The phantom is a player named Ocho Quatro, who materialized yesterday for an old friend reacting to my posting “The coming duodecfest”, on occurrences of the number 84. I stashed a note about their Facebook comment away, for following up this morning. When Google kindly led me, slantwise, to Chad Johnson. Yes, you have a right to be puzzled by that, just as I was until I read Johnson’s entry in Wikipedia.
So this will be (yet another) posting on the fragility and mutability of human memory, and on associative thinking as providing access to those memories.
But first, what led my friend to Chad Johnson: some facts about the man, from Wikipedia:
Chad Ochocinco Johnson (born Chad Javon Johnson; January 9, 1978), known from 2008 to 2012 as Chad Ochocinco, is an American former football wide receiver who played in the National Football League (NFL) for 11 seasons.
… On October 25, 2006, in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Johnson [who has claimed to be 40% Mexican], whose jersey number was “85”, announced that he would prefer to be called “Ocho Cinco,” which is “eight five” in Spanish (“Eighty-five” would be “ochenta y cinco”). During warm-ups for the October 29, 2006, game against the Atlanta Falcons, the back of his jersey read “Ocho Cinco” instead of “C. Johnson.”
… Johnson legally changed his name to Chad Javon Ochocinco on August 29, 2008. The Cincinnati Bengals decided to allow him to have it on the back of his jersey
So my friend, thinking about eighty four and its numeral representation 84, recalled that a football player had a jersey number they remembered as 84 and that somehow this became part of his name. Hence ocho quatro.
First, the association of the number with a football jersey (and some other pieces of the Chad Johnson story). Meanwhile, since my friend was casting about in their memory for an 84, they transformed the real-world jersey number, 85, to 84. Very close, and better for their purposes than the real thing. (None of this was consciously thought through, of course.)
On the marvels of associative memory, see my 9/14/23 posting “How an Australian film-maker evokes tennis”. My 68 blog postings tagged with Memory are listed in this file; I’ve long hoped to turn this into a page with annotations on the contents of the postings, but that’s a project currently beyond me.
That’s act 1: my posting and my friend’s Ocho Quarto comment. Act 1 is about memory.
Act 2 is about the net.
In any case, my friend’s comment came late in the day, so I saved a note to check on Chad Johnson. (I’m a sports idiot, so I couldn’t depend on my remembering the name, which meant nothing to me. Had to write it down.) Went to Wikipedia, and pieced out what I wrote above.
Then I went to Facebook to copy exactly what my friend had written. And there was no trace of it. It was gone from the comments on my posting. It was gone from my friend’s FB page. Vanished.
Clearly my friend had also done a Chad Johnson check, discovered what I discovered, and realized that they’d crucially misremembered. And so deleted their comment. And then, somewhat eerily, it was as if it had never been — except for my note pad. Poof. Life on the net.
(You’ll see that I’m protecting my friend’s identity. Well, you know that they’re more of a sports fan than I am; good luck with that.)
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