When I was growing up, all through elementary school we would watch movies and read books about the Berenstein Bears. …they were nuclear family of anthropomorphic bears who lived in a tree out in Bear Country and had family-based situational comedy and taught life lessons. And Ma Bear always wore a blue shower cap.
About a year ago, [author] Jan Berenstein passed on, as had Stan some time before. And appearing in headlines across the internet, I saw "Jan Berenstain Dies at 88".
BerenstAin.
They misspelled her name. In her obituary. Gosh, that's really just morbidly embarrassing. "Berenstain" doesn't even make sense.
And then I saw the book covers. The ones in the squiggly bubble letters from the childhood. The ones I saw a hundred times a month from the formative ages of 5 to 9. The ones that every 20-something in the world will tell you read "Berenstein Bears".
Except they don't read "Berenstein". They read "Berenstain".
The
Here's the thing. These books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of whom clearly and distinctly remember "BerenstEin", that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the "BerenstEin Bears" when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc.
In 1992 they were "stEin" in 1992, but in 2012 they were "stAin" in 1992.
I would like to make a modest proposal: We are all living in our own parallel universe.
There is at least one other universe parallel to our own. I will distinguish the two by the stEin universe and the stAin universe, depending on the surname of the creators of the famous children's book. The stEin universe was the world we resided in during the 1990s. Sometime after we all stopped reading kids books, that is when we were shifted in to the stAin universe.
More:
http://woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.jp/2012/08/the-berenstein-bears-we-are-living-in.html?m=1 See also:
http://woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.jp/2014/06/commenting-on-berenstein-bears.html?m=1 http://mandelaeffect.com/berenstein-or-berenstain-beard