Oops, I did it again…
Twitter user Totiki sleeps on drywall—as retweeted by Glycine Goblin—posted a few screenshots about the music video for the 1998 Britney Spears hit Baby, One More Time. The first Spears hit, it notoriously features our Britney in quasi-Lolita schoolgirl attire as she pumps away. However, the screenshots record that all is not as it should be: the short schoolgirl skirt that once adorned the lithe Britney is no longer plaid but black. Now, I distinctly recall, as do the people in the screenshots, that it was plaid—and yet, so far as we can see, it is black. I canvassed a girl—women being more attentive to clothes—and she suggested that the skirt was definitely plaid and probably grey. It was not solid black, anyway. She suggested that perhaps I was distracted by the fact Spears had her shirt tied round her in a strip—yet I countered that Spears has small tits, so I paid much more attention to her skirt; and so I am sure the skirt was plaid.
Anyway, for the Internet this exemplifies the so-called “Mandela effect”, so named because a subset of the population distinctly recalls that Nelson Mandela died in prison in apartheid South Africa, whereas another population slice—and official history—holds that he died long after his release. So, with Britney, it seems that the effect has struck again. And, indeed, if you look at the screenshot below it seems Britney herself—in all her emancipated glory—also thinks the skirt was plaid; and, further, online shops that sell “the look” (for anyone who wants to look like a pre-millennial eighteen-year-old) also think the skirt was plaid.
As another ’90s teeny-bop sensation sang, “Uh-oh, we’re in trouble—someone came along and burst our bubble!”. The reason usually touted for these temporal shenanigans is the experiments at CERN—since the Britney incident occurred just after CERN fired up again. This is possible, frankly I have not looked into it; however, it is also in accord with standard magical practice and could well go on without CERN’s intervention at all—or CERN itself could be some electro-mechanical hocus-pocus.
William S. Burroughs, a modern magician, would use “cut-ups” of sound recordings to shut down businesses that offended him: loop a few tape extracts, as was, in the right way and the café that once served you a surly cappuccino would be closed next time you popped round. For Burroughs, this was all just another shot in the time wars: somewhere, in the realms beyond, lies an invisible directorate—the hidden masters, as that old fraud Blavatsky might say—that wars over time, switches the timeline this way and that. This hidden boardroom, perhaps peopled by the Lemurs of the eponymous lost continent, constitutes one headquarters in the war over reality—a war often facilitated by Mayan codices (their calendar was a mind-time control device too).
This was all run-of-the-mill for Burroughs, one of his lovers, Ian Sommerville, a whizz mathematician and computer scientist, started to photograph his every moment with a Polaroid camera—he stuck the Polaroids up in his Tangiers room until one day he stopped. Visitor after visitor, including the storied Allen Ginsberg, saw that the Polaroids had formed a ghostly figure in outline; and collages such as Sommerville’s are just another salvo in the time war—sometimes these are unintentional, as with the Polaroids, so that what happened to Britney’s skirt may be due to CERN or a by-product or a deliberate magical act or a magical misfire.
What we know is that something is “up” (upskirt?): there is a time war, there is a conflict over timelines and the continuity—and much has been hidden already. Indeed, developments like quantum computers are used to hide secrets in what their creators conceive as “parallel universes”—and who knows how much reality has already been concealed in this way. So when I say our travails can be partially attributed to black magicians this is no joke…