Coincidences, Whoo.....

A couple years ago, while living in Barcelona, I was good friends with a British dude. After moving back to the states, we lost touch, until I was staying with my uncle in San Francisco. Walking down a side street in the Castro, I literally ran into him (himself walking with a couple friends). It took us a minute to recognize each other, but when we did, our minds were significantly blown. I mean: we met in a city that neither of us really lived in, lost touch entirely and then met again, in another city, that neither of us really live in, 8000 miles away from the first city in which we had met.

I'm out of touch with him again but I sort of hope that I'm going to meet up with him again in Bangkok.

then i remembered that i'd arranged to meet him there, and that was why i'd been thinking about him as i walked along.

do i win £5?

Then I switched on my ipod put it on shuffle and

IT WAS THE SAME TRACK

SPOKEEY!!!

was reading alistair reynolds short story. worms on one of jupiters moons (think Dune). they were called ouro boros. later that day finished millinnium series 1 box set and started on the extras and was told that the thing in the titles, the snake eating itself, was called an ouro boros.

was reading alistair reynolds short story (the day before the above). last man on mars with only a hologram of elton john for company(!). aliens appear and offer him the chance of creating new humans from the dna of his dead colleagues. he tells them not to because mars 'ain't the kind of place to raise your kids'. the day after, in the observer, someone is dissecting rock lyrics, picking bad examples. one of which is exactly the same line from Rocket Man (which i hadn't realised at the time).

and that's a coincidence too.

http://www.pandafishnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/shrimp.jpg

You could also post that to the deja vu thread.

whoo 11:11

whoo 2.

I got sent information about a course and discovered my friend is delivering it.
Erm, whoo?
sorry, lame.

Some time ago I received a card, not birthday or anything, from my mother, with a drawing of a young goose on that she thought I would appreciate. (I did.) Some time later, six months or so maybe, she sent me the same card again. I couldn't help but tell her, and she denied all knowledge of sending it the first time. The second card is currently up on the mantelpiece.

This week a friend came to stay, and saw the card. She said (without knowing any of the above) that her mother had sent the same card to her boyfriend, for his birthday. And then a year later, sent it again, forgetting she'd sent it the first time.

all it's missing is a serious paper cut incident, then you've got a poe right there

OK, here's a tale:

Alice would get walked to school by our 'child-minder' since starting primary school, this has happened at least two days out of five, but for the past year it's been every day. (she just completed and is moving up to secondary)..

Anyway, a couple months ago, she'd asked to take an album to show to hear teacher that she had decided was cool (the album I mean, although the teacher as well thinking about it).. So, I got it out and put it into a plastic bag for her.

On arrival at the childminder, the husband opened the door and said "ahA! Alice! Alice Cooper!! School's Out!... I don't suppose you've heard that one."

To which Alice replies "yes I have, and in fact I have it in my bag" and produces the Lp (the one that folds out into a desk) from the bag.

Whoo.

it's good

Walking past the Vida e Caffe in soho, I naturally get to thinking of the Pet Shop Boys' Se a Vida é. That leads on to their cover of Coldplay's Viva La Vida, and guess what's playing in the next shop I walk into a minute later?

Yeah it's just the 'thinking of a song and it comes on the radio" thing but the 3 Vidas are a bonus twist.

REBUS

^REMEMBER 5/22/10: s1ocki and I posted the same Boutros Boutros-Ghali rebus (well, mine was "boot rose boot rose gully" and his was "boot rose boot rose galley") within about 10 seconds of one another. minds were blown, universes collided, the divine watchmaker revealed his face, etc.

