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Coincidences

With over 30 minutes before my bus was due, I was killing time reading a book in the library.

A fictional Churchill said "You are putting spokes in the wheel of history"
His companion replies: "Then perhaps the wheel might roll at last..."

I took a few minutes to digest this word-play, and then noticed that on the shelf right in front of me was a book entitled "The mysterious Merry-go-round"

I'm sure the Library Angel has some kind of message for me there.
But maybe it's just "The wheels on the bus go round and round..." 8)
 
All day Saturday I had "Hava Nagila" playing in my head. I'm not Jewish so I had no idea why something so random was on constant repeat on my internal iPod. When I turned on the television it was automatically on a channel playing an episode of "Will & Grace" in which a neighbour steals Grace's music box which plays........."Hava Nagila"
 
Which reminds me......

A few weeks ago I had a song called "Counting Flowers on the wall" constantly in my head. It was so persistent that it was bugging me. Where did I know the song from? Then one day in the car it occurred to me that it had been on the "Pulp Fiction " soundtrack which I owned (and lost) years ago. OK so now I knew where I knew the song from why was it in my head? It must be over 10 years since I watched Pulp Fiction and possibly that long since I'd consciously heard that song. That night I was flicking through the channels and when I got to BBC3 "Pulp Fiction" was on at exactly the spot in the film where Bruce Willis is singing along to "Counting Flowers on the Wall".

Perhaps when we die the point of all these silly little coincidences will be made apparent. Until then, well they keep me amused.
 
This is a really old account but I was reminded by the library story. When I was 12 I had a best friend at school. We were literally joined at the hip and you wouldn't see one without the other. Our first names are very important in this, both had non German names. Mine is Nicole and my friend was called Judy. One French one English name, hers so rare that I still have to find another German [I know its common in english speaking countries] with that name and mine rare enough. Both together probably not seen very often.
We sometimes hang out in the school library, just sitting, playing and chatting. That day we decided that we should take a random book, open it at a random page and see what happens. I went blindly along the aisle, picked a book and we looked at the page, where there was a description about to ladies one called Nicole and the other Judy. We thought that that was a really brilliant coincidence. I believe [but am not sure] that the book was El Cid.
 
I have Tim Hunkin's book 'The Rudiments Of Wisdom', a collection of his Observer cartoon strips, which my kids used to love. I recently noticed it on a shelf and thought, hmmm, I bet my nephew'd like that for his son.

Forgot about it, until I noticed it on TV last night, on a bookshelf behind someone who was being interviewed. Better get it sent off! ;)
 
This morning it was dry as I arrived at the station. On the train I was listening to a lecture on linguistics and the following was said:

IT is raining. But what is this "IT"?
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When I got out of the train it was raining indeed :D
 
escargot1 said:
You know what IT is. ;)
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Because I'm an editor, I've always known what "it" is; however, writers often don't. I never let them get away with using it. ;)
 
My family tends to have a very strange way of looping through the same circle of people. It would be a laugh if it were a small town, but in a big city it becomes a bit of a mystery.
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Some believers in reincarnation think that groups of souls tend to reincarnate in more or less the same generation, and work through relationships from different angles. So you might come back as the opposite sex to your previous life, or you and a parent might find the relationship reversed in the next life, etc.

Ringing these changes could help a group of souls to work out karma carried from a previous existence.

But it sounds as if Tamyu's family are swapping around more than usual in just this one incarnation! 8)

EDIT: This is odd - Tamyu's post seems to have disappeared! :shock:
Which might explain why 'Reply with quote' didn't work on her post...
 
I think I've solved the mystery.
The post by Tamyu that I replied to was a new version of a story she'd already posted on this thread ages ago! She must have realised she'd told the story before, so deleted the latest version.
The original post was here:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 273#800273
(In fact, the newer version didn't mention the birthdays, but this still fits with my reply.)
 
Hahaha. You caught the post in the 2 or 3 minutes it was up before found that I had indeed posted it before. I just couldn`t shake the feeling that I had, so did a more thorough search. It wasn`t showing up in my past posts, and a search didn`t hit it, but going back through this thread I found it... So promptly deleted the new and hid in embarrassment.

I had hoped no one would find and laugh at me for posting the same thing twice, but no such luck it seems. :oops:

One of those huge mysterious circles of coincidences that I occasionally stop in life to marvel at. :D
A recent bit of contact from the guy who was my mother`s boyfriend, my half-brother`s step-father, and my aunt`s boyfriend reminded me of it.
 
