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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

In case it helps, I definitely saw it in school, I remember it clearly. If it wasn't live, then they re-played it unedited as if it were live, before the news broke, but that also seems improbable.

I was in the 5th grade, and our teacher was super excited to break the regular class schedule to let us watch this live science happening. When it happened, the room went quiet with disbelief. After maybe ten seconds, one of the class clowns said "No, a Bud light" thinking it was funny and trying to break the awkward silence but being a kid not realizing how brutally insensitive it was at that moment. The teacher got really upset, turned off the TV, and went into the other room to cry & calm down while we just waited quietly.

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I was in sixth grade and did not catch it live, as I was just getting off the bus when it happened. A number of students were already in the classroom when it was streamed live, and I remember one of them running down the hall past me and other students coming in the building, saying "the space shuttle blew up, the space shuttle blew up!" over and over.

I know we ended up watching the replays for a while and then I don't recall what we did after that. It was a big deal, that's for sure.

And I have to say, I just laughed out loud, literally, at that "No, a Bud light" comment because it's been so long that I can chuckle at how wildly inappropriate that comment would have been, and yet, exactly right. We are human, after all.

>one of the class clowns said "No, a Bud light" thinking it was funny and trying to break the awkward silence

Is that a pop culture reference of some kind?

It was a series of beer commercials from the mid-late 80s. The premise if I remember correctly was a guy walking up to a bar and saying “hey give me a light.” And then some ridiculous light would be given to him that was most often not a beer. Then he would say no a bud light to great fanfare and cheering.

https://youtu.be/Bodf2HYWIAY

Thanks for the reference. For a 10-11 yo (if I read "5th grade" correctly) this is actually a surprisingly abstract reaction (all the tragedy aside)

This will be an unpopular opinion, but I strongly suspect you’re misremembering what became a common joke after the fact, just like the original article.

I was also in 5th grade when the Challenger exploded. There was a slew of challenger “jokes” that came out afterwards, and I distinctly remember this one. It’s probably the cleverest of the ones I’ve heard.

So I find it highly improbable a fifth grader came up with that comment within seconds of the explosion. I think you’re probably misremembering the class clown telling the joke a few days after the fact, just like the original article.

Btw, in my school we didn’t watch live. The principal came on the PA to tell us it exploded. Happened just before our daily 15 minutes of “journal time”. So I drew a picture of the challenger and some story about it.

And dammit, years later I’ve looked for that notebook top and bottom in my house, but seems it’s gone.

Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion of events they didn't witness, I suppose. There's exactly zero chance I put this together later, I know the student's name, he got in trouble for saying it, it's a big part of the reason our teacher freaked out, and there were many witnesses. I find it fairly strange you would decide you know what happened based on your logic alone.

I had a long reply, but now deleting it all except this bit, which goes back to the theme of the actual article :

If there’s ever been one thread on Hacker News where a user could reasonably claim to doubt another’s memory of an event that possibly didn’t occur : this is that thread.

Good point, I do buy that the article’s proximity and power of suggestion has (mis) led you to think you know something you don’t.

The Bud Light joke had been seen by hundreds of millions of people, with dozens examples of the joke in those ads. Kids in my school had been practicing that joke in various situations. I am certain you’ve drastically mis-calculated the probability of someone repeating the joke. I’d be surprised if tens of thousands of people hadn’t thought the same joke independently.

In case you hadn’t followed the immediate thread, people who believed the shuttle disaster couldn’t have been seen live were (like you) wrong.

Fair enough.

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