When That Guy Died on My Show (2007) | Hacker News Reader

When That Guy Died on My Show (2007)

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

198 pointsmcenedella61 comments

I found this article difficult to follow, mostly because I'm not familiar with the people or event, and it begins with rhetoric assuming the reader is familiar. Here's a list of the "characters".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._I._Rodale who died on the stage of the Dick Cavett Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dick_Cavett_Show

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cavett

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hamill who Cavett was talking to while Rodale died

Thank you for listing this out- while I enjoyed the article, I did feel at a bit out of touch not knowing the background.

I was a big fan of Dick Cavett's show, it was a higher brow show than the others.

I went looking for his interview of Jimi Hendrix to post which happened during Woodstock but sadly couldn't find it on YouTube. But here's a short clip where he tells Cavett who he thought was the best guitarist in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJxiCZwP_GI

Here's Cavett interviewing John and Yoko Lennon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kXCnKfdGOY

I'd never heard of Dick Cavett nor the guest and didn't find it hard to follow at all. It was a good read.

This is one of those situations where people remember the gist of an event, but they don't clearly remember the exact details.

I was a high school kid living in NYC at the time. I used to watch Cavett on TV all the time. Here's what I remember:

1) this was relatively big news when it happened

2) newscasts covered it. Newspapers covered it.

3) Cavett spoke about it on his show the next day (as he mentions).

4) I saw footage from that show. Did that footage air on the news on the day Rodale died, or did Cavett show some footage the next day? I don't remember, but there clearly was footage of the guy sitting in the chair just before he died.

-----

So, many people "saw" the event, in the sense that they pieced it all together.

Even when Cavett talks about "the look on your face", that also happened. People might not have seen his face that day, but Cavett was somber the next night when he explained the previous day's events. Many people tuned in for that and I'm not surprised they "remember" it.

All this is well understood. As Wiki claims: Memory is never a literal recount of past experiences. Rather, it is dependent on the constructive processes present at the time of encoding that are subject to potential errors and distortions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructive_memory

I once saw a very drunk woman drive her car at full throttle into the corner of a hotel.

It's like he describes it, snapshots. My brain throttled hard, and locked up at the amount of information there was to process all at once. That can't be right, she just drove into the side of that building. No, she slammed into it. She might have been trying to drive through it? No, that's silly.

But one clear piece is the unmistakable sound of an automatic transmission with the pedal hard to the floor. And the crash, an onomatopoetic word of itself, it sounded like a crash.

It was complicated by the fact that moments ago, I was loading wedding gifts in to a van. Not mine, just helping the Niece after the reception. But what a stark and sudden turn for a day, to witness something like that. What if she had turned her wheel this way or that when entering the parking lot before hitting the building? Would she have gone through me, and right in to the lobby? Would she have missed the building wide and ramped off the escarpment overlooking the Interstate?

And I was just frozen in that moment of time. Slack jawed and wide eyed while I watched by buddy Timmy organize the available bystanders and check on the driver. I believe he shut the ignition off, but I believe that is something he would do, I have no proof that is what actually happened next.

It's weird, the kind of stuff that goes through your head, and you find out about when something like that happens.

This reminds me of the Challenger explosion. I’m certain I watched it live in elementary school and when it blew up my teachers had to deal with a bunch of crying 2nd graders. I’ve read, however that it is highly improbable for that to have occurred due to the launch being tape delayed and CNN being the only station to carry it live. I have enough memories of my classmates crying and the teachers trying to figure out what to say that I’m convinced I saw it. It’s likely the same scenario happened as mentioned in this article.

Huh. I thought I saw it live but now that you mention it, I don't think I did. In fact, I remember the class bully--a fat cartman-esque kid, running down the hallway yelling "The space shuttle blew up!" We didn't believe him because he wasn't the brightest kid around. But that was the first time I knew about the explosion. So I didn't see it live. But I think other kids in my class were watching it in a classroom somewhere.

Wasn't NASA broadcasting it to schools due to a teacher being on board, and thus pupils where quite likely to actually have seen it live?

