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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

escargot said:
Made me think of The Cricket Bag (safe YouTube link)
:lolling:

Maybe you have to be of a certain age to get this!
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That just links to Deck of Cards but it made me think of the sketch from (I think) I'm sorry I'll Read That Again which is based on Deck of Cards. Is that it? "The three cricket stumps make me think of Shadrach, Mechach and Abednago. Or three cricket stumps."
 
Min Bannister said:
That just links to Deck of Cards but it made me think of the sketch from (I think) I'm sorry I'll Read That Again which is based on Deck of Cards. Is that it? "The three cricket stumps make me think of Shadrach, Mechach and Abednago. Or three cricket stumps."
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Nope, it links to Frost's The Cricket Bag, the parody of Deck of Cards. For some reason it's mislabelled and is indeed the song you're thinking of.
 
Mythopoeika said:
My own weirdness seems to revolve around camera tripods. 3 have gone missing.
I even bought one that I put in plain sight right next to my coffee table here. I didn't notice when that went missing.
I bought a new high security lock for my front door after that.
They may turn up sometime (I hope).
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Last week I tipped out t'banger ready for the MOT and found several folding seats, like for outdoor concerts. One was actually a camera tripod in a long nylon case. Have you done that?
 
escargot said:
Last week I tipped out t'banger ready for the MOT and found several folding seats, like for outdoor concerts. One was actually a camera tripod in a long nylon case. Have you done that?
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Not in my new car. They won't be in there.
 
Camera tripods are like sink plungers. <nods wisely> You have an image of them in your head and when they don't look like the version in your head, they are invisible. I am physically incapable of seeing a sink plunger that is lying down.

We have a pair of scissors like that at work. Put them down and they become invisible - because they have a kind of shaped handle, which means they don't fit the mental image of 'scissors' that our brains have. They can only be found by someone who isn't looking for the scissors...
 
catseye said:
Camera tripods are like sink plungers. <nods wisely> You have an image of them in your head and when they don't look like the version in your head, they are invisible. I am physically incapable of seeing a sink plunger that is lying down.

We have a pair of scissors like that at work. Put them down and they become invisible - because they have a kind of shaped handle, which means they don't fit the mental image of 'scissors' that our brains have. They can only be found by someone who isn't looking for the scissors...
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Entirely understand. If I'm looking for anything and picture it as being black rather than red, ex. manual can opener, I cannot find it even if it is right in front of me.
 
That weirdly makes sense. It's the opposite of me looking for something-- I'm good at puzzles (sort of) because I can narrow down the shape I want and pick it out. It only works if I have enough of a shape to go for, but people are weirdly impressed by you picking out a single puzzle piece and just slotting it in. I assume I'm relying on all the back-end work that vision does (like how your peripheral vision interpolates all that junk without you being aware of it?). Looking for the wrong thing would be pretty hard I guess.
 
escargot said:
We've been out on t'mokes and Techy took a photo of me, on which my right hand/glove looks really weird. The gloves fit tightly and they were fastened as normal.

He took a couple of others at the same time and on the hand/glove looks normal on them. Some kind of glitch I s'pose.

View attachment 28749
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with digital camera, if there is movement the image is distorted like your hand/glove was. On film this would have been a slight blur. One time I took a picture of a rabbit while it was jumping away and it looks like stretched out to a foot long like a piece of elastic.
 
For months I have been concerned that there might be something up with the wiring in my house.
Of an evening, sitting watching TV, I would occasionally notice a burning smell.
Whenever I smelt it I would start to walk around, sniffing at the air, holding my hand against electrical sockets, etc etc trying to locate the source of the burning smell.
I reasoned that surely, if I did indeed have an electrical problem, that the fuse would blow in the fusebox, or some other issue with (eg) a flickering light would manifest itself.
Just a couple of nights ago I had been out to my kitchen to get a beer from the fridge, and as I walked back into the lounge I noticed a very small yet dense trail of smoke, about 6 inches high, coming from the top of a free-standing lamp. The lamp has an upturned bowl on the top containing a fairly powerful halogen bulb which itself is covered by a glass tube.
So I got on tippytoe and peered over the brim of the upturned bowl and discovered an insect graveyard of crisply dried/fried bodies of various flying bugs, with the latest self-destructive addition, burning away on the glassy griddle, a fat moth.
 
Last week I dreamt about a friendly fluffy black and white cat smooching up to me.
Today a friend rang and said that as well as a feral cat she's been feeding, a friendly fluffy black and white cat has been smooching up to her.
She thinks it's either been dumped or someone who was supposed to look after it hasn't been.
It's more than 5 kilometres to the animal shelter so I wouldn't be surprised if she let it stay as it's already walked straight inside. She hasn't had a cat for awhile since hers died.
 
