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Mandela effect renamed Truss effect




The Mandela effect is a mass misrecollection of events where millions of people vividly remember something which never happened. Like the existence of the word misrecollection. It was first discovered in 1983 when everyone replied 'yeah, probably' to the question 'do you remember when Nelson Mandela pinched Bananarama's bottoms?'


It has since been recognised, however, that all who responded to the survey can't now remember what they had for breakfast. Even when reading this while eating their breakfast. Therefore, a whole new generation of people have been asked, 'do you remember when Liz Truss was Prime Minister?'


Professor Anna High from the Institute of Erm, Er, You Know, Thingy explained, 'Many people have a false memory of professional bonkers lettucehead Liz Truss being Prime Minister of Britain. It's clearly ridiculous, eminently untrue, and could be no more a reality than a flange of Not The Nine O'Clock News sketches.'


Professor Hannah Fry who is real and lovely and thoroughly respected confirmed, 'There was never anything called the Mandela effect. The whole thing is misremembered by lots of people. And misremembered is a real word. Rather, it is something which is technically termed a Trap Street, when the London A to Z inserted non-existent roads into their maps to catch rotters out who were copying their science and claiming it as their own work. People who remember living on those roads don't actually exist themselves.


'So the Mandela effect is in itself a Mandela effect, which is a beautiful event horizon of infinite butterflies within butterflies where science becomes art and quiz question setters don't know where they stand.'


Picture credit: Wix AI

Man hospitalised after drinking homemade water



A Stoke man is in intensive care after consuming two cups of water he made while watching his first science documentary. The documentary, narrated by someone with Attenboroughesque gravity of credibility, made mention of the fact that water is a naturally occurring concoction of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The man then isolated the compounds and mixed them together with disastrous results.


Lacking high-tech lab equipment, he used his toothbrush mug as a crucible, meaning his moonshine H2O was suffused with poundshop microplastics. His second mistake was to measure out the compounds by hand, leading to a way off guestimate of the measures required. Thirdly, he doesn’t really know what hydrogen and oxygen are. And fourthly, he was very drunk.


A neighbour said, ‘I heard him clattering about in his kitchen through the walls. Walls are very thin in Stoke. We’ve complained to the council about them but…’ After reminding the neighbour of the main topic, she added, ‘He’s always making stuff at home. Last month he offered me some of his homemade chocolate. But I refused. He’d clearly used cabbage.’


The man is not the only person to revert to self-generation of essentials in straitened economic times. A Bristol student was warned to simply breathe in what’s around him after he set fire to his dorm following a botched attempt to concoct his own air. While a family in Napper valley near Crest-of-the-wave neath Oldham are still awaiting charges of selling bottled farts as Tibetan wallpaper adhesive. On the issue of homemade water, a government spokesperson reiterated, ‘Those caught not drinking state distributed tap water will be shuttered, clamped, audited, unpersoned, and their address published in the sky.’



Tuesday follows Monday for 234,285,714,286th time



As predicted by scientists late last week, Tuesday happened yesterday following the passing of Monday the previous day. Scientists had anticipated the day’s occurrence when it appeared in the same part of the week as it had done over 230 billion times since the Earth was formed some 4 billion years ago. ‘The power of modern supercomputing allows us to calculate the forthcoming order of days with much greater speed and accuracy than we were previously able to,’ said Dr David Hertz at the Astronomy Royale, on Tuesday.


The scientist elaborated for the layman on the physics rationale behind the mind-bogglingly correct prediction. ‘If we consider the week days from a geological perspective, the Earth's formation, which occurred about 4.5 billion years ago, leaves us with a calculation roughly amounting to 4.5 billion years × 365.25 days per year equaling a total of some 1.64 trillion days.’ Now comes the real scientific work. ‘Then what we do is divide this number by seven –which is the number of days in the week- to arrive at the final number of Tuesdays.’


The computer used at the Astronomy Royale is nicknamed ‘The calculator’ due to its uncanny ability to do difficult sums. I got a chance to test out the device myself and was amazed at the results. First I gave it my date of birth and asked it to calculate my age. Tricky, you might think. But it was correct to the exact date and time. Astounded, I moved onto calculations requiring what I figured to be otherworldly capabilities. Asking it how long it would take a rabbit to outrun a fox if both started ten metres behind the line thing at lunchtime(ish) in Sherwood Forest, it told me 17. At which point, I gave up. You cannot defeat modern AI.


Dr David Hertz insists that the Astronomy Royale’s awesome computing power will not be used to harm humanity. ‘The calculator has been programmed to disarm itself if asked to predict what time someone’s wife will get home. And anything to do with small boats, as in every other department of the state, is completely verboten.’ But how can we be sure that Tuesday will follow Monday next week? ‘That, I’m afraid,’ says Hertz, ‘is a complete unknown.’




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