7 ms·

When That Guy Died on My Show (2007)

198 points by mcenedella 9y ago

PhantomGremlin 9y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructive_memory
- bittermang 9y ago
  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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
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rudeboot 9y ago
"Next thing I knew I was holding his wrist, thinking, I don’t know anything about what a wrist is supposed to feel like."
closed 9y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory
- nielsole 9y ago
  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
vermontdevil 9y ago
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/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sinbad-movie-shazaam/
- WingH 9y ago
  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
  - nsxwolf 9y ago
    It’s only a Mandela effect if many people share the memory.
    - pluma 9y ago
      The "52 states" thing seems to be a common false memory: http://www.debunkingmandelaeffects.com/51-or-52-states-in-the-united-states-of-america/ 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.
      - WingH 9y ago
S_A_P 9y ago
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.
- insickness 9y ago
  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.
- detaro 9y ago
  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?
- AndrewNCarr 9y ago
  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/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11031097/
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    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.
salgernon 9y ago
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-are-living-in.html http://www.woodbetween.world/2012/08/the-berenstein-bears-we...
- Larrikin 9y ago
  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.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Yes, but that explanation is a lot less fun.
efrafa 9y ago
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_Sweat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Art_of_Forehead_Swe...
pfarnsworth 9y ago
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.
- sparky_z 9y ago
  I have to assume you meant this to be a part of the thread about the Challenger explosion.
vortico 9y ago
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 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/The_Dick_Cavett_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cavett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cavett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hamill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hamill who Cavett was talking to while Rodale died
- rhacker 9y ago
  Thank you for listing this out- while I enjoyed the article, I did feel at a bit out of touch not knowing the background.
- rmason 9y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJxiCZwP_GI Here's Cavett interviewing John and Yoko Lennon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kXCnKfdGOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kXCnKfdGOY
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  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.
jaytaylor 9y ago
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.
rrauenza 9y ago
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/ 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.
loser777 9y ago
I assume the resurgence in interest is due to an earlier submission that showed up this week? ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555592
cafard 9y ago
I remember reading the bit about asking his "is there a doctor in the audience?"

198 points by mcenedella 9y ago

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

bittermang 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

rudeboot 9y ago

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

closed 9y ago

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

nielsole 9y ago
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

vermontdevil 9y ago

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

WingH 9y ago
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
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  It’s only a Mandela effect if many people share the memory.
  - pluma 9y ago
    The "52 states" thing seems to be a common false memory: http://www.debunkingmandelaeffects.com/51-or-52-states-in-the-united-states-of-america/ 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.
    - WingH 9y ago

S_A_P 9y ago

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.

insickness 9y ago
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.
detaro 9y ago
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?
AndrewNCarr 9y ago
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/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11031097/
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  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.

salgernon 9y ago

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-are-living-in.html http://www.woodbetween.world/2012/08/the-berenstein-bears-we...

Larrikin 9y ago
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.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Yes, but that explanation is a lot less fun.

efrafa 9y ago

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_Sweat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Art_of_Forehead_Swe...

pfarnsworth 9y ago

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.

sparky_z 9y ago
I have to assume you meant this to be a part of the thread about the Challenger explosion.

vortico 9y ago

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

rhacker 9y ago
Thank you for listing this out- while I enjoyed the article, I did feel at a bit out of touch not knowing the background.
rmason 9y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJxiCZwP_GI Here's Cavett interviewing John and Yoko Lennon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kXCnKfdGOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kXCnKfdGOY
cup-of-tea 9y ago
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.

jaytaylor 9y ago

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.

rrauenza 9y ago

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/ 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.

loser777 9y ago

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

cafard 9y ago

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