I've just had a Minor Strangeness related to my new house! You know, the one that's so unhaunted that the previous owner thought I was odd asking about ghosts...

A friend was over on Saturday and he burned his hand under the hot tap. My hot water is POWERFUL hot, and we can't find the thermostat for the immersion tank, so I had the timer set to come on once a day 6-7am, because that's enough to get, and keep, the water hot for a day. We jointly moaned about how hot the water gets in this house.

On Sunday the water wasn't quite so hot out of the tap. On Monday, it was warm, but definitely not hot. I investigated the immersion tank and timer. Turned out that the timer had broken(?) and so the tank wasn't heating the water at all.

I ranted a bit, because the timer is hard-wired in, I am hopeless at DIY and I'd need an electrician to sort out the issue. So, in true bad-DIY fashion, I fiddled with the timer a bit and berated it for not doing its thing.

And now the timer is working again. I have piping hot water out of all taps. Now, I know that it was probably just the timer becoming 'stuck', but I like to think it was the spirit of House, hearing that the water needed cooling down a bit...
 
On weird minor strangeness, I've been noticing something with cars lately....

I take regular walks (I'm still self-isolating because the states don't know what they're doing), and lately, I've seen some odd trends....

1. There was a week where I saw 10 different cars pass by which didn't have hoods. Like they were in accidents, but hadn't had the money/time to have a new hood put on.

2. Absolute parades of the same color car. This isn't like for a car show, these were wholly different styles/years. But there I am, walking down the street and suddenly I see 15 of the same color car pass by.

3. Older cars. Now, I get it, it's nice out so people who've done some work and maybe have a collector car or something take 'em out for a spin. That's fine. But never in my life have I seen 6 different T-buckets pass by within a couple of days.

You could chalk it up to the baader-meinhof phenomenon, but I'm always attentive to the vehicles passing me (it's all about survival) and I've never seen this kind of thing. How many times have you seen 4 different hearses pass by you over the course of a day?

Edit: Mind you, I'm not saying this is directly Fortean, it's just very, very weird.
 
MercuryCrest said:
On weird minor strangeness, I've been noticing something with cars lately....

I take regular walks (I'm still self-isolating because the states don't know what they're doing), and lately, I've seen some odd trends....

1. There was a week where I saw 10 different cars pass by which didn't have hoods. Like they were in accidents, but hadn't had the money/time to have a new hood put on.

2. Absolute parades of the same color car. This isn't like for a car show, these were wholly different styles/years. But there I am, walking down the street and suddenly I see 15 of the same color car pass by.

3. Older cars. Now, I get it, it's nice out so people who've done some work and maybe have a collector car or something take 'em out for a spin. That's fine. But never in my life have I seen 6 different T-buckets pass by within a couple of days.

You could chalk it up to the baader-meinhof phenomenon, but I'm always attentive to the vehicles passing me (it's all about survival) and I've never seen this kind of thing. How many times have you seen 4 different hearses pass by you over the course of a day?

Edit: Mind you, I'm not saying this is directly Fortean, it's just very, very weird.
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What do you think is going on?
 
I don't actually have an opinion. It's odd, but likely sheer chance.

Still, I've lived in this same place for ~15 years and not seen this sort of thing. Then again, isolation makes one's mind do weird stuff, so that could be a part of it.
 
*Anti-PC grandstanding removed as wholly off-topic*

Some of it had was here for a few days as it slipped under the radar.

Please don't waste our time.
 
MercuryCrest said:
On weird minor strangeness, I've been noticing something with cars lately....

I take regular walks (I'm still self-isolating because the states don't know what they're doing), and lately, I've seen some odd trends....

1. There was a week where I saw 10 different cars pass by which didn't have hoods. Like they were in accidents, but hadn't had the money/time to have a new hood put on.

2. Absolute parades of the same color car. This isn't like for a car show, these were wholly different styles/years. But there I am, walking down the street and suddenly I see 15 of the same color car pass by.

3. Older cars. Now, I get it, it's nice out so people who've done some work and maybe have a collector car or something take 'em out for a spin. That's fine. But never in my life have I seen 6 different T-buckets pass by within a couple of days.

You could chalk it up to the baader-meinhof phenomenon, but I'm always attentive to the vehicles passing me (it's all about survival) and I've never seen this kind of thing. How many times have you seen 4 different hearses pass by you over the course of a day?

