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Coincidences

Yesterday I was bantering with a colleague, asking each other music questions. I asked him 'Who wrote the songs on Roger Daltrey's first solo album?' The answer is '(Mainly) Leo Sayer'.

Made me wonder what Sayer is up to now, and started me thinking about why I went off him, as I'd bought his first few albums.

So today I'm watching a music documentary while doing a bit of stuff and there's Leo Sayer describing how he went almost by accident from being a songwriter for Roger Daltrey to turning up on Top Of The Pops in the Pierrot costume.

He went on to describe how he eventually became known for doing other people's ballads and sort of lost his way as a singer/songwriter until he was 'rediscovered' by a dance DJ.

Thank you, Music Coincidence Fairies!
 
Leo was also on Celebrity Big Brother (the controversial Jade Goody one) but stormed out in high dudgeon before it all kicked off. Seems like ages ago now. He came across like a stereotypical sufferer of "small man" syndrome, it was almost funny, like he was putting on an act, though he did try to beat up a security guard a lot bigger than he was, so... anger management issues?
 
On Saturday Techy met me from work and as we strolled along we happened upon the scene of a freak accident. We saw a man lying on the ground and the ambulance arrived. Found out today that he'd died.

Yesterday when out cycling we noticed a sudden traffic jam on the other side of a hedge. We soon learned that there'd been a pile-up - road blocked off, sirens, the Air Ambulance, the lot. Today I found out there'd been a fatality there too.

Two deaths in two days. No more, please.
 
Just listening to Damon Albarn talking about the new Gorillaz album on the radio, when I read Koko the famous gorilla has died. It's a sign, from a signing gorilla.
Sorry to hear that. My coincidence is that I was watching a YouTube video with Koko earlier today.
 
Didn't that gorilla die last week as well?
 
Last Tuesday I walked into a church in Innsbruck and read the following "reading of the day". This being the days when Trump's "children in cages" were in the news, I found it strangely appropriate:

nahum.jpg

1 Kings 21:17-2317Then the word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite: 18"Go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, who rules in Samaria. He is now in Naboth's vineyard, where he has gone to take possession of it. 19Say to him, 'This is what the LORD says: Have you not murdered a man and seized his property?' Then say to him, 'This is what the LORD says: In the place where dogs licked up Naboth's blood, dogs will lick up your blood-yes, yours!'" 20Ahab said to Elijah, "So you have found me, my enemy!" "I have found you," he answered, "because you have sold yourself to do evil in the eyes of the LORD. 21He says, 'I am going to bring disaster on you. I will wipe out your descendants and cut off from Ahab every last male in Israel-slave or free. fn 22I will make your house like that of Jeroboam son of Nebat and that of Baasha son of Ahijah, because you have aroused my anger and have caused Israel to sin.' 23"And also concerning Jezebel the LORD says: 'Dogs will devour Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.'
 
We were talking at work today about favourite short stories today and someone mentioned "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." which got us pondering as to whether Harlan Ellison was still with. I get home from work to find out he has died today.
 
We were talking at work today about favourite short stories today and someone mentioned "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." which got us pondering as to whether Harlan Ellison was still with. I get home from work to find out he has died today.
Thanks for telling us. Another great one dead.
 
We were talking at work today about favourite short stories today and someone mentioned "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." which got us pondering as to whether Harlan Ellison was still with. I get home from work to find out he has died today.

Sad news indeed.

Rest In Power Harlan!

Speculative-fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who penned short stories, novellas and criticism, contributed to TV series including “The Outer Limits,” “Star Trek” and “Babylon 5” and won a notable copyright infringement suit against ABC and Paramount and a settlement in a similar suit over “The Terminator,” has died. He was 84.

Christine Valada tweeted that Ellison’s wife, Susan, had asked her to announce that he died in his sleep Thursday.
Christine Valada@mcvalada

Susan Ellison has asked me to announce the passing of writer Harlan Ellison, in his sleep, earlier today. “For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time, I mattered.”—HE, 1934-2018. Arrangements for a celebration of his life are pending.

