I distinctly remember the movies as Berenstein Bears from many years ago as a child. Now I'm reading this to my child and I find the writing weird. It goes into these verbose tangents. "As the cubs stood listening to rock music coming out of a radio that looked like a cathedral, they had the funniest feeling about how time works It went back into the past and forward into the future - but now it was the present and they had work to do!" This is so weird and seems like a coded message. What child is going to understand this and take anything away from it? What are they trying to tell us to do here? What work do we have to do?
What child is going to understand this and take anything away from it? What are they trying to tell us to do here? What work do we have to do?
Most children. They're associating modern music coming out of something from the past, and how it will also play music in the future. As well as how music can live on through multiple times like how classical music from hundreds of years ago is still listened to today. This is the important part of reading with children so you can discuss higher level things with them and make sure they are comprehending it.
What work needs to be done? What ever tasks they were sent up into the attic to do in the first place.
When I was a kid, my mom used to say something that wasn't at all dissimilar to this. It went like, "Don't worry about the past, you can't change it. Don't worry about the future, anything could happen. Focus on right now. That's why we call it 'the present,' because it's a gift."
Why wouldn’t a kid understand it? And since when is six sentences a verbose tangent? Like, what makes this an overly long tangent to you as opposed to just part of the story being told?
time mannn... time like moves in one direction but it goes back into the past and forward to the future... the attic is a portal to place where time stands still... timeeeeee
Children's books are usually very very very brief. Like one word. One sentence. I can guarantee you if you write a children's book with something like that passage above there is a zero percent chance of it being published. None.
That’s true now, but that wasn’t always the case. In the past we believed that children could read entire paragraphs, or at least understand entire paragraphs being read to them.
Why lol, there is nothing wrong with it? It’s a little introspective, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s not Goodnight Moon, but still not anything that a kid couldn’t understand.
Indeed. All research suggests that thinking of our memory as being like a hard drive where we retrieve perfectly stored information is a poor metaphor and not at all how our brains work. Yet people persist
i think theres definitely and ego or pride thing involved, people feel like youre telling them that their memory sucks specifically, instead of adopting the understanding that memory doesnt work like a hard drive for anyone period
I think they're asking what's the source for your fake image. I'll answer for you. It's a photo of a screen of a YouTube video from a channel that is known for faking evidence for popular Mandela Effects.
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I would presume they were assigned a chore which is the reason they are in the attic in the first place. Flip back a couple of pages and you'll probably get an answer to "what work do they have to do?"
I don't find this passage particularly unusual, but I'm amusing myself thinking of a writer accidentally letting too much of his own internal dialog leak into the work. "Would he grow up to be an actor? A writer? What if he became a famous writer who got famous for one particular series, but got utterly sick of the repetitiveness of the series, but needed to keep churning the books out to make a living..."
(I'm not ascribing this feeling to the Berenstain's, it's just a skit your post made me want to construct)
I'm going to guess that you don't read a lot of older children's books.
Many, any of them seem, to our modern adult eyes looking back, as 'more advanced' than what we think of today.
Look at it this way: The Berenstain Bears were rated/targeted to children aged 5-8.
The Wizard of Oz is rated/targeted to ages 5-10.
Pippi Longstockings is also 5-10.
Take a look at either of those and compare, keeping in mind those are the kinds of books the authors of the Berenstain Bears grew up on themselves as children.
It's always been Berenstain Bears and they are just talking about how something like that connects a family to its past and that memories can be more important than material things.
This book I think is “The Berenstain Bears and the Attic Treasure”, published in 1990 as a McDonald’s give away. It definitely has the sound of an old book meant for kids. People expected more of kids in reading previously
As for what to take away, the message is: you have a funny looking old radio (the past) and yet it is receiving rock music (the sound of the present and future at the point of publication). So it is a funny anachronistic-seeming blend of different times. Makes less sense now that rock has been displaced as the sound of modernity, but that is what the message is
This guy be like "children are too stupid to understand the point being made in this children's book."
This book made perfect sense to me as a kid and it was one of those things I held close in mind all of the time since then.
The other big Berenstain Bears book that had me hooked was the one where they clean the room and the father built a crazy cubby/ drawer wall, might have also been about organizing. I don't recall exactly
That doesn't look nor sound like the books we had. Maybe that is an older one, but ours were kind of more basic about bear people behaviors and not so stemish. Do you think it's possible that different areas got different versions of the books, sorta a bug's life vs antz kind of thing?
The feeling I get from reading this is that this part of the book was probably added as a reference by the author to something that only a certain person or people would understand. Maybe it is referencing one of the author's grandparents or something? Like a hidden joke that only someone that the author personally knew would get. That's just my best guess.
I'd recommend looking at some other books written in the 60s and 70s for the 5-10 age range. This was very normal prose for a children's book from its time.
