Issue: April 22, 2026

The so-called “Mandela Effect” is when a buncha people all together remember somethin that never happened as havin happened. It gets its name from the idea that lotsa people claimed to remember seein news reports of Nelson Mandela havin died in prison in the ’80s – despite the fact he didn’t, & in fact he became President of South Africa from ’94 to ’99 & only died in 2013!

Anyways, I’m only bringin all this up because yesterday’s answer Shaquille O’Neal is kinda adjacent to another popular Mandela Effect belief: namely, that what comedian supposedly starred as a djinn in a 1990s movie titled Shazaam? Folks’re prob’ly just confusin it with Shaq’s Kazaam movie from 1996 – but given that there’s a djinn involved, I wonder if maybe people are makin some kinda subconscious Arabian Nights connection in their heads on this one.

I feel like I’ve been dreamin of djinni all week long! Well, here’s one more for ya: Jeanie Deans. Never heard of her? She’s the namesake of an opera, a play, a poem, a ship, at least TWO locomotives, a hybrid rose, an antipodean potato, at least a few pubs, AND a geriatric hospital ward in Helensburgh, Scotland! (That’s what Wikipedia tells me, at any rate.)

Who IS this Jeanie Deans that so many folks named stuff after? Why, she’s only one of 19th century literature’s most celebrated heroines, is all! Specifically, she stars in The Heart of Midlothian, the seventh book of what author’s Waverley series?