7:46 PM - Jun 28, 2018

The prolific but cantankerous author famously penned the “Star Trek” episode “City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Kirk and Spock must go back in time to Depression-era America to put Earth history back on its rightful course, a goal that for Kirk means sacrificing the woman he loves (played by Joan Collins). The final script was rewritten by “Star Trek” staffers to avoid the anti-war lesson Ellison had intended to impart about the ongoing Vietnam War, leaving Ellison unhappy.

https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/harlan-ellison-dead-dies-star-trek-1202861048/
 
About 24 hours ago, I was ironing my work shirts and decided to play some CDs while ironing - 'Lionheart' by Kate Bush, 'Once Upon A Time' by Siouxsie & The Banshees and 'Horses' by Patti Smith.
Last night, while flicking through the tv channels, BBC4 were showing a program with Duran Duran discussing their influences. Just as I flicked to it, Patti Smith was performing 'Land' from 'Horses', and then the next song was 'Hong Kong Garden' by Siouxsie & The Banshees, the first track off their album I was playing earlier that day!
 
Today is the anniversary of the death of someone close to me. As I was cycling along a canal towpath I was thinking about him; his birthday was the 13th and he's now been gone for 13 years. I glanced up and noticed that I was about to cycle under canal bridge number 13.
 
Today is the anniversary of the death of someone close to me. As I was cycling along a canal towpath I was thinking about him; his birthday was the 13th and he's now been gone for 13 years. I glanced up and noticed that I was about to cycle under canal bridge number 13.

If I may join in with your kindred spirit empathy thing, I've just got home from playing Sunday league cricket, where I finished on 13 not out today.
 
Following on from my coincidences on Friday, I had another Saturday and then Sunday.

On Saturday while watching Uruguay, I was also watching a youtube video titled '10 Time Travelers That May Have Been Caught on Tape', quite a Fortean subject there. Unknown to me, it showed a video of a league match in Uruguay, where some sort of entity seems to be running through the crowds.

Later on, I was browsing through ebay, something I don't do that often these days, when I was looking at t shirts of Debbie Harry. The next morning, while on twitter, it said that it was Debbie Harry's birthday!
 
I'm not sure whether the underlying cause is quantum entanglement, telepathic resonance, karmic balancing, or something entirely different, but these two news stories posted on Friday the 13th leave me pondering whether I should write an article announcing:

Enola's Law of the Conservation of Human / Rodent Misattributions

Woman calls police to report burglar, officers find squirrel
Police in London said a terrified woman who thought there was a burglar in her house called officers, who arrived to find the culprit was a squirrel. ...

SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/0.../?utm_source=sec&utm_campaign=sl&utm_medium=2


Tomato-stealing 'squirrel' turns out to be mailman
A Quebec family who set up a camera to catch a suspected squirrel stealing their tomatoes made a shocking discovery -- the culprit was the mailman. ...

SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/0.../?utm_source=sec&utm_campaign=sl&utm_medium=8
 
Interesting read here.

Although the gambit is to introduce the topic via an example about conspiracy, it broadens to cover coincidence in general:

The Odds of That
By LISA BELKINAUG. 11, 2002

When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where he had just had a jovial dinner with friends. The following week, Vladimir Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.

The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated in an air-locked lab in Geelong, Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-splattered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging. Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizza delivery man served as a decoy.

What joined these men was their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise missiles into biological weapons. The chain of deaths -- these three men and eight others like them -- began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies were on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail.

In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but these are not ordinary times...


Long Essay:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/the-odds-of-that.html
The biological analysis is, for me at least, more interesting that debunking via mathematics:

''We are hard-wired to overreact to coincidences,'' says Persi Diaconis. ''It goes back to primitive man. You look in the bush, it looks like stripes, you'd better get out of there before you determine the odds that you're looking at a tiger. The cost of being flattened by the tiger is high. Right now, people are noticing any kind of odd behavior and being nervous about it.''

