In the movie Hard Boiled (辣手神探/Lashou Shentan/Hot-handed God of Cops), there’s a big warehouse fight scene that just keeps going and going. It’s a pivotal moment or two, so that’s fair. Early in that scene, when Johnny Wong’s crew are attacking rival mobster Uncle Hui’s property, one of the defenders calls up the boss to let him know what’s going down.
In my head the line was something like “Uncle Hui, Uncle Hui. At the armory. There’s a raid going on.” “Armory” was said more like “ermory.” Side note, I’m talking about the dub, because I love the early english dub of that movie. Anyway, the actual line? Completely different. I can’t easily find a version to double check at the moment, but going from memory is where I went wrong in the first place, so not sharing it.
Why did such an inconsequential line take real estate in my brain? The dub voices were so funny to me I couldn’t help repeating lines, sticking on them. The obvious ones to hit over and over again would be your “Give a guy a gun and he’s superman, give him two and he’s god!” and, oh, practically everything Johnny Wong says. Maybe I was more likely to get those ones right, so the lesser lines suffered memetic drift in my head.
Again with the dubbed voices, there’s a kung fu movie where Jacky Chan steals a guy’s food. I always remembered the line as “Hey, goddammit! Who stole my piece of chicken?” The actual line was more like, “My piece of chicken, who stole it?” I get confronted with this, the limitations of memory, far more often than I’d prefer. I call it “Uncle Hui-ing” in honor of that moment from Hard Boiled.
The original George Romero version of Day of the Dead has a kinda hilarious but heartfelt performance by the late Anthony Dileo Jr, as a guy who is losing his mind under the influence of a zombie apocalypse. I remembered a number of those lines perfectly, but at least one was a bit off. Uncle Hui’d! And perfectly fitting the theme of this post, as I look at the videos I was watching just last fucking night, I can’t remember which line I had wrong or how the wrong version went. fml.
Off topique, but that dude died from covid early this year. Keep vaxing, and if you wanna like i do, keep masking. Don’t take chances with your lives.
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why are there spaces after those apostrophes? there aren’t in text editor view in wordpress. fml!
figured it out. fixed it, at least.
In the scheme of memory weird stuff that’s not too bad. I once dreamed a whole day at school, the next day so when I went to school I ended up in the wrong classrooms, and eventually got sent to the Headmistress. Luckily for me she believed me, even sat me down with a cup of tea to get over it.
Maybe worse a friend of mine, Her, was absolutely convinced that another friend, Him, had a cane toad, and that on a visit to Him with Her children Her son had wanted to hold the cane toad, but for obvious reasons Her didn’t let him. Now of all the people we knew Him was the most likely to have obtained a cane toad, but Him hadn’t, never had one, never ever. Plus Him lived a ways away, and Her had visited Him a total of ONE time, without her kids. Her brain had made the whole thing up, freaked Her right out, because if Her brain had made up a whole event, which she only discovered when she brought it up in conversation, what ELSE had Her brain made up that she didn’t know about?
Brains really are weird.
they’re the worst. i’m positive i’ve had dreams and memories get mixed up as well, that slipped notice because they were about inconsequential things.
It is odd when you dream about someone you know, even when you realise it, having had whatever interaction in the dream colours how you view that person, and it’s difficult to disregard when it felt so real. I’ve had the odd vivid dream about colleagues that I’d only interact with occasionally in real life, and boy that could be tough to get over, because I’d not see them often enough to really make it stick that the dream wasn’t real. But those were things I knew couldn’t be real, I’ve no idea how much of what I think of as real memories are just dreams, although I suppose I’ve got a head start on anyone who hasn’t had reason to wonder if their memories are real in the first place.
fortunately most of the time i dream about someone i know being weird it’s obvious. early in our relationship i had a dream about my husband throwing his sketchbook out the window and became a meme with us. this is a case of the irl person coloring the dream – easy to imagine him getting upset about a criticism and giving up. he sometimes has dreams i’m being unreasonable in various ways that are just exaggerations of my real foolery.
sounds like u have more of this going on than i do. sorry about that.
i remembered what it was! in the yacht rock web comedy, i remembered the guy playing messina saying “fuck you loggins, your crappy singing made me puke.” he actually said, “your shitty music make me barf, loggins.” he did open the scene by saying “fuck you loggins” so i wasn’t wildly far off.