both because — playing a quadriplegic — Pacino pulled it off somehow without moving a muscle below his neck, including a harrowing moment when he nearly fell off the bed, helpless to stop his fall. And also, for his amazing delivery of a great joke, which I repeat here from memory:

An Indian brave goes to visit his tribe’s elder, and says, “My wife is heavy with child, but we cannot decide on what to name him. Have you any advice?”

The elder says, “Yes, my son. There is an old Native American custom that on the morning after the day of the birth, you throw open the flap of your teepee, and whatever is the first thing you see shall be the name of the baby. If you see a deer running, the child shall be Running Deer. If you see a hawk in the sky, the child shall be Soaring Hawk. But you already KNOW this, Two Dogs Fucking.”

So.

Al Pacino never starred in Whose Life Is It, Anyway? Never performed a minute of it. I discovered this only recently when I told my story to Rachel, who is an actor, and I wanted to supplement the story with more details from the performance, and went online, and gasped.

The man I saw was Tom Conti, a star at the time, and very Pacino-like in looks and delivery. But not Pacino. Not even Italian-American. He’s Scottish. To this day, I have no idea how, over time, Conti became Pacino in my mind …. and in the minds of others.

It turns out there is a name for this phenomenon. You may know it but I had not. It is called The Mandela Effect, and it refers to the situation in which enormous numbers of people — for reasons that are unclear — have the same certainty of memory about something, but it is wrong. When I asked Rachel if she’d heard of it, she said yes, and said it was based on a wildly circulated quote from Mandela — one she once hung on a bedroom wall. Here it is:

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."

It turns out it was not Mandela at all. It was, um, Marianne Williamson.

Rachel was right that the quote was wrong, but it isn’t the derivation of The Mandela Effect. It’s a simple misattributed quote, like dozens allegedly from Dorothy Parker — in this case it was probably deliberately and maliciously done by some jackass. But it is understandable that people believed it, which is the anathema to the Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect is that, starting in the late1990s, people inexplicably developed a memory that the great man had died in prison in the 1980s.

And Rachel said, “Wow, the Mandela Effect has its own Mandela Effect.”

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So. Regarding the examples above. Ready?

Question one: You would need two colors, not one. C3PO is almost all gold, but the lower half of his right leg is silver. It is so unremembered that even some C3PO figurines, for purchase, are painted pure gold.

Question two: Desi never said that. I would have sworn he did, too. He said things like “‘Splain that,” or “‘Splain that, if you can.”

Question three: Yes, the Evil Queen said exactly that. She did NOT say “Mirror, Mirror …” though most people think she did.

Question four: He has no monocle. A ridiculous number of people, for some reason, remember one.

Question five: No, there are not two Cinderella’s Castles. There is one, in Florida’s Disney World. The Castle in Disneyland is Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.

Question six: Believe or not, Sally said that, as printed, and only that. Yep, it is wordy and far less articulate than what everyone remembers. It is unclear where “You like me, you really like me!” came from.

Question seven: Sarah did not say that. She said: "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”This one is partially explicable because Tina Fay, spoofing Sarah, did say that on SNL.

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I should mention that most of these questions were adapted from a simple list, presented in far less confrontational form, and not as a test, in a story story years ago in Good Housekeeping magazine.

Do you doubt any of these? I would link to the proofs, but you can find each with a 15-second Googlesearch.

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I like eBay. But they do something that drives me nuts. I will often browse the offerings, particularly antique clocks, and occasionally will see something so hideous, so ostentatiously ugly, that I’ll punch it up so I can get a larger view. Invariably a day or two later, I’ll get an email from ebay saying “IT’S ALMOST YOURS. MAKE AN OFFER NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.”

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When I was in high school, I was at a party. There were maybe twelve of us there, girls and boys. At one point, the “host” (a kid) distributed three or four things he had made, a board at one end of which two nails were driven in, maybe an inch apart, and protruding maybe two inches above the board. Then he gave each team a cooked noodle and challenged everyone to grab it by one end and and try to maneuver the other end on the board, in between the nails.