Don't worry about posting the same story twice. We always like a good yarn, whether or not we've heard it before, and besides there're always people who haven't caught it first time around. ;)
 
...and there are people with memories like mine who can't remember reading (and replying to) this story before!

It was only when Version 2 disappeared that I looked more deeply.
(And at first I thought the MB was just playing up again.)
 
My next Crime novel, which I got from the Library on Monday, is called "The Fire Engine That Disappeared".

Today, I came across this story:
Managers of London's fire engines face financial meltdown
By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor
Wednesday, 2 March 2011

The company that runs London's fleet of fire engines faces a financial crisis over unpaid taxes after the Inland Revenue applied for a winding-up petition from the court.

The Fire Brigades Union last night claimed that the problems at AssetCo Fire and Rescue could result in the 113 appliances based in 169 fire stations in the capital being sold off to raise funds. AssetCo, which has launched a drive to raise £8m to pay off its debts, has won permission to delay its court hearing until mid-April.

...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 29614.html
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In the last few months I've had FOUR water leaks in my airing cupboard! The first was actually a leak in the flat upstairs, which came down through the ceiling.

The next two were caused by a faulty valve - the thing was replaced, but two weeks later the replacement failed!

Less than two weeks after that (ie today) the carpeting had still not dried out, which suggested another leak somewhere. The plumber has been and this time replaced a faulty sump unit.

I hope that's the end of the saga! Luckily my rent includes all repairs and maintenance, but these things are still a nuisance.
 
Some of these are new to me:

The history of coincidence
In a universe where anything can happen, most things sooner or later do
Sam Leith guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 April 2011 20.00 BST

'Coincidence?" as an old friend of mine liked to say whenever one of her enemies fell down an open manhole. "I think not."

We have a strange relationship with chance. Ever since the philosopher Fred Hoyle compared the likelihood of life evolving spontaneously to the chances of a tornado assembling a 747 from a junkyard, we've tended to see extreme improbability as a sign that Something Is Messing With Us.

In the case of my friend, of course, that may be the case. But other instances are enough to suggest that in a universe where anything can happen, most things sooner or later do.

• In 1898, a novel called Futility described an "unsinkable" ocean liner called Titan colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage. Just as in the case of the real-life Titanic, a catastrophic shortage of lifeboats did for Titan's passengers.

• Chris Cleave's first novel, Incendiary, about a terrorist attack on London, was published on 7 July 2005.

• John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, second and third presidents of the United States and lead authors of the Declaration of Independence, both died on 4 July 1826, 50 years to the day after they signed it.

• That other American founding father, Mark Twain, was born on the day Halley's Comet visited in 1835 and died on the day of its return in 1910. He predicted it would see him out.

• The 19th-century King Umberto I of Italy was eating in a restaurant when he noticed the owner was a near-exact physical double. It emerged that both were born on the same day, in the same town, and had married women with the same name. The restaurateur had opened his establishment on the day of Umberto's coronation. Umberto was shot dead on the day he learned the restaurateur had died in a shooting.

• Park ranger Roy Cleveland Sullivan was hit by lightning seven times: in 1942, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1977. On one occasion the lightning blew his shoe clean off. After the fourth of these strikes he became accustomed enough to having his hair on fire that he took to carrying a can of water around with him. He lived to 71, dying by his own hand after a love affair went wrong.

Sam Leith's novel The Coincidence Engine is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/ap ... oincidence
 
I was on a bus today, waiting at traffic lights, when a dark-coloured stretch limo passed ahead of us. It was soon followed by three more, all identical. But that's not the coincidence - as they were driving away from the crematorium, they were no doubt taking mourners away from a funeral.

A couple of hours later, I was sat down with a pint and decided to start reading my new library book. The central character is about to start working for a criminal gang as a driver of - you guessed it - a stretch limo! But the original driver is still on the scene, until the gang knife him and leave him in the boot to die! :shock: Stretch limos, dead bodies... a creepy coincidence.

Later, on my way home I thought I'd seen two separate kids with Thomas the Tank engine back-packs. But then I realised it was the same kid, who'd travelled part way on the bus but got off before me.

However, on my last bus of the day, there was a different kid, and he was wearing a Thomas the Tank engine cap - which was nice! 8)
 
The same book has popped up another coincidence: the criminal gang is planning on relocating from the NY area to Chicago, which they often abreviate to 'Chi'.

I went to school in Chi! Not Chicago, but Chichester, West Sussex! (As the school was called Chichester High School, it was abbreviated to Chi Hi. 8) )

But I guess the pronunciation of Chi might be different in the US case - 'Shee', perhaps? Anyone know?
 