[...]

'Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It might just be part of our biology that conspires to make coincidences more meaningful than they really are. Look at the natural world of rocks and plants and rivers: it doesn't offer much evidence for superfluous coincidences, but primitive man had to be alert to all anomalies and respond to them as if they were real.''
 
Just a few minutes ago, I read 'guns don't kill people - people kill people'.
Just a minute ago, watching Romeo Must Die, one of the characters says exactly the same line.
 
Three years ago, when I was bathing in the Mediterranean with a diver's mask and a snorkel, I was thinking that it was many years (seven, exactely) that I had not seen an adult common pipefish, an uncommon sight (I had seen the previous year a broad-nosed pipefish, a species imitating a leaf of posidonia). Seconds after, I am looking at the sandy seabed, strewn with dead posidonia leaves, when I see one of them, of light colour, moving, probably because of a mini-current. But then , I realize that it is waving too much, in a serpentine way, which could not be induced by a current of water, in addition surrounding leaves were not affected. In fact, it was a pipefish, a relative of sea-horses, moving among dead leaves. It was a remarkable coincidence that I saw one of those rare fish at exactely the same time that I was thinking of them.
 
Today I was reading last night's London Evening Standard* about an exhibition of photos of old London. One was of the Ludgate Viaduct which was demolished in 1990.
Tonight we're watching an old Tales of the Unexpected which showed virtually the same view. I'm stunned!

* link
 
Today I was reading last night's London Evening Standard* about an exhibition of photos of old London. One was of the Ludgate Viaduct which was demolished in 1990.
Tonight we're watching an old Tales of the Unexpected which showed virtually the same view. I'm stunned!

* link

Worthy of Ro(n)ald Dahl himself!
 
Just noticed: a few weeks before the announcement of water in an underground cavern on Mars, there was an episode of Thunderbirds that featured exactly the same thing. Presumably the writer was taking his plot from scientific prediction, but not bad all the same. There was bioluminescent life in their fictional Martian lake, incidentally.
 
Just noticed: a few weeks before the announcement of water in an underground cavern on Mars, there was an episode of Thunderbirds that featured exactly the same thing. Presumably the writer was taking his plot from scientific prediction, but not bad all the same. There was bioluminescent life in their fictional Martian lake, incidentally.
Maybe the scientists saw that episode and got the idea for another 'keep 'em keen to keep up the funding' press announcement?
 
Maybe the scientists saw that episode and got the idea for another 'keep 'em keen to keep up the funding' press announcement?

That would depend on the underground lake being fictitious, and I don't believe it is.
 
Today I was in a charity shop where there was a book open on a table. I had a look, and it was one of those religious 'daily lesson' jobbies. I had a read and learned about a journalist who was imprisoned by some terrorist group. He was freed, but felt sorry for the other former hostages. The experience is still very much with him.
I bought some jeans for £1 to cut down to Capri length.

Tonight after work I shortened the jeans and made a little bag out of the remnants. The radio was on, with an account of a journalist who'd been imprisoned with others by terrorists who was returning to the city where it happened and hoped to find the locations, meet the kidnappers etc. As with the other journalist it is still a big part of his life.

It was like the same story but with two different outcomes.

The revamped jeans are comfy, and the little bag is cute!
 
At 0445 today l was driving out to my shooting permission to go deerstalking. l was idly thinking about how rare it is to see badgers locally. Seconds later l slowed to allow two rather dim hares to get off the road and, as they did so, a badger ran across the road twenty yards in front of me!

maximus otter
 
This morning, I was in my local Waterstones, where I came across a book I'd never heard of before; 'Jerusalem' by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
About a couple of hours later, I was reading through another message board I frequent, and decided to look at the book section, something I don't do that often, when the same book was mentioned!

https://www.onetouchfootball.com/showthread.php?40760-The-Five-Foot-Shelf
 
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