We all tried it for about ten minutes. When we were done, the host revealed that he was taking notes on all the comments he heard, and read them aloud. They were, like: “I can’t get it in the hole!” and “It’s too limp to fit in!” We always guffawed at the priceless sophisticated sexual innuendo! In retrospect, it was pretty much a precursor to the modern genre of joke known as “that’s what she said,” which is also a highly sophisticated genre of humour.

Gad, 16-year-olds are assholes. Does anyone younger than 60 know of this game?

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Finally, as you can imagine, I am now very, very leery of criticizing ethnic foods in any way.

Haha, right. So I like fried chicken wings, and the dish is usually offered as buffalo wings, which offers a French blue cheese dressing dip. I once tried it and forever gave it up. Why would anyone take perfectly good chicken wings and then dip them in a mixture of toe cheese, urine, and chunky milk gone sour? I always ask the waiter to substitute ranch dressing, which works fine, unlike the putrid bleu cheese from the French.

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Okay, we now descend into the real-time Gene Pool, where you ask questions or make observations, and I respond to them in real time. Today, many of your questions / observs are in response to my call this weekend for you to tell us at what age, and under what circumstances, you first discovered your sexual orientation. Reminder: if you are reading this in real time, please keep refreshing your screen for more hot takes.

Submit questions / observations here.

Q: I'm a 44-year-old woman, and I have spent my entire life assuming I was straight. Although I got drunk and kissed the odd girl from time to time, my physical attraction to them seemed to have a hard ceiling — right up until my husband and I agreed to open up our 14-year, largely sexless marriage, and I found myself promptly falling in love with another woman. I don't really feel like I should be claiming another identity all of a sudden, or that I've spent my whole life Repressing My True Self (although I probably could have had a lot more fun a lot earlier on if I'd figured this out). But having such a range of brand-new sexual experiences is quite the revelation at my age, and my husband and I have joked that the most applicable acronym for me is STBQ: Surprised to be Queer.

A: I like the acronym. I also like that you are still with your husband. You sound like a complicated, interesting person who is comfortable in her own skin.

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Q: Barney and Clyde question: The 12/16 episode relies on the difference between the French "pain" and the English "pain." The joke works OK seeing it on paper, but if said aloud, the pronunciation is so different in the two languages that "pain" isn't the same word at all. So that made me wonder: Do you write for the jokes to be read aloud or not? Sometimes one way and sometimes the other?

A: You refer to this one.   It’s a good question. 

There are certain illogical conventions that are common to comics.  One is that sometimes a character will be left- handed, and sometimes the same character will be right-handed, depending on the spatial needs of the cartoonist that day.  I prefer to think of it as that in the comics, all characters are ambidextrous.  

In this case, we are flexing a second illogical convention, but one I particularly like. .Comics are a written medium about a spoken medium.  You can go either way, depending on the needs of the writers.   In this case it would be hard to even communicate the pronunciation of “pain” in French. (Pan, basically.) I consider this duality of expression, which I see as a joyful paradox, as one to be explored and exercised.  I wrote this particular strip, and understood the paradox, and liked it.    

This week we reached the one-year anniversary of the start of the Gene Pool, which, historically speaking, is an anniversary every bit as momentous as July 4, 1777. We have been energized by the high percentage of paid yearly subscribers who have so far chosen to let their subscriptions renew. Somehow, this strange amalgam of ego, wit, stupidity, rude humor, sexual innuendo, annoying grammatical assertions and pronouncements, highly partisan political opinionating, and dubious philosophizing, has proven popular with its subscribers. If you have not yet paid for your subscription, do not feel bad — you are playing by the rules — but we urge you to join the Big Kids Table, starting with this garish orange button. There are benefits to this. You are already a friend, but will become a friend with benefits.

