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No. 706: Q: Are We Not Mandela? A: We are Evo!

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Q: Are We Not Mandela? A: We are Evo!

First | Previous | 2023-06-27 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=706

Strip by: Jacob S

Dorm:
[Cueball and Megan holding hands in front of a door. Megan is attempting to turn the doorknob.]
Locked
Other Dorm:
[Cueball and Megan holding hands inside another dorm room. The roommate is sitting at a computer wearing a headset.]
Roommate: I'll be done Tuesday.
Roommate in raid
Library Rare Book Collection:
[Cueball and Megan looking through a closed door. Inside Evo Morales and two university workers are talking amongst various items on display.]
Occupied by tour for visiting Evo Morales
Accelerator Tunnel:
[Cueball and Megan in silhouette in front of an imposing-looking door. The door is marked "NO ENTRY" with a radioactive trefoil symbol, and has a passcode scanner beside it.]
Sealed while beam is in operation
Beaver Lodge:
[Megan climbing on top of a dirt mound while Cueball stands on the ice beside it. A cross-section reveals a beaver inside the mound and a submerged entrance.]
Frozen over for winter to keep out predators, only accessible via underwater entrance
Hyperspace:
[Megan reading a textbook in front of a table piled with five other textbooks. Cueball looks over Megan's shoulder.]
Cueball: Are you sure?
Ruled out by current understanding of physics
College Law #27:
The availibility [sic] of private space is inversely proportional to the desirability of the hookup.

The author writes:

When Nelson Mandela died in 2013, many were surprised, as they thought Mandela had died while in prison instead of going on to end apartheid in South Africa. Many other commonplace false memories exist, and eventually the term "Mandela effect" was coined for such occurrences. A common mystical interpretation is that these are evidence of slightly different parallel universes people travel between unknowingly. Personally, I don't believe it. Firstly, examples of the Mandela effect can be explained by human brains working in similar ways. Upper-class people are usually depicted with monocles, so it's easy to assume Mr. Monopoly has one too. It makes more sense for the Fruit of the Loom logo to have a cornucopia than to just be a pile of fruit. And someone uneducated on South African events might have heard the story of Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist beaten to death by state security officers, and conflate it with Nelson Mandela's contemporaneous prison sentence. Secondly, Mandela dying would have a huge impact on the world—including, it seems, this comic. I picked Evo Morales because he is also an indigenous rights left-wing politician who instituted country-wide reforms, and the hair was easy enough to change. It helps that I could make the Devo joke.

Original xkcd strip: 2011-11-28, "Privacy".