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A Surfeit Of Dutch Princesses

grimnebulin

soul of a hippy, mouth of a sailor
Joined
Dec 6, 2011
Messages
55
Yesterday I was reading a thread on Reddit, I think it was called 'What is the strangest thing that ever happened to you?' The account I was reading was written by a man who claimed that when he was a small boy, the radio in his sister's bedroom used to 'talk' to him, cursing and swearing and calling him horrible names. The guy's name was Dustin, and he claimed that the radio had said 'Dustin! That should be the name of a dutch princess' among other things. I went on reading the thread for a while then decided to get something to eat. I closed the window on my laptop and my news feed came up. The headline was 'Dutch princess dies in UK.' Now, I know that all my devices are watching and listening to me (adjusts tin-foil hat) but this seemed so oddly specific that it quite freaked me out for a few minutes.
Apologies if I should have posted this somewhere else, not sure if it should have been in the strange coincidences thread.
 
I think the lack of sense is part of the unsettling nature?
 
For a moment there, I hoped someone was collecting Dustins, but the post is true to the thread title.

Dustin is not an unusual name, at least here in the US. I did a quick search on Dutch princesses, and found pretty normal names. Of course, given the source of the comment about the name Dustin, trying to make any sense of it is a fool's errand to begin with.
 
I can attest to the fact there was a juxtaposition of the name "Dustin" and a news item on the death of Dutch Princess Christina yesterday.

I was scanning through a listing that was probably either a news-specific Google search or a list of current stories on a news webpage. In either case, a title is followed by a very brief excerpted blurb. There was an item titled to refer to the story of Princess Christina's death but including a fragmentary reference to "Dustin" in the associated blurb - phrased in a way that could be parsed as referring to this or another Dutch princess as the "Dustin" being cited.

This piqued my curiosity, and I set out on a brief tangential bit of 'Net surfing ...

I checked the listed news item, but couldn't access it for some reason. I then did some cursory searching, but couldn't locate any combination of Princess Christina and "Dustin" except for unrelated sidebar mentions of (e.g.) Dustin Hoffman on news webpages addressing Christina's death.
 
Interesting.
Don't you just love how the interwebz, and comfusers in general, tend to garble otherwise perfectly useful text? Babble in, garble out I suppose.

Yep ... But that leads to a possible explanation for the OP's story's connection to my incident yesterday. The OP was reading a (presumably recent) Reddit thread containing an allusion to "Dustin" and "Dutch princess." My weird (probable) Google search blurb could well have represented Google's own (probably recent) incorporation of the same Reddit thread.
 
I checked the listed news item, but couldn't access it for some reason. I then did some cursory searching, but couldn't locate any combination of Princess Christina and "Dustin" except for unrelated sidebar mentions of (e.g.) Dustin Hoffman on news webpages addressing Christina's death.

On a bit of a tangent.

I was reading some item on here (can't remember what it was, short term memory stuffed) and I Googled some reference to this item. Given three links I clicked one but was given a notice saying that as I was in the EU I was denied access. This has happened before when tryint to access American sites.

So I opened my VPN, set the country of origin as Russia, and the link went straight through.

I found this oddly satisfying.

INT21.
 
wow, so many replies, thank you all. Yes, it was the lack of sense re the radio 'saying' Dustin should be a name for a Dutch princess, it was all a bit unsettling really. I moved into this flat just last month and sometimes I feel that previous inhabitants might still be around. It's not a scary feeling, surprisingly, more of a 'I'm not alone in here' but quite peaceful. I'm sorry, just read that back and it sounds very garbled to me, it's the medication you kno...
 
'That sounds like paranoid schizophrenia to me.' It actually does, doesn't it? Which is disturbing in itself without any 'paranormal' aspect
 
The story is 7 years old. Coincidences?
 
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