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this right now, on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Full Nelson…”) for the full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

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Q:  In watching the House yesterday, I realized that “shameless” and “shameful” mean roughly the same thing.  I like cases like this, also like “resign” and “re-sign,” the same word, meaning roughly opposite things. Just mentioning for interest.

A: Shameful and shameless mean almost the same thing. 

Shameful is describing an action that is bad and should cause shame in the perp.   Shameless is describing an additionally bad “I don’t give a crap” attitude of the perp.   Shameless is worse. 

“Resign” and “re-sign” would be a good trick to play in a crossword puzzle, perhaps a themed puzzle with other such examples, , because without hyphens in the grid, they are identical.   Imagine a clue:  Quit; don’t quit.  

Q: I am the guy who wrote in last week After we found ourselves in Rome, lighter by a few euro, in a locked-door mystery in a trian.  We reported the crime to the local Polizia.  They did me the favor of going through the motions, pretending to write stuff down.

But since I am in the military, and we were there serving Uncle Sam, we also had to file a report with the Italian Federal Police, the Carbinieri, at our base near Venice.

Expecting a police station, instead I found a fortress.  The facade was concrete, with gun slits for windows in every direction.  If there was room for a moat and drawbridge, there would have been.  The giant steel door had one of those smaller doors at eye level.  When I knocked, an eyeball appeared in the small door and looked me up and down. Then the giant door swung open and allowed me inside.

I sat in the hallway for a few minutes before a translator greeted me.  She introduced me to a Carbinieri officer.  The officer was stone faced and only spoke Italian.  He proceeded to take my personal information, with the assistance of the translator.  We got to the part where I had to name the other persons in the train car with me.  My wife is third-generation Italian-American.  The officer brightened slightly upon hearing her last name.

"Veneziana! " he said.  From Venice, in northern Italy.    No, I said, Calabrese. From Calabria, in very Southern Italy.   The officer, face breaking for the first time in the conversation, looked skeptical.  I had to explain.  My wife's grandfather was tired of Americans mispronouncing his last name to make it sound vaguely like a curse word in American English.  Change the vowel sound and the problem was solved.  Her family's from Southern Italy, not Northern. Toe of the boot, near Sicily.  Tough-guy, goodfella land.   The translator relayed all this information and the officer shrugged and went back to his report, again stone faced.

I detailed the elements of the crime, not forgetting the one thing my wife insisted I include: She had a bump on the back of her head she insisted wasn't there before she fell asleep.  The perpetrator must have whacked her during the theft.

The officer heard this from the translator in silence and then, before writing it down, said something back. The translator said: The officer thinks it highly unlikely the robber would hit your wife.  The crime involves stealth and speed.  Hitting her would be counterproductive.

I agree, I said, but my wife absolutely insisted, and if I don't include this detail, it's my ass.

The translator chuckled, then translated.

The officer, smiling for the first time, says directly to me, "Calabrese!"

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Q: I was painfully shy growing up, but knew there was a fascinating difference early on. Oh, what to do about it? Not much, actually. But, a friend had a very attractive sister, and I would try not to stare, but just to grab a quick peek now and again, particularly if she was wearing something clingy. I've often wondered if she knew my fascination, and if so, did she enjoy the fact that she was driving a young buck to distraction. I would love to bump into her some time, and just flat out ask the question. And if I find her, I will.

A: You sound like a stalker.  Do NOT stalk her. 

Before I wrote the story about Shari and second grade, I had considered a different subject: Finding and dating the first girl I ever kissed. She was easy to find because she has an unusual first AND last name.  She is an OB/GYN in New York.  I sent her an email explaining what I hoped to do – a “date,” etc. – and she never wrote back, not even to say hi, but no.  I felt like a creepy stalker.   It turned out the story about Shari was better because it was more innocent. After that story came out, I mailed it to my first kiss. 

SHE NEVER WROTE BACK, AGAIN.   Now I really felt like a stalker.

