Those Memories of Disney World

Remember your childhood visit to Disney World?

Cinderella's castle glistening, the cartoon characters laughing, grouping for photos, the many rides with their height requirements, the smells of freshly cooked food, and Bugs Bunny shaking your hand?  As you bring that experience to mind, you may have the feeling you are reliving it, seeing your childhood pass through your mind's eye, much like reviewing a videotape.

But the way human memory works is very different from that of a video tape recorder—our memories are actually reconstructions of bits and pieces of information we have obtained over time.

Sometimes those reconstructions are very similar to what we experienced; other times we are "tricked" and remember things differently than how they actually happened.

In Fact, Most of what you recall didn't happen. 

Mainstream - Hank Green Derision - Propaganda

Robert Earll, who I called Bobby, like everyone else we hung out with, was one of the writers for Ironsides, and then Starsky & Hutch. You know the episode where Starsky's wife dies of cancer? The one that got all those awards? He wrote that -- after his wife died of cancer. That's how writers deal with things like that, we write about them. 

So, anyway, Bobby never felt like he really belonged in Hollywood, making a ton of money and writing for a living. He didn't have a degree. Hell, his only serious schooling was through a correspondence course while he lived in Las Vegas. Nope, not joking at all. It was sort of a strange assemblage of accidents that got one of his assignments into the hands of the producer of Ironsides as well. 

About ten years into a solid career he took a young man to work with him, who wanted to get into to writing TV shows as well. 

Bobby told me that this guy was absolutely insatiable the whole day. 

"He just wouldn't stop! He talked to all the stars, the directors, he even spent more than an hour bugging the stunts guys, asking how they did things. I was so frustrated I could have screamed and whacked him with something blunt!"  Then Bobby looked at me sideways, "You know why I was really mad though?"

"I'll bite, why?" 

"Because that kid had more fun at my job in an afternoon, than I've had there in the last ten years." 

Hank Green, my son tells me, is still getting razed by the mainstream news media about his visit to the Whitehouse. When my son told me about this I thought of that story Bobby told me. I would be willing to bet a royalty check that not one of those CNN reporters has a selfie with the president. 

That and they're scared shitless.