Funny detail:
an economy book I'm reading mentions medieval history and
a medieval book I'm reading mentions economy.

Both have a Fortean slant - the economy book reads like conspiracy theory and the medieval book is about false messiahs. Both are highly recommended:
* Speculative Capital: The Invisible Hand of International Finance by Nasser Saber
* The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn

More details here:
http://uair01.blogspot.com/2011/04/cross-reference.html
 
A rather remarkable one this evening:

On my short stroll to the pub, various random thoughts were passing through my mind. At one point I was trying to remember the exact form of the saying or quotation that goes something like "Cowards die many times, a brave man only once."

Half an hour later, sitting with my pint and a book, I read this:
"The weak die repeatedly before their deaths, the strong only when it arrives". (I should add that this is a new book to me, and I hadn't started it before getting to the pub. There's nothing on the cover blurb to suggest this saying either.)

An earlier version (according to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) is:

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once."
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.
But old Will probably cribbed it from someone even earlier! ;)

(I did Julius Caesar many years ago for O-level, which probably explains why the idea is in my memory banks - but it doesn't explain the synchronicity of finding another version tonight!)
 
I am planning a major overhaul of The Mission's web site, and I have wanted a graphical flowchart program to help things along.

The other day, I was searching around the Internet for a suitable online program, when our admin (who has no idea about what I do when I'm not at the office), asked me if I would like a copy of Visio. Management, it seems, had purchase several, then decided not to use that product.

It's new, in package, and has it's license. Zowie!
 
This morning I posted a story on this MB about the search for Hitler's gold, much of which had probably been looted from the Jews.

This afternoon I got some new library books. Starting to read one, I got deja vu feelings that I'd read it before, but as I couldn't remember any details (let alone whodunnit!) I decided to carry on with it.

The story's set in a New Hampshire auction house, and after a while it becomes clear that the plot will turn upon a mysterious Renoir painting, which was one of several removed by the Nazis from a German family home in 1939 in exchange for exit visas (so presumably the family was Jewish).

So that's two stories about Nazi loot in one day!

And only yesterday I posted another story about Einstein's brief visit to Britain when he too fled Nazi Germany (in 1933) because he was regarded as an enemy of Hitler's regime.

Odd how these things fall together. (And the Nazis/Renoir painting wasn't mentioned in the book's blurb, btw.)
 
Some of you might be aware that I "experiment" with certain fortean subjects. My "why don't we ever get a good shot of a UFO?" test was...er...inconclusive. And my continuing fortean camping events have so far proven less than eventful.

So last week I started thinking about the subject of coincidences after reading the story about the guy who passed a public phone box that was ringing, answered it and found he was talking to his wife. Since then I've been actively thinking about circumstance. Anyway, yesterday I came out of Shepherd's Bush tube station and purposefully thought "I'm going to bump into someone I know" and low and behold I DID. Enter ex girlfriend "Becky" from my student days in Cardiff. I estimate it has taken me something like 30-40 attempts over a 9 day period to "call" this situation. It goes without saying that the other attempts were failiures. Weirdly I actually was trying to picture someone entirely different, but I was happy enough with the result.

Just thought I'd mention it....
 
Tonight I was browsing the news, and came across this headline:

'I just want to curl up and die', tweets Imogen Thomas as Ryan Giggs faces new affair claims
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... z1OX291zyi
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Which rang a bell - this afternoon, riding a bus in West Cornwall, I passed a hairdresser's shop called "Curl Up and Dye"!

(But a websearch shows this is actually a common name for hairdressers worldwide.)
 
I wonder if it's become more common since 1980.
 
Common as muck!

Passing a S/H book stall today I noticed a book by David Mitchell. I thought it might be by the TV comedian, but it turned out to be another David Mitchell.

But imagine my surprise when I resumed reading my latest book to find that a David Mitchell is also a character in the story!

In fact Wikipedia lists over 20 David Mitchells!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mitchell

By contrast, Wiki doesn't mention anyone who shares my R/L name, apart from one session musician who's mentioned in passing on a page about another musician's album...
 
This morning I came across this story:

Rip currents researched by RNLI and Plymouth University

RNLI lifesavers and scientists from the University of Plymouth have joined forces to investigate how rip currents drag swimmers out to sea.
...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-13712840

Then this afternoon in my latest crime book I came across a reference to rip currents. It wasn't just a passing mention - the rip current in question could have swept the murder weapon out to sea... :shock:
 
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