Q: I don't know for sure about orientation awareness, but I have a good question to elicit the age at which puberty hit: "Who was the hottest girl in 6th grade?" If you don't know, go up a grade; if you have an immediate, confident answer, go down a grade and see if that's still true. For 5th grade, I have nothing. For 6th, I still remember her name almost 50 years later. The question is phrased for straight guys, but just tweak it for other cases.

A: I go back to second grade, as you all now know.  By the way, many of you asked to show my second grade class picture, with me and Shari and Clayton Landey.   I don’t have it.  Am going to try to get a copy from what the Post printed.  Will let you all know.

Q: In the Indian joke told by Conti in Whose Life, did he really say “wife”?  Or did he say “squaw.” ?

A: I’m pretty sure it was squaw, but I changed it here.   Since 1980, there has been a debate on whether the word is offensive; experts are divided on it, and I didn’t want to wade into that mess.   At one end of the debate is that it is harmless, and a word Native Americans used.  On the other end, it is foul, essentially a synonym for the c-word.   So, no.

Q: Who decided to make one of the prongs of an electrical cord bigger on one side; then have  the receptacles upside down or not, all over the house? Of course, if the "plug in place" is behind a piece of furniture, you have to guess, while not seeing, which way to plug in the  cord.

A: I have wondered this, too!  It seems nuts, since equal sized prongs work in all plugs, I think.  When you look it up, it talks about changes in live wires and grounding wires, a change made many years ago– but why was it made?  It is not addressed.  Can any knowledgeable person elucidate?

Q: As a man of strong opinion and formerly of blue pencil infamy, what say you about emphatic punctuation (think I hear Pat's eyebrows raising) and the use of the exclamation point (aka the "bang" or "shriek") , in particular.  It's celebrating its 680th birthday this year and has never been more popular than when that Italian scholar first decided a new mark was needed to show "wonder and admiration." And this, despite its disfavor among the arbiters of  those clarifying little marks such as the the "Penguin Guide to Punctuation," which calls this hybrid of period and apostrophe, "...breathless, almost childish.." You're welcome to add your inevitable thoughts on the colon.

A: I have no idea why anyone would be annoyed by emphatic punctuation!!  It helps in communicating context!  And emotion!  A dash or colon or even ellipses delivers more complexity, and more connotation, than a comma; These are all the equivalent of the difference between reading lines and acting them.   You see what I am saying, no?    Compare that to “you see what I am saying …. no?”.  

But now I am gonna tell you something that reveals both my age and your comparative lack of age.  Back in the days of the manual typewriter, there was no exclamation point on the keyboard, because space on the keyboard was precious, onaconna you didn’t want too many keys, onaconna  keys “jamming” each other.  So to type an exclamation point, you had to hit a comma (which was a raised vertical line, no curve to it) then backspace, and hit the period.  Everyone did it!

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Q: Your take on Gopnik, especially the Marx brothers?  On his take on Humor?

Roy Ashley

A: I urge everyone to read this trenchant and deeply important  analysis of comedy, and try not to fall asleep a quarter of the way through it.    

Also, , “focussing.”  Pointless use of an extra letter.  It is almost as bad as prevenTAtive. 

Also, the “Sanity Clause” scene in the Night of the Opera, which he gushes over, is one of the few straining, unfunny bits The Marx Brothers ever did. 

Q: As a cis-het woman born in the 60s, I don't feel like there was much of a "discovering" as it was just assumed that I'd like boys in the same way it was assumed I'd learn to drive and have babies one day.  BUT, I said aged 4-7 because in kindergarten, I decided I was in love with a kid named Albert, who went by Chip.  I only wanted to eat from the plates and bowls that were chipped (here's where being broke came in handy!). I still have a vague fondness for a chipped bit of servingware.  I remember nothing about him and if I didn't have a class photo, I'd have no idea even what he looked like.  But, as it happens, he looks a lot like the guy I ended up marrying (and having babies with, and who tried and failed to teach me to drive a stick shift)

A:  I recently wrote about my tragic attempt to date Suzanne Gottfried in high school. Thirty years later I was showing Molly my high school yearbook, and she noticed a certain girl had signed it, over her picture, saying “Luv, Suzy.”  And Molly said, “Who is she?  She looks just like Mom.”