If you were in school, it is very possible you did watch it live:

"With Christa McAuliffe set to be the first teacher in space, NASA had arranged a satellite broadcast of the full mission into television sets in many schools, but the general public did not have access to this unless they were one of the then-few people with satellite dishes. What most people recall as a "live broadcast" was actually the taped replay broadcast soon after the event." http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11031097/

Was (too) early in the morning on the east coast, the cold contributed to the failure. By the time we arrived in school in California, it was hours-old news.

"The time had come, at 11:38 AM Eastern Standard Time" - at least look it up.

So it was 20 mins old, no need to be an ass about it.

I have a memory of watching it live in elementary school in the US. I remember wondering why everyone was saying "what happened?" when it had clearly exploded. I don't think it's a false memory.

I definitely remember that day - Commander Dick Scobee was from my hometown of Auburn, WA, so every tv was on. Likewise, ask anyone from the Pacific Northwest who was alive on May 18, 1980 what they were doing that day... I was maybe 3, but even I recall vividly.

Even if you didn’t actually see it it’s very likely you heard an announcement about it when it happened. Children may actually have been crying in reaction to that.

In case it helps, I definitely saw it in school, I remember it clearly. If it wasn't live, then they re-played it unedited as if it were live, before the news broke, but that also seems improbable.

I was in the 5th grade, and our teacher was super excited to break the regular class schedule to let us watch this live science happening. When it happened, the room went quiet with disbelief. After maybe ten seconds, one of the class clowns said "No, a Bud light" thinking it was funny and trying to break the awkward silence but being a kid not realizing how brutally insensitive it was at that moment. The teacher got really upset, turned off the TV, and went into the other room to cry & calm down while we just waited quietly.

>one of the class clowns said "No, a Bud light" thinking it was funny and trying to break the awkward silence

Is that a pop culture reference of some kind?

It was a series of beer commercials from the mid-late 80s. The premise if I remember correctly was a guy walking up to a bar and saying “hey give me a light.” And then some ridiculous light would be given to him that was most often not a beer. Then he would say no a bud light to great fanfare and cheering.

https://youtu.be/Bodf2HYWIAY

Thanks for the reference. For a 10-11 yo (if I read "5th grade" correctly) this is actually a surprisingly abstract reaction (all the tragedy aside)

I was in sixth grade and did not catch it live, as I was just getting off the bus when it happened. A number of students were already in the classroom when it was streamed live, and I remember one of them running down the hall past me and other students coming in the building, saying "the space shuttle blew up, the space shuttle blew up!" over and over.

I know we ended up watching the replays for a while and then I don't recall what we did after that. It was a big deal, that's for sure.

And I have to say, I just laughed out loud, literally, at that "No, a Bud light" comment because it's been so long that I can chuckle at how wildly inappropriate that comment would have been, and yet, exactly right. We are human, after all.

This will be an unpopular opinion, but I strongly suspect you’re misremembering what became a common joke after the fact, just like the original article.

I was also in 5th grade when the Challenger exploded. There was a slew of challenger “jokes” that came out afterwards, and I distinctly remember this one. It’s probably the cleverest of the ones I’ve heard.

So I find it highly improbable a fifth grader came up with that comment within seconds of the explosion. I think you’re probably misremembering the class clown telling the joke a few days after the fact, just like the original article.

Btw, in my school we didn’t watch live. The principal came on the PA to tell us it exploded. Happened just before our daily 15 minutes of “journal time”. So I drew a picture of the challenger and some story about it.

And dammit, years later I’ve looked for that notebook top and bottom in my house, but seems it’s gone.

Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion of events they didn't witness, I suppose. There's exactly zero chance I put this together later, I know the student's name, he got in trouble for saying it, it's a big part of the reason our teacher freaked out, and there were many witnesses. I find it fairly strange you would decide you know what happened based on your logic alone.

I had a long reply, but now deleting it all except this bit, which goes back to the theme of the actual article :

If there’s ever been one thread on Hacker News where a user could reasonably claim to doubt another’s memory of an event that possibly didn’t occur : this is that thread.