Edit: Mind you, I'm not saying this is directly Fortean, it's just very, very weird.
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The Matrix. That is all.
 
MercuryCrest said:
On weird minor strangeness, I've been noticing something with cars lately....

I take regular walks (I'm still self-isolating because the states don't know what they're doing), and lately, I've seen some odd trends....

1. There was a week where I saw 10 different cars pass by which didn't have hoods. Like they were in accidents, but hadn't had the money/time to have a new hood put on.

2. Absolute parades of the same color car. This isn't like for a car show, these were wholly different styles/years. But there I am, walking down the street and suddenly I see 15 of the same color car pass by.

3. Older cars. Now, I get it, it's nice out so people who've done some work and maybe have a collector car or something take 'em out for a spin. That's fine. But never in my life have I seen 6 different T-buckets pass by within a couple of days.

You could chalk it up to the baader-meinhof phenomenon, but I'm always attentive to the vehicles passing me (it's all about survival) and I've never seen this kind of thing. How many times have you seen 4 different hearses pass by you over the course of a day?

Edit: Mind you, I'm not saying this is directly Fortean, it's just very, very weird.
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I would think it's partly due to owners getting out in their cars, having been locked down for so long. I've seen the same phenomenon here in the UK and I've done the same. The hood thing is weird though- perhaps project cars and hoods being the last thing to be installed but owners couldn't wait to get out or a defence against the heat? The same colour cars in convoy I've seen here too. Black, silver and white are very common and I often see this around where I live. Envious of seeing T Buckets around! Hearse thing is also common where I live (aged population) and the increased death rate due to Covid increases the chances.
 
PeteS said:
I would think it's partly due to owners getting out in their cars, having been locked down for so long. I've seen the same phenomenon here in the UK and I've done the same. The hood thing is weird though- perhaps project cars and hoods being the last thing to be installed but owners couldn't wait to get out or a defence against the heat? The same colour cars in convoy I've seen here too. Black, silver and white are very common and I often see this around where I live. Envious of seeing T Buckets around! Hearse thing is also common where I live (aged population) and the increased death rate due to Covid increases the chances.
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Thanks for that, Pete. We usually get people bringing out their nicer cars in Spring and you just occasionally see them until Winter sets in. I've certainly seen a lot of same-color cars before, it's just never this many. Usually maroon/burgundy or black.

As for the hearses...I can't believe I didn't think of covid. Of course, that's why.

The cars without hoods is still a bit of a poser. I'm sure it's coincidence, but every one I saw was clearly in an accident. I don't recall the last time I saw a car driving without a hood, let alone many of them in a short period.
 
I don't think I've ever seen a car going by without a hood.
. . . I'll probably see twenty today . . .
 
PeteS said:
I would think it's partly due to owners getting out in their cars, having been locked down for so long. I've seen the same phenomenon here in the UK and I've done the same. The hood thing is weird though- perhaps project cars and hoods being the last thing to be installed but owners couldn't wait to get out or a defence against the heat? The same colour cars in convoy I've seen here too. Black, silver and white are very common and I often see this around where I live. Envious of seeing T Buckets around! Hearse thing is also common where I live (aged population) and the increased death rate due to Covid increases the chances.
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Talking of Hearses... in the town where I live, I catch a bus into Town then I had to cross a very busy road in order to catch another bus to get to my destination on the day. So, walking towards a crossing point I pushed the button, waited, then on came the crossing sound. As we begun to walk across the zebra crossing, my friend paused as we stepped off the curb and said, I don't think we should have pushed the button just then, as a big black shiny Hearse had to stop at the crossing. Made me think ~ "was that being inconsiderate, or not... " to stop a Hearse (with an occupant in the box) on it's journey? If I'd have realised it was a Hearse, I might have hung back until it had passed us by, but it did make me feel a bit guilty at the time!
 
Sid said:
Talking of Hearses... in the town where I live, I catch a bus into Town then I had to cross a very busy road in order to catch another bus to get to my destination on the day. So, walking towards a crossing point I pushed the button, waited, then on came the crossing sound. As we begun to walk across the zebra crossing, my friend paused as we stepped off the curb and said, I don't think we should have pushed the button just then, as a big black shiny Hearse had to stop at the crossing. Made me think ~ "was that being inconsiderate, or not... " to stop a Hearse (with an occupant in the box) on it's journey? If I'd have realised it was a Hearse, I might have hung back until it had passed us by, but it did make me feel a bit guilty at the time!
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You might have done the occupant a favour, depending on their ultimate destination...
 
fairy_ring.jpg
\

Discovered this fairy ring growing in a lawn in the next town over to mine.
 
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