Q: When I was 16 or so I had a fervid dream in which I was lying on top of Olivia de Havilland. That may have brought back memories of energetic "doctor" sessions with a friend years earlier, but I believe it was the first time I thought about myself in connection with the category "lesbian." "Huh, that was kind of a lesbian dream," I thought upon waking up, and then continued pursuing and being pursued by boys for another few years, until I finally kissed a woman, and that was that. Still is.

A: I can understand why.  And I’m not even a lesbian!  

Q: I found it hard (ha!) to answer this question because, frankly, it was a long time ago.  But I think my realization of my sexuality was between ages 5 and 7 and although I don't recall much detail, I'm pretty sure it happened because I had a sister. Older, but not by much.  Somehow, I became aware that she was ...... different.  I had something that she didn't, and we were both curious about it.  I think this is the normal course of learning for siblings of both genders and I wonder if there's a difference in the responses to your question if the data is broken down between those who had a sibling of the opposite gender and those who did not.

A: I have often wondered why brother-sister incest was not more common; it stands to reason, for exactly what you are talking about.  Guys I know who have sisters tell me that if I’d had one, I would understand.  Supposedly, there is some psycho-medical principle that you cannot become sexually interested in anyone you knew before the age of six.  But … how did that happen?  I used to think it was a reason to believe in God, but no.   It occurs to me it’s Darwin.  The DNA of people who followed that urge would die out in a generation of two-headed idiots.   But how on Earth is this taboo  encoded in our genes?

Q: Thanks for linking to that story about you and Shari in second grade.   It was familiar enough that I know I read it when it came out, on a dead-tree edition of the Post (I always read your columns aloud to my husband) but I was only 34 then and now I'm older than you were when you wrote it.

Schools had stopped shoving the smart kids through grade levels by the time I got there, but I was still a young-for-my-grade crybaby.  My dad's job meant we moved every year, so I got to leave whatever reputation I'd created behind and start fresh, but my cousins made sure I knew that THEY knew that I was a crybaby.  So eventually, I became funny and mean, as you did.  I've been working hard to drop the mean, at least on the outside.  I'm still funny, though not so often at the expense of others. And I've finally started allowing myself to cry again.

I tried to right all the wrongs with my own kids...but dammit they're funny!  . 

A:  Ask Gopnik for advice.   He will tell you about heteronormative sensibilities and the hermeneutic inconsistencies of intra-familial amusement vis a vis the institution of humor.

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Q: In England, ‘pants’ refer to underpants - the outerwear garments are trousers.

Al Lubran, Rockville, MD

A: “Trousers” is a funny word.  The Brits are funny.  Especially their foods, like Toad in the Hole, Bubble and Squeak, Rumbledythumps, Mucky Dripping, and obviously, Spotted Dick. 

Q:  Our dog wasn't aware of the danger that the Beltway Sniper posed and insisted each evening on going for a walk. It was still soon enough after 9/11 and the phase "Don't let the terrorists win" was still fresh, so we would go, looking out for white box trucks. One evening, when we rounded a corner, an old Chevy Caprice that looked very out of place in our Alexandria neighborhood started up and slowly pulled away from the curb, turned the corner and drove very slowly away. My wife exclaimed, "That's who they should be looking for! Not some truck." An hour or so later, a woman was shot at the Home Depot in Falls Church. If we had approached that corner from the other direction, which we often did, I believe that it would have been one of us.

A: Wow!  Good story.  I assume it was a blue Caprice? I think it is likely you are right. You are here today because of a change in routine.