Talking about mixtapes in the pub last night I tell the story of the time a friend sent me a tape that turned out to be 90 minutes of The Birdie Song aka The Chicken Dance. My friend then says that she once made a tape that was all Haddaway's What is Love. Apparently in the US that song is only famous from an SNL sketch, she looks on her phone for a video of the sketch, meanwhile I head to the wiki page for the Birdie Chicken Song Dance (which is a great read, especially when it starts arguing with itself about why it's called "The Chicken Dance") to find about about the song and why it's so famous everywhere and guess what? The famous UK version by The Tweets, which reached #2 in the charts, was produced by HENRY HADAWAY *cue twilight zone music*

Happy to oblige...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50P_YFSSkNc

alt: Hadaway and shite, man.

xp Appropriately terrifying.

about a year ago, my flatmates had estonian friends of theirs come over. their friends were traveling around the world and had been working in australia three or four months ago and were now stopping for a couple of days in malaysia. anyways, we're at a party and we start talking and they start telling me some weird names of people that they'd met during their trip. one of the names was the name of a friend of mine traveling around the world and who had worked in australia. i jokingly ask them a few questions and it turns out they had indeed been working with my friend. and to make it even more whooo coincidence, that friend of mine was planning to come to malaysia a week later.

Tonight I was leafing through "Je Me Souviens" by Georges Perec. One of the entries I read was number 311, which mentions the punning name "Harry Cover" (haricots verts/green beans).

Two or three minutes later, my wife and son started to read a book that they had just checked out of the library: "Let's Fly a Kite, Charlie Brown!" When reading a book to our son we always say the author's/illustrator's name(s) out loud...

The text of this Charlie Brown book is credited to... "Harry Coe Verr". When I hear her say the name, I nearly plotzed.

Whoo

A few years back I walked home from town for the first time. I'm a few km out of town so tend to take the bus, but I'd been at a gig so it was too late.
I took the scenic route so took a couple of hours & loads of photos.
As I walked in through the front door of my flat the phone rang. It was my step-aunt who'd never rung me before. Ringing from NYC and presumably not aware of what time it was. Only reason I was up was that I was just getting in. So timing was amazing.

Read about brett kavanaugh getting into a fight about ub40. Put phone down, pick up current book, author talks about getting bitten by a rat and a hospital orderly singing ub40's 'rat in mi kitchen'.

Currently reading Kenneth MacMillan's biography "Different Drummer".

As I'm approaching my tram stop I finish the paragraph on how his work "Winter's Eve", was inspired by Carson McCullers' "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". Hit shuffle on my iPod getting off the tram and "Carson McCullers" by Trust Fund comes on. Spooooky.

Whoo

Weird how the vast majority of my spooky coincidences relate to an iPod on shuffle.

COINCIDENCE?!?

Just learnt this one: the numberplate of the car Archduke Ferdinand was in when he was shot was A III 118. The war caused by that incident ended on A(rmistice day) 11/11/18.

I'm listening to Neil Cicierega's Mouth Dreams where a mashup of Wannabe and Beethoven's Fifth is followed by a mashup of Say It Ain't So and In the Hall of the Mountain King. I'm also watching a random Penn & Teller Fool You on Youtube and one guy does his trick to Beethoven's Fifth, immediately followed by In the Hall of the Mountain King. :O stop the simulation now please.

one the guy

I googled the name of someone in the news plus a location as I was trying to remember when an event happened.
The second google result was about a court case involving two people, each sort of sharing part of their name with the person I googled, in the location I was googling.

I had been on the jury for that court case.

Was just watching the film The High and the Mighty (1954), a successful Cinemascope production which is now credited with establishing the template for the 1970s disaster film.

In it, Sidney Blackmer plays a prominent character named Humphrey Agnew. In the year 1969 the US had two Vice Presidents, named Humphrey and Agnew.

Spiro Agnew resigned from the office of Vice President in October 1973, four days after Sidney Blackmer died.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/07/studio-defends-barbie-movie-after-controversial-map-prompts-vietnam-ban

On a visit to our local oxfam bookshop I bought, purely on a whim, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Poe and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco. I read the Poe, then moved on to the Eco, which is about an Italian book dealer called Giambattista Bodoni who has amnesia but retains his prodigious memory of all things literary. The last line of the first page is "My name is Arthur Gordon Pym".

Maybe not a coincidence, but unusual:

In the mid 90s, when I was a teenager on a high school exchange trip to Montclair NJ (!), I bought a secondhand copy of Here Come The Warm Jets - I can’t remember where, either in Montclair or in the Village.

I just noticed it had a sticker on it with the former owner’s name and address. I googled him and it turned out he was the original writer of Ratatouille.

ha, my husband knows him (a bit)