Good point, I do buy that the article’s proximity and power of suggestion has (mis) led you to think you know something you don’t.

The Bud Light joke had been seen by hundreds of millions of people, with dozens examples of the joke in those ads. Kids in my school had been practicing that joke in various situations. I am certain you’ve drastically mis-calculated the probability of someone repeating the joke. I’d be surprised if tens of thousands of people hadn’t thought the same joke independently.

In case you hadn’t followed the immediate thread, people who believed the shuttle disaster couldn’t have been seen live were (like you) wrong.

Fair enough.

I saw it live in school that day, it was on one of those TVs on the roll around carts and we definitely saw it happen live.

We used to watch all the shuttle launches live.

That's exactly what I remember. Central time zone.

Same here. Same roll a cart with 19” crt tv. I was in Houston Texas as well which is home to NASA mission control (was about 35 minute drive away from my elementary school). The more I think about it the more convinced I am that it was shown live.

Same here, though I don't recall much crying, more a lot of curious kids asking questions who didn't truly understand what had just happened (The TV was shut off pretty quickly after the explosion, if IIRC, but I probably don't because I was 6 years old).

EDIT: Turns out it was early in the morning. I lived in California at the time - there's no way I could have seen it live during the schoolday. Wow. My memory is broken :)

I believe I watched it live in the UK. Same disclaimer about not being 100% sure though. This was in the afternoon while I was supposed to be in some class at college but wasn't.

It happened on a Tuesday in late January, 1986, just before noon, so before lunchtime.

I remember being home sick, and seeing the footage interrupt my usual sick day routine of watching daytime TV. At that hour, I’d normally have been watching The Price is Right, with Bob Barker on CBS or possibly I Love Lucy reruns on another channel. I didn’t watch it live, but I remember it being all over TV once it happened.

When my sister got home from school, I had to explain that something weird was going on, and I was watching that instead of cartoons. I was too young to really grasp the gravity of what had occurred. She paused, watched warily, looked concerned, said Oh Man! and then went about here after school tasks, and then ran back out to meet friends.

For what seemed like weeks after, elementary school projects were devoted to understanding the disaster. They sat us in the gymnasium we watched a VHS recording and then talked about why this event was both unfortunate and significant. After questions and answers, we were then tasked to make cards that would be collected and sent to Nasa, as an expression of sympathy.

East coast? I watched a replay right after it happened during second-period Physics, so like 9-9:30a Pacific.

I distinctly remember not seeing it live. I was leaving the high school band room when two girls who knew I was enthusiastic about space exploration told me in the hallway. I wasn’t sure whether to believe them, and nothing odd seem to be going on that day at school otherwise, so I spend lunch time using a payphone at the school to call every family phone number I could think of.

Same with 9/11 for me. I could swear I saw it live but I don’t think I actually did. All I remember is being kept back from school and watching the news repeat everything.

I was on a PC at school when the first news report came in over the internet that a plane stuck one of the towers. The news article I read made it sound like it was hit by a small plane, and not a passenger airline.

Then, nothing. Our internet went down. It turns out Comcast relied on the fiber under WTC 1&2 for a large part of their east coast backbone.

We found out that the first tower collapsed by (no kidding) standing outside of one of our teacher's cars and listening to his car radio.

A few years before 9/11 a Cessna had crashed into the Empire State Building in the fog and when someone in class said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center I assumed it was a similar thing.

I know I didn't see it live but it would've been easy to fool myself into thinking I did. The news services would run unedited footage of the plane crashes and buildings burning virtually all day. And they don't do that anymore. So your brain has this image of continuous footage but can't correlate it to modern journalistic practices of how this event is portrayed in tge media. So you think "Oh, I must have seen it live."

I remember seeing it on TV. I was home sick that day in 2nd grade, and there was a CBS News special report within minutes. My mom ran out to the corner deli to get some chicken soup for lunch and I remember telling her when she returned. We didn't have cable, it definitely wasn't CNN.