Q: Not a question, but a crime story. I'm from a small town where we were delighted to (finally!) get a bank. Not so delighted was my father's experience there one day. The bank was fully staffed with the manager and clerk, both women. He was the only patron. Also, Dad was physically handicapped, required the use of crutches, and even then getting around was a chore. Two robbers appeared, took him hostage at gunpoint, and after getting the money, did their best to lock the women in the vault. Unfortunately the robbers soon discovered how difficult it was to haul around a hostage who needed crutches and a fair amount of slow going to remain upright. They fled. The manager and clerk were disappointed that my father initially failed to defend them all by hitting the robbers with one of his crutches, but... Gravity. The bank manager had hit the alarm when things started, so the police showed up. My father gave them a detailed description... of the handgun held on him. He had no idea how many robbers, what they were wearing, or even hints regarding their ethnicity. 

A: That last thing is common.  Once, when I was 20, and doing that story on streetgangs in the Bronx, I  walked into a basement gang room, and the guy in there whipped around, and pointed a sawed-off shotgun at me.   I’d always thought that in such a situation, I would kick the gun away or something.  Instead I spent the next ten seconds staring at the gun barrel (it seemed to be about 5/8ths of an inch in diameter, of black steel) but could not have told you what he looked like.  I was also spending a great deal of mental energy trying to keep my sphincter sphincted. 

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Q: From the very beginning, I, a female (now 69 years old) had a STRONG attraction to males. At age two, I had a huge stuffed dog that I named “Jim McKay,” after the sportscaster. When I was six, JFK ran for the White House. I drove my parents nuts kissing the television screen whenever he was on the air. I usually seemed to fall for good-looking guys, both at school and on TV and movie screens, as a child and then an adult: Robert Redford, Glen Campbell, Tom Selleck, Christopher Reeve, Denzel Washington, and even now, as a grandmother, Gerard Butler. (Leonard Nimoy was one of the few exceptions in the looks department). Anyone who tries to argue that sexual orientation is a choice should talk to me — I was definitely born straight and I’m sure I’ll die straight.

A: I have to admit as I was reading this, I was hoping you would end it by saying you realized you were a lesbian at 63.

Q:  I was born in 1974 (solidly middle aged here) and knew there was something different about me from around 6 or 7 but I couldn't put my finger on it. My parents let me watch a lot of TV, so I was familiar with Three's Company - the premise of the show was John RItter's character Jack had to pretend he was gay so he could continue to live with two single women. But to this 7 year old, it just meant that he had to act a certain way and say certain things around different people, and to hide a part of himself some of the time. But just knowing that there were boys (men) who didn't like girls in that way was comforting. It wasn't until I hit puberty in the mid-80s and watched Harry Hamlin on LA Law and tennis player Stefan Edberg that I realized yep, I was definitely going to be crushing on guys for the rest of my life. I didn't have a crush on a school friend until high school in the early 90s. I see now that he must have known - I would find any excuse to spend time near him.

A:  Thanks.  That’s an interesting takeaway from Three’s Company, for a gay kid who didn’t quite know who he was, yet.

Q: Re the limp noodle game, I'm exactly 60 so I don't fit your criteria, but just thought I'd mention that I was introduced to a variation on that game in my Israeli paramilitary youth group in the 70s. We were 12 or 13. In our case it was a contrived knot tying exercise.

A: Thank you.

Q: Electrical plugs: one of the flat blades is for the “hot” wire, one for “neutral”. Sometimes it matters which is which (a point driven home to me when I once tried to replace a ceiling light fixture that had been reversed at the wall switch - and got zapped), sometimes it doesn’t. And I’m pretty sure sometimes manufacturers don’t want to have to figure out every time when it’s significant or not so they only stock the one part.

A: But it worked without the different sizes for , like, 120 years. Why did it have to change?

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This is Gene. I am calling us down. Please keep sending in Questions and Observations, which I will deal with on Thursday.