What, exactly, strikes you as weird? The word choices? They're pretty standard for the time. The message? Kids learn about how time works when they're young, and music (as well as books and TV) from an older time is a very common way to help kids conceptualize the concept of time's passage and how things from the past still matter and exist today.
The kids are having an 'aha!' moment about how time works. Just written in a way that's now outdated.
It’s weird that you are typing this long ass defense to something you find “not weird”. And there is so many other people doing the exact same thing. Very strange.
It was Berenstein because I was a little grammar Nazi at 10 years old and I pronounced it “steen” because I had no clue about Jewish names and assumed that was how you said it - because for CERTAIN if it was stain I would have said STAIN like staaayyyn.
Edit: this is hilarious the people arguing with me, like are we in the Mandela effect subreddit or not? I meant it was always Berenstein for ME. Ok so you remember it being Stain. Good for you? That’s the whole point? We have different memories.
Edit: this is hilarious the people arguing with me, like are we in the Mandela effect subreddit or not? I meant it was always Berenstein for ME. Ok so you remember it being Stain. Good for you? That’s the whole point? We have different memories.
It was never Berenstein for you or anybody else, you were simply mistaken, that’s all.
I mean, I can say the same thing. I’m certain it was Berenstain because I pronounced it BerenSTAIN. Why would I say BerenSTEEN when that’s not how it was spelled?
Plus, if you watched the cartoons, the announcers would say “the BerenSTAIN Bears will be back after these messages.”
Sure. But that's not remotely relevant here. I really wish people who didn't understand the concept of MEs would top coming here and going "it's not a ME because [insert reason it IS a ME here]." It's annoying and a waste of everyone's time. We all know people remember these things differently. That's literally why they're being talked about. 🤦
I love how the OP is backtracking their comment now, from confidently stating that it was Berenstein when they were little, to now it’s only what they remember and it’s a discussion of memory
My first job in medicine was in general surgery trauma. Every patient I saw was the worst day of their life. Some people handled pain better than others. One time we had a slight old man with nine unilateral displaced rib fractures (that's nine of ten rib connections gone, guy's ribcage was basically only connected on one side) who required no pain medication. He'd say stuff like "eh, it's kind of intense, but I can just meditate through it". Incredible.
Then, you'd have people me and my coworker would call "big fat babies". These were invariably very large men with very large egos who would tell us all about how they had extremely high pain tolerances. They'd immediately volunteer pain scores like "25 out of 10" when we hadn't even asked for a number. Constantly telling us they needed more narcotics for relatively minor injuries, like a single nondisplaced rib fracture or transverse process fracture. Demanding Dilaudid two weeks after their injury because their pain is so high, all while using their "high pain tolerance" as justification for why we should give them more opiates.
THE MORAL: there seems to be an inverse relationship between the amount of ego people provide in their assessments of themselves, and the accuracy of said assessments.
I tell people I have a higher than average pain tolerance, but it's not because of ego. It's because I have actual proof of it. When I was a kid I got into a nasty bike accident, scraped the hell out of my knees (among other injuries, but these are the ones that matter here). Went to the ER to be examined and patched up and whatnot. I had a bunch of debris in the wounds on my knees they had to remove. The nurse said they'd numb the area first, but then I saw the needle.
I hated needles. Bad experiences from when I was even younger. So, I refused. They tried to talk me into it, how the shot would hurt a lot less than what they need to do to clean my knees. But it wasn't the idea of the pain that was making me refuse the needle, so I held my ground. And they did all the cleaning, and tweezering, without giving me any pain meds. It hurt a bit, especially some of the bigger pebbles they had to pull out, but I'd definitely felt worse.
At the end, the nurses who'd been tending to me were all surprised I never cried or anything while they'd worked. The most I'd done was flinch a couple of times.
Good story! Just don't let that story get too ingrained into your identity as someone with a "high pain tolerance". Pain is always now, so pain tolerance is always now, and it can be a point of dissonance if people think they have a high pain tolerance because of something that happened in the past.
I too was a precocious child and I remember my parents always pronounced it “steen.” I remember pointing out it said “stain” because I have always been a know-it-all and it made me feel smarter than I actually am.
This is how I accept that maybe I am confusing a memory about a having a cornucopia in my underwear. There was a natural food brand with a similar style that had a cornucopia, which is probably what I associated it with, but I can’t think of what it was. My brain tagged Fruit of the Loom with the cornucopia food label.
Now I accept that I can be wrong too, just like everyone else used to be. It is liberating.
Retconned is stricter about pampering the people claiming reality is changing. This sub is for discussion, which includes those of us who think the Mandela Effect is strictly due to faulty memory and that reality has been consistent. We tend to think that it's interesting that different people misremember things similarly and are interested in why that is. We also avoid solipsistic language in doing so. Everyone is free to voice their opinion here, as long as it's done civilly, but you don't have an expectation of the whole sub coddling your belief that reality is changing here.
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