Similar to the insistence that Sinbad played a genie in a movie called Shazaam when he never did. But people really insisted they saw the movie.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sinbad-movie-shazaam/

A Mandela effect that stuck with me was that North/South Korea were detached islands a bit south of Japan, but detached from China.

That and the fact the US has 52 states not 50

It’s only a Mandela effect if many people share the memory.

The "52 states" thing seems to be a common false memory: http://www.debunkingmandelaeffects.com/51-or-52-states-in-th...

Personally I also remember (as a child) thinking that the US had 52 states but that's mostly because "51st state" is a common expression I likely came across frequently enough to think that there are at least 51 states, 50 feeling too rounded and 52 being a close enough number that frequently pops up elsewhere (52 cards in a deck, weeks in a year).

I don't like the term "Mandela effect" because of the pseudo-scientific connotations, though. It's just a false memory and in many cases it's not even a memory, just a misconception (like thinking there are penguins at the North Pole because it's easy to mix up the Arctic and Antarctic or to mistake puffins for some kind of penguin).

EDIT: As for Korea: googling yields several claims of people misremembering its placement on the map but if I had to guess I'd blame news reports that like to highlight countries on the map by showing them in isolation or exaggerating their borders by creating a small gap around them.

Also the fact most US maps show Alaska and Hawaii semi-separately makes me think its 50 plus 2.

Also DC not being a state as well as all the "territories". I'm pretty sure I as a child I thought DC counted as a state.

Sinbad should just go ahead and make that movie now. He can then release it with a marketing campaign that says, "The classic childhood favorite, lost for 20 years, now available and fully remastered!"

I think I have a valid argument for this theory besides people mistaking this with Shaquille O'Neal's 'Kazaam'. In an episode of Nickelodeon's 'All That', Sinbad once played the father of Ishboo (played by Kenan Thompson) 'Sinboo'. And I recall his clothing being very similar to that of a Genie. Can enough people be mistakenly conflating their childhood memories of Sinboo and Kazaam and creating 'Shazaam'..?

Also there was a TV show called Shazam.

If anyone is looking for a rabbit hole to go down, the memories formed in response to surprising, highly emotional events, that people feel are especially vivid, are called flashbulb memories :).

RE people believing they saw it, even if they couldn't have, an important factor for people's (mis)recollection is what happens after the event.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory

I liked how Terry Pratchett mocked this phenomenon:

> He remembered once when he'd been stabbed and would have bled to death if Sergeant Angua hadn't caught up with him and how, as he lay there, he'd found himself taking a very intense interest in the pattern of the carpet. The senses say: we've only got a few minutes, let's record everything, in every detail... --The Night Watch

My favorite part of the article was this memorable quote:

    A man convinced against his
    will,
    Is of the same opinion still.

Cleanly sums up the phenomenon.

This is partly about the Mandella Effect -- many people claimed to have seen the episode, but supposedly it never aired.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/

It's named after Nelson Mandela due to the widespread false belief he died in the 1980's.

I don’t remember the show - but it probably coincided with the global renaming of Berenstein Bears as Berenstain Bears. [1]

[1] http://www.woodbetween.world/2012/08/the-berenstein-bears-we...

This often gets mentioned, but its pretty easily explained by the fact the books are for children, Bernstein or Bernstain are both difficult words for the target age group, and the ending stein is far more common a spelling.

Yes, but that explanation is a lot less fun.

"Next thing I knew I was holding his wrist, thinking, I don’t know anything about what a wrist is supposed to feel like."

Last season of xfiles have a funny episode about the stuff you think happened, but didnt :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Art_of_Forehead_Swe...

I didn't catch it live, but the school principal announced it over the PA system. It didn't seem as big of a deal to me at the time to warrant a PA announcement, I was in high school at that point.

I have to assume you meant this to be a part of the thread about the Challenger explosion.

I remember reading the bit about asking his "is there a doctor in the audience?"

I assume the resurgence in interest is due to an earlier submission that showed